I Familiari delle vittime non saranno avvertiti / Crime Boss / New Mafia Boss

Directed by the underrated Alberto De Martino this is one of those Italian crime films that followed in the wake of The Godfather's international success, though its pace and dynamics are perhaps more reminiscent of classic Hollywood gangster films like Little Caesar, insofar as it deals with the ascendancy of a 'proletarian' gangster rather than with the power struggles of a well-established family in the crime aristocracy.

Unlike the 1930s films, however, there's no censorship or other requirement to present the protagonist's subsequently inevitable and thereby tragic fall. Instead, as with the Corleone family in The Godfather he can be better understood as succeeding by one set of criteria (business) and failing by another (personal).

We open with Antonio Mancuso (Anonio Sabato) getting permission from the local Don to leave Sicily for Milan, away from the possibilities that he sees as defining his future: starvation or being torn apart by lupara blasts.


The country mouse in the city?

On arrival in Milan, Antonio is given a high-profile job by Turi Petralia: the assassination of Loretto Abondano. It has a personal aspect as well, with Abondano being responsible for the murder of Antonio's father Vito many years ago. The situation is complicated by the fact that Vito was reputedly a traitor – a fact Turi had hoped to exploit by disposing of Antonio once the job is done.


The killer coming with a smile on his face

But Antonio is not the country bumpkin that he has appeared – “I know what you think Turi: I'm young, I've got no friends, I'm a country hick. Nevertheless, I'm no shit. I got the picture. I took some precautions and here I am” – and surprises Petralia.


The minions waiting in a spaghetti western configuration

Rather than killing Petralia, Antonio leaves him alive and indebted, declining a bundle of money in favour of his agreed-upon fee. It is all, as both men agree, strictly a matter of business.

Antonio next contacts his brother, Nicola, who has hitherto been a moderately successful pimp with “a stable of six or seven” in and hatches a plan: they secretly switch a consignment of narcotics from Godfather Don Vincenzo's men, let the replacement consignment be captured by the police and then offer to retrieve the original – i.e. the only one anyone else is aware of – in exchange for place in his family.

The daring plan succeeds – here we can forgive the skirting over the obvious plot holes as part and parcel of the 90 minute genre formula movie, especially since Vincenzo quickly surmises what has really happened – with the two men soon developing a close relationship, almost father-son like at times. (“You know something? I was like you when I was young” “I'd like to be like you. What do I have to do?”)

Unfortunately Vincenzo soon proves to not quite be the man he once was, showing signs of weakness and megalomania that can only re-ignite Antonio's ambition, especially when fuelled by the scheming of the ex-Don's daughter, Vincenzo's niece the beautiful Monica (Paola Tedesco).

Given the various locations within and outwith Italy – Palermo, Rome, Milan and Hamburg – and the presence of Savalas in the guest-star role, Mob Boss clearly had a reasonable budget.

Antonio Sabato again seems more comfortable playing a bad guy than a hero. If we perhaps engage with his character in more of a detached, observational manner we also prefer him to most of the other mafioso presented insofar as he at least has vestiges of a code of honour about him, being committed to his family's reputation and well-being and against the indiscriminate killing of civilians who have not chosen the gangster's life, as seen when one unfortunate is thrown out of a speeding car: “You shithead!” “Why? Are you afraid of killing?” “I only kill on commission or in self defence.”

The most significant scene in this regard is probably that of the family's reunion dinner where over complaints about Nicola's occupation – “a common pimp – I'd rather he was a killer or a thief. Even if he ended up in jail at least he'd have some self-respect,” remarks his wife – and a delightfully spaghetti eating montage, De Martino places a folk-sounding theme complete with ocarina: if ever you want an image of old southern / Sicilian attitudes and habits transcending time and place this would be a contender.




Domestic life

It's also a scene which perhaps indicates how the character of Antonio might have played to the intended vernacular audience, as someone more “like us” than the others presented and thus more of an identification figure, however ambiguous, than he appears to outsiders such as myself.

This in turn also impart an air of uncertainty over how to interpret some of the earlier lost in the city antics. Does he express bemusement at the automatic door of the airport because he doesn't know any better or because he knows that he's being appraised by Turi's men? Are 'we' laughing at him, with him, or being suckered just like his diegetic watchers, with their evalaution that “He's a real peasant [...] nothing but a punk kid, a cafone”?

