This movie is just plain awful. It's a textbook example of how "packaging" has ruined the art of film-making in Hollywood. It was obviously more important to the studio to fill up the screen with "bankable" stars than to make an intelligent, entertaining drama.
The casting is horrible and the acting is strictly cornball. Anthony Quinn, that Swiss army knife of ethnic characterization, delivers yet another offensive, simplistic stereotype, a two-dimensional cartoon slob who stuffs his face with pasta and blubbers with faux emotion.
The young stars who powered this fiasco into production are little better. The most notable aspect of their vapid portrayals are their glamorous but unbelievably pristine suits. In fairness, they've been given very little of substance to work with; did it really take two writers to butcher this story and concoct such clueless dialog? Luciano and Lansky were criminal geniuses in real life, smart enough to rule the underworld and avoid the long arm of the law, yet here they can best be described as "less dumb" than the rest of the idiots surrounding them.
The worst crime committed by this movie is the screenplay, which wastes one of the most fascinating and dramatic episodes in the history of crime, the Castellammarese Wars that rocked New York in the late 1920s and solidified the structure of the modern American mafia. Typical of its idiocy is the misnaming of Maranzano as Faranzano. Apparently some wise old development exec decided that having two of the key characters with names that began with "Ma" was simply too confusing, so they kept Masseria and renamed Maranzano. There are several other inaccuracies as well. The movie is more fiction than fact, and not good fiction at that. It adds nothing of value to the body of gangland cinema.
The beauty of "The Godfather" was that the writer researched the story he was telling and translated it into an epic tale that captured the spirit and reality of the mafia, changing the names of the characters but preserving the essence of their experience. "Mobsters" kept the names and threw everything else out the window.
On top of all that, even the action sucked.
That said, there is one redeeming moment in the movie. The chorus girls dancing in the club looked great and the dance routine was fairly good. Too bad it wasn't 90 minutes longer.
The casting is horrible and the acting is strictly cornball. Anthony Quinn, that Swiss army knife of ethnic characterization, delivers yet another offensive, simplistic stereotype, a two-dimensional cartoon slob who stuffs his face with pasta and blubbers with faux emotion.
The young stars who powered this fiasco into production are little better. The most notable aspect of their vapid portrayals are their glamorous but unbelievably pristine suits. In fairness, they've been given very little of substance to work with; did it really take two writers to butcher this story and concoct such clueless dialog? Luciano and Lansky were criminal geniuses in real life, smart enough to rule the underworld and avoid the long arm of the law, yet here they can best be described as "less dumb" than the rest of the idiots surrounding them.
The worst crime committed by this movie is the screenplay, which wastes one of the most fascinating and dramatic episodes in the history of crime, the Castellammarese Wars that rocked New York in the late 1920s and solidified the structure of the modern American mafia. Typical of its idiocy