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The famous first lines of The Godfather (1972) are “I believe in America”; while seeming patriotic, the opening scene of Coppola’s genre classic is an indictment of the American judicial system. Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973) is a film which echoes the same attitude, by portraying the system of power in Western governments walking hand in hand with organized crime.
Lucky Luciano begins with its titular character, played by Gian Maria Volontè , boarding the SS Laura Keene, being freed from prison and deported to Italy after aiding the Allied war effort during World War II. While Luciano’s underworld entourage, big names like Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese, gather on the [i]Keene [/I ]to bid him farewell, Federal Narcotics agent Charles Siragusa (played by Siragusa himself, a former narcotics agent who worked on Luciano’s case) “freezes his balls off” in the back of a van filming the whole affair, as dockworkers loyal to Luciano keep the press back with meat hooks.
It’s the beginning of Lucky Luciano that racks up the body count, all in flashbacks. Just as Luciano boards the Keene, he pauses to reminisce about the assassination of Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant on Coney Island. Not long after, while Luciano is eating and drinking with friends on the Keene, a quick montage of brutal assassinations plays, a flashback to the (historically mythical) Night of the Sicilian Vespers; the elimination of the old “Mustache Petes”, the old Mafia guard, around the country, leaving Luciano, Lansky, Genovese, Costello and other mobsters to take power and form the modern American Mafia.
When Luciano reaches the small Sicilian village of Lercara Friddi, where he was born, he visits his family’s burial plot. Rosi decides not to focus on Luciano’s family during this scene, but rather on the graves of other, younger Sicilians whose markers advertise them dying from “an infamous assassin”, or “brutally murdered by an unknown man” or “a victim of a tragic and inevitable destiny.” Rosi purposely drags out this scene to demonstrate that the establishment of underworld order that Luciano incorporated in America is lacking in the blood soaked Sicilian underworld. Luciano then travels to the more cosmopolitan Naples, where he finishes a cigar and enters a small restaurant for dinner. When a waiter takes Luciano’s order, he requests spaghetti with marinara. This causes the waiter to assume that Luciano is an American, and when asked he responds with “I suppose so.” Then, when asked by the waiter how he likes Naples, Luciano responds with “It’s gonna take a little while.”
This is one of Volontè’s finest moments in the film; the sadness in his voice from the “I suppose so” line is able to capture the pain of being a man exiled from the country he loves, while being considered a foreigner in his motherland. The “It’s gonna take a little while” line echoes the same sadness, but soon turns to something more sinister as Luciano smiles, indicating that he has plans for establishing a new criminal order in Naples, with himself on top.
The film then fast forwards a few years to 1952, to the United Nations International Conference on Drug Traffic. This is where Lucky Luciano snags its best cameo with the great noir actor Edmond O'Brien (The Killers (1946), White Heat (1949), and D.O.A. (1950)), as the first Commissioner of the Bureau of Federal Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, or as Luciano later refers to him, “Ass Slinger”. The scene starts with Anslinger chastising the Italian government for not doing anything to hinder the new heroin network that Luciano has established while in exile, with the majority of the heroin flowing into the United States. Anslinger further suggests that the Italian government is at worst complicit, at best indifferent, towards this drug network. The hostile Italian representative then reminds Anslinger that during World War II, Colonel Charles Poletti chose mobster Vito Genovese, who was hiding out in Italy from a murder charge when the war broke out, as his right hand man and driver (this is historically disputed).
The film then flashes back to after the Allies have freed Italy from the grip of fascism and Col. Poletti (Vincent Gardenia) flanked by Genovese (Charles Cioffi) with a group of prostitutes enter the U.S. Army officer’s club. Col. Poletti goes on a long speech on how he wants to give the Italian population “cigarettes, food, gas, the works, that’s what freedom is all about” to bring democracy to Italy, the same way that Luciano will bring his new criminal order to Italy. When Col. Poletti, Genovese, and his entourage of officers enter the club, it’s a scene out of a gangster movie. A table is brought out, and chairs are moved out of the way so they may have a table up front by the band. Though Col. Poletti plans to obliterate the black market, making sure supplies coming to Italy go to the people and not the crooks; the immediate next scene is Genovese using U.S. Army trucks to peddle goods out of a warehouse to sell on the black market. The film then cuts back to the United Nations, and the hostile Italian representative again attacks Anslinger and the U.S. government for releasing Luciano in the first place. Defeated, Anslinger’s only comeback is “Don’t forget all the help we gave you with the Marshall plan”, and the meeting ends in an uproar.