Savalas doesn't doesn't completely convince as the Godfather figure, especially when he's the only American actor in the cast. His character also seems inconsistently written at times, though his forgetting the “only business” mantra when seeking to position himself above the rest of the family and referring to “cosa mia” could also be read as a sign that he is losing touch.

Paola Tedesco provides some compensation by virtue of doing more than just providing eye candy and love interest in pursuing her character's own enigmatic agenda.

De Martino's direction of the chases, shoot-outs and brawls is competent rather than inspired. Normally this would be a weakness though here it functions to film's overall benefit, giving it a more balanced feel than is often the case with filone cinema.

Indeed, the most memorable sequence is a montage dealing with the aftermath of mob rub out, in which one of the losers is processed into soap and then sent back to his bemused boss, who is clearly at something of a loss over what to do.




Turi gets punched in the face

Elsewhere we also get some nice single-shot set pieces and cuts, like Turi's opening the door to dramatically receive a punch in the face from Antonio's fist coming unexpectedly into the frame, ot one of those camera move transitions between inside and outside worlds through the window itself.

Francesco De Masi's crime jazz score is decent but nothing particularly outstanding or memorable, with most of the cues – the eating scene excepted – being rather generic and not always ideally suited to the on-screen action.

The dubbing of the film, in accented English, causes an element of confusion at times, with Sicilian rather than Italian terms being left untranslated and an English conversation at a bar in one of the German-set scenes being butted into by Antonio on grounds of 'unexpectedly' hearing his Italian mother tongue.

[The film is available for download from Cinemageddon]

L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio / The Man with the Icy Eyes

Arizona state senator Neil Robertson has been murdered by a man with distinctive “icy eyes.” The police soon arrest a Mexican immigrant, Valdez. Thanks in the main to the testimony of an eyewitness, a stripper by the name of Anne Saxe (Barbara Bouchet), Valdez is found tried, found guilty and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Italian-American journalist Eddie Mills (Antonio Sabato) is not convinced by the neatness of the whole affair and embarks upon his own investigation, which soon uncovers evidence that Valdez is innocent and the real man with icy eyes still at large...

Though released near the peak of the giallo boom, this 1971 entry from Alberto De Martino has more in common with the American thriller – I Want to Live! seems an obvious point of reference, albeit with the focus here being less on the one condemned and more on their would-be saviour – thanks to its unusual setting and the downplaying or reconfiguration of some of the more usual generic motifs and thematics.

Thus, for instance, while testimone oculare obviously has an important role, it is here less about the protagonist being unwittingly misled by their hitherto taken for granted perceptual framework, as in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, than a duplicitous supporting character who may well have deliberately lied about what they saw. (There is still something of a pattern element, in that Valdez's conviction is aided by his having prior criminal form.)

What weakens L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio / The Man with the Icy Eyes – besides an admitted distaste for Antonio Sabato's somewhat smug, self-satisfied persona – is the failure to fully integrate their two main narrative threads, as the identity of the killer declines in importance as saving Valdez becomes more so, rather than their being intertwined, along with the sense that less is made of the socio-political aspects of the piece than might have been the case.

Although the film-makers do certainly try here, as further evinced the way references are frequently made to Mills's Italian origins – with one also wondering whether there's possible (over-)analytical mileage to be made in the casting of Uber-Aryan Bouchet as a character by the name of Saxe, as in Saxon / WASP – I can't help thinking that the relocation of the action to a northern Italian city and commutation of Valdez to a southern Italian or non-Italian immigrant wouldn't have given the film a sharper edge.

This said, as the example of the Australian-set Pyjama Girl Case demonstrates, it is undoubtedly possible for the giallo to have both a foreign setting and specifically Italian cultural resonances. The difference, perhaps, is that the stranger in a strange land aspect there is less tacked on than integral to the meaning of the film as a whole, with its inspiration in fact coming from a real-world murder case. Or perhaps the problem for the filmmakers here was that the kind of thing they might have drawn on for inspiration had already been used, Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco e Vanzetti having been released in Italy the previous month.

One point of note for the Argento fans is that the film also makes use of the precognition idea found in Deep Red, as a supposed psychic / astrologer type tells Mills that he predicts three deaths before the night of Valdez's execution is out – the last being that of the reporter himself...