A decade before Coppola made The Godfather, Alberto Lattuada released one of the first masterpieces about the mafia, appropriately titled Mafioso. It wasn't meant to be the type of straight drama that people came to expect in mafia films of the 1970s: it was a blend of current Italian cinema movements and the future of mafia films, with a little Italian film history thrown in. Mafioso has its dramatic moments, but it's also a farce, a dark comedy, a neorealist film, a postmodern critique, and a love story all in one. While nothing will ever come close to The Godfather in overall brilliance, Mafioso is in many ways a more ambitious film for its time, and it succeeds at everything it tries to do. The only problems are that it's in black and white, and it's in Italian.
Of course, that's not a problem for the folks at Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival where the film was described as a "sensation" during its retrospective screening. Those film nuts will do anything for an old black and white foreign film that no one's seen and that they've "rediscovered."
I kid, of course, because I am one of them. I loved this movie. And Rialto Pictures probably thought there were enough of us out there to warrant a re-release. I hope they're right, but I can't say I'm very optimistic. Just because a movie kills at a films festival doesn't mean that people will pay money to see it in theaters.
Besides its overall quality, though, Mafioso has one other huge draw: Alberto Sordi. Appearing across seven decades in over 150 films, including many of Federico Fellini's finest, Sordi was one of the most popular and versatile Italian actors. A large part of the film's success in transitioning from comedy to drama is due to Sordi's engaging performance. He plays Antonio, a worker in a car factory, who unwittingly becomes a hit man for the mob while innocently delivering a gift on his vacation. After a series of farcical episodes, the film transitions to an extremely dark comedy before becoming very serious when Antonio must choose between his own moral code and the safety of his family.
Mafioso is currently in re-release downtown at the Ritz movie theaters. It's well-worth seeing, especially on a big screen. It's one of those rare old movies that is both critically acclaimed but also fun to watch.
But with 300 right here at the Bridge, that short ride downtown just seems so long.