Soon after, we’re introduced to Gene Giannini (Rod Steiger), a flashy drug dealer who comes to Italy to visit Luciano. While in his hotel room with a countess he’s having an affair with, Giannini is visited by Agent Siragusa, and it’s revealed that Giannini is feeding information to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Rosi’s choice to cast Siragusa as himself was a bold one, but his acting alongside veterans like O'Brien and Steiger exasperate his already stiff performance. After visiting the ancient brothels of Pompeii with Luciano, to see how their ancestors plowed vice, Giannini is arrested by the Italian police. It’s during this time in prison that Luciano finds out that Giannini has been feeding information to the feds.
After serving 10 months in an Italian prison, Giannini is sprung by Agent Siragusa, who forces him to fly back to New York to give evidence at a trial. This is where Editor Ruggero Mastroianni shines. The following voice over, read by Frank Adonis (who would go on to have bit parts in both Goodfellas and Casino), is played over real footage of Mafia informant Joe Valachi’s testimony before the McClellan hearings:
“In around the beginning of September, 1952, Gene Giannini was back from a trip to Italy, he’d done 10 months in jail over there. Tony Bender sent for me, for the biggest contract I ever got from Cosa Nostra.”
Though Valachi wouldn’t testify at the McClellan Committee until 1963, making the footage of Valachi’s testimony playing over the voice over an historical anachronism, Valachi’s image is appropriate in cementing that Giannini is a rat, and is going to testify before some court or committee in New York. Also interesting is the namedrop of Tony Bender in the voiceover. Anthony Strollo, whose nickname was Tony Bender, was a capo of the Genovese Crime Family crew that Valachi was apart of. Shortly after his testimony, Strollo would disappear; his remains never being found.
The raspy voice over of the hitman continuing to describe the way he plans to murder Giannini is reminiscent of Allen Baron’s masterful Blast of Silence (1961), and this is where Lucky Luciano starts to resemble the traditional gangster film with familiar shots of the New York skyline, smoky bars, and seedy back alleys. It’s in this environment where Giannini is gunned downed in the street by assassins.
Though Luciano organizes a large meeting between the Sicilian and American Mafia to establish a more coordinated transatlantic smuggling operation, Agent Siragusa is told by his superiors to lay off his investigation. Siragusa later remarks that his superiors think that he’s getting “too close to something”, suggesting that a portion of the American government doesn’t want Luciano captured. When Rosi was interviewed by French film critic Michel Ciment for his massive book on Rosi named Le dossier Rosi, Rosi commented on how Siragusa felt about his halted investigation: “He feels like the victim of a conspiracy he can’t quite comprehend, that someone or something is stopping him from carrying out his work the way he wants to.”
Though the American government has given up on capturing Luciano, a massive drug bust by the Italian government puts a frail looking Luciano in the office of some law enforcement bureaucrat (we’re never specifically told who). While grilled about his connection to certain mobsters (New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello gets an unexpected name drop here) and land deals, Luciano’s weakened state is revealed by a coughing fit.
After getting a fresh haircut, Luciano goes to Naples to meet film producer Martin Gosch about making a film based on his life. Luciano quickly collapses, dead of a heart attack, as the public looks on Luciano’s body sprawled out on the floor. The film ends with a voice over of a political conversation Agent Siragusa and Director Anslinger had earlier in the film about being demonized by the powers that be in Washington. Playing as a crowd gathers to see Luciano’s corpse, when Agent Siragusa asks what he should do now, Anslinger responds with:
“You keep on chasing Luciano, Dewey will keep on chasing us, Keaufver will keep on chasing Dewey. When all this running around is over, everybody will find themselves back at the same god damn place where he started.”
Released in 1973, between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, Lucky Luciano isn’t as revered as its more romanticized counterparts, but deserves more recognition in laying part of the foundation for the comeback of the gangster genre in the early 1970s. In style, Lucky Luciano is less like The Godfather movies and more like the documentary biopic style of Scorsese’s gangster movies that would follow it (Scorsese often said that Rosi’s Salvatore Guliano (1962) is one of his favorite films).
But while different in style, Lucky Luciano and The Godfather films share the same indictment of the American government. In The Godfather, the corrupt American justice system fails the immigrant, forcing him to go to Don Corleone for the justice the government has denied him. The Mafia is the only safeguard against the establishment. In Lucky Luciano, the American and Italian governments are complicit in the crimes of the Mafia, often blaming each other for legitimizing criminals. In a scene at the UN, an Italian representative yells “You basically gave him a metal!” to Director Anslinger, referring to the U.S. government freeing Luciano after World War II. Later, Director Anslinger admits: “Dewey let loose a flow of drugs in this country when he got Luciano sprung from jail” and “the Mafia makes no distinctions about parties. They have no party. They are on the side of whoever is in power. Back in the day, they were backing Truman while Dewey was fighting them, now Dewey has the power, and now Keaufver is fighting them.” Luciano himself reminisces later in the film to an Italian bureaucrat that playing politics in Italy is too small, in America he was “face to face” with President Roosevelt. Throughout the whole film, Agent Siragusa is the only person trying to put away Luciano; the rest of the government agencies are either blaming each other or using Luciano and the Mafia as a torpedo to sink political rivals.
The pacing of Lucky Luciano may be alienating to some, but diehards of the gangster genre will find it one of the better gangster films of the 1970s. As elusive as Luciano was to authorities, he is in the film; there are prolonged scenes where he isn’t seen, but his name is uttered, his presence is felt, like some kind of demon. But at the same time, Rosi makes the character feel insignificant, like he’s just another cog (although be it a large one) in the machinations of crime in corruption. Not only does Gian Maria Volontè physically resemble Luciano, but no other actor since has played him in such a restrained, calculating manner; more accountant than gangster. Though it may seem like Rosi skips an in-depth analysis of Luciano in the film, and on the surface it does, if you take a closer look Rosi tells us what makes Luciano tick: he was a man who believed in America.
RATING:
I Believe In America: A Review of Lucky Luciano (1973)
The famous first lines of The Godfather (1972) are “I believe in America”; while seeming patriotic, the opening scene of Coppola’s genre classic is an indictment of the American judicial system. Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973) is a film which echoes the same attitude, by portraying the system of power in Western governments walking hand in hand with organized crime.
Lucky Luciano begins with its titular character, played by Gian Maria Volontè , boarding the SS Laura Keene, being freed from prison and deported to Italy after aiding the Allied war effort during World War II. While Luciano’s underworld entourage, big names like Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese, gather on the [i]Keene [/I ]to bid him farewell, Federal Narcotics agent Charles Siragusa (played by Siragusa himself, a former narcotics agent who worked on Luciano’s case) “freezes his balls off” in the back of a van filming the whole affair, as dockworkers loyal to Luciano keep the press back with meat hooks.
It’s the beginning of Lucky Luciano that racks up the body count, all in flashbacks. Just as Luciano boards the Keene, he pauses to reminisce about the assassination of Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant on Coney Island. Not long after, while Luciano is eating and drinking with friends on the Keene, a quick montage of brutal assassinations plays, a flashback to the (historically mythical) Night of the Sicilian Vespers; the elimination of the old “Mustache Petes”, the old Mafia guard, around the country, leaving Luciano, Lansky, Genovese, Costello and other mobsters to take power and form the modern American Mafia.
When Luciano reaches the small Sicilian village of Lercara Friddi, where he was born, he visits his family’s burial plot. Rosi decides not to focus on Luciano’s family during this scene, but rather on the graves of other, younger Sicilians whose markers advertise them dying from “an infamous assassin”, or “brutally murdered by an unknown man” or “a victim of a tragic and inevitable destiny.” Rosi purposely drags out this scene to demonstrate that the establishment of underworld order that Luciano incorporated in America is lacking in the blood soaked Sicilian underworld. Luciano then travels to the more cosmopolitan Naples, where he finishes a cigar and enters a small restaurant for dinner. When a waiter takes Luciano’s order, he requests spaghetti with marinara. This causes the waiter to assume that Luciano is an American, and when asked he responds with “I suppose so.” Then, when asked by the waiter how he likes Naples, Luciano responds with “It’s gonna take a little while.”
This is one of Volontè’s finest moments in the film; the sadness in his voice from the “I suppose so” line is able to capture the pain of being a man exiled from the country he loves, while being considered a foreigner in his motherland. The “It’s gonna take a little while” line echoes the same sadness, but soon turns to something more sinister as Luciano smiles, indicating that he has plans for establishing a new criminal order in Naples, with himself on top.
The film then fast forwards a few years to 1952, to the United Nations International Conference on Drug Traffic. This is where Lucky Luciano snags its best cameo with the great noir actor Edmond O'Brien (The Killers (1946), White Heat (1949), and D.O.A. (1950)), as the first Commissioner of the Bureau of Federal Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, or as Luciano later refers to him, “Ass Slinger”. The scene starts with Anslinger chastising the Italian government for not doing anything to hinder the new heroin network that Luciano has established while in exile, with the majority of the heroin flowing into the United States. Anslinger further suggests that the Italian government is at worst complicit, at best indifferent, towards this drug network. The hostile Italian representative then reminds Anslinger that during World War II, Colonel Charles Poletti chose mobster Vito Genovese, who was hiding out in Italy from a murder charge when the war broke out, as his right hand man and driver (this is historically disputed).
The film then flashes back to after the Allies have freed Italy from the grip of fascism and Col. Poletti (Vincent Gardenia) flanked by Genovese (Charles Cioffi) with a group of prostitutes enter the U.S. Army officer’s club. Col. Poletti goes on a long speech on how he wants to give the Italian population “cigarettes, food, gas, the works, that’s what freedom is all about” to bring democracy to Italy, the same way that Luciano will bring his new criminal order to Italy. When Col. Poletti, Genovese, and his entourage of officers enter the club, it’s a scene out of a gangster movie. A table is brought out, and chairs are moved out of the way so they may have a table up front by the band. Though Col. Poletti plans to obliterate the black market, making sure supplies coming to Italy go to the people and not the crooks; the immediate next scene is Genovese using U.S. Army trucks to peddle goods out of a warehouse to sell on the black market. The film then cuts back to the United Nations, and the hostile Italian representative again attacks Anslinger and the U.S. government for releasing Luciano in the first place. Defeated, Anslinger’s only comeback is “Don’t forget all the help we gave you with the Marshall plan”, and the meeting ends in an uproar.
Soon after, we’re introduced to Gene Giannini (Rod Steiger), a flashy drug dealer who comes to Italy to visit Luciano. While in his hotel room with a countess he’s having an affair with, Giannini is visited by Agent Siragusa, and it’s revealed that Giannini is feeding information to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Rosi’s choice to cast Siragusa as himself was a bold one, but his acting alongside veterans like O'Brien and Steiger exasperate his already stiff performance. After visiting the ancient brothels of Pompeii with Luciano, to see how their ancestors plowed vice, Giannini is arrested by the Italian police. It’s during this time in prison that Luciano finds out that Giannini has been feeding information to the feds.
After serving 10 months in an Italian prison, Giannini is sprung by Agent Siragusa, who forces him to fly back to New York to give evidence at a trial. This is where Editor Ruggero Mastroianni shines. The following voice over, read by Frank Adonis (who would go on to have bit parts in both Goodfellas and Casino), is played over real footage of Mafia informant Joe Valachi’s testimony before the McClellan hearings:
“In around the beginning of September, 1952, Gene Giannini was back from a trip to Italy, he’d done 10 months in jail over there. Tony Bender sent for me, for the biggest contract I ever got from Cosa Nostra.”
Though Valachi wouldn’t testify at the McClellan Committee until 1963, making the footage of Valachi’s testimony playing over the voice over an historical anachronism, Valachi’s image is appropriate in cementing that Giannini is a rat, and is going to testify before some court or committee in New York. Also interesting is the namedrop of Tony Bender in the voiceover. Anthony Strollo, whose nickname was Tony Bender, was a capo of the Genovese Crime Family crew that Valachi was apart of. Shortly after his testimony, Strollo would disappear; his remains never being found.
The raspy voice over of the hitman continuing to describe the way he plans to murder Giannini is reminiscent of Allen Baron’s masterful Blast of Silence (1961), and this is where Lucky Luciano starts to resemble the traditional gangster film with familiar shots of the New York skyline, smoky bars, and seedy back alleys. It’s in this environment where Giannini is gunned downed in the street by assassins.
Though Luciano organizes a large meeting between the Sicilian and American Mafia to establish a more coordinated transatlantic smuggling operation, Agent Siragusa is told by his superiors to lay off his investigation. Siragusa later remarks that his superiors think that he’s getting “too close to something”, suggesting that a portion of the American government doesn’t want Luciano captured. When Rosi was interviewed by French film critic Michel Ciment for his massive book on Rosi named Le dossier Rosi, Rosi commented on how Siragusa felt about his halted investigation: “He feels like the victim of a conspiracy he can’t quite comprehend, that someone or something is stopping him from carrying out his work the way he wants to.”
Though the American government has given up on capturing Luciano, a massive drug bust by the Italian government puts a frail looking Luciano in the office of some law enforcement bureaucrat (we’re never specifically told who). While grilled about his connection to certain mobsters (New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello gets an unexpected name drop here) and land deals, Luciano’s weakened state is revealed by a coughing fit.
After getting a fresh haircut, Luciano goes to Naples to meet film producer Martin Gosch about making a film based on his life. Luciano quickly collapses, dead of a heart attack, as the public looks on Luciano’s body sprawled out on the floor. The film ends with a voice over of a political conversation Agent Siragusa and Director Anslinger had earlier in the film about being demonized by the powers that be in Washington. Playing as a crowd gathers to see Luciano’s corpse, when Agent Siragusa asks what he should do now, Anslinger responds with:
“You keep on chasing Luciano, Dewey will keep on chasing us, Keaufver will keep on chasing Dewey. When all this running around is over, everybody will find themselves back at the same god damn place where he started.”
Released in 1973, between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, Lucky Luciano isn’t as revered as its more romanticized counterparts, but deserves more recognition in laying part of the foundation for the comeback of the gangster genre in the early 1970s. In style, Lucky Luciano is less like The Godfather movies and more like the documentary biopic style of Scorsese’s gangster movies that would follow it (Scorsese often said that Rosi’s Salvatore Guliano (1962) is one of his favorite films).
But while different in style, Lucky Luciano and The Godfather films share the same indictment of the American government. In The Godfather, the corrupt American justice system fails the immigrant, forcing him to go to Don Corleone for the justice the government has denied him. The Mafia is the only safeguard against the establishment. In Lucky Luciano, the American and Italian governments are complicit in the crimes of the Mafia, often blaming each other for legitimizing criminals. In a scene at the UN, an Italian representative yells “You basically gave him a metal!” to Director Anslinger, referring to the U.S. government freeing Luciano after World War II. Later, Director Anslinger admits: “Dewey let loose a flow of drugs in this country when he got Luciano sprung from jail” and “the Mafia makes no distinctions about parties. They have no party. They are on the side of whoever is in power. Back in the day, they were backing Truman while Dewey was fighting them, now Dewey has the power, and now Keaufver is fighting them.” Luciano himself reminisces later in the film to an Italian bureaucrat that playing politics in Italy is too small, in America he was “face to face” with President Roosevelt. Throughout the whole film, Agent Siragusa is the only person trying to put away Luciano; the rest of the government agencies are either blaming each other or using Luciano and the Mafia as a torpedo to sink political rivals.
The pacing of Lucky Luciano may be alienating to some, but diehards of the gangster genre will find it one of the better gangster films of the 1970s. As elusive as Luciano was to authorities, he is in the film; there are prolonged scenes where he isn’t seen, but his name is uttered, his presence is felt, like some kind of demon. But at the same time, Rosi makes the character feel insignificant, like he’s just another cog (although be it a large one) in the machinations of crime in corruption. Not only does Gian Maria Volontè physically resemble Luciano, but no other actor since has played him in such a restrained, calculating manner; more accountant than gangster. Though it may seem like Rosi skips an in-depth analysis of Luciano in the film, and on the surface it does, if you take a closer look Rosi tells us what makes Luciano tick: he was a man who believed in America.
RATING: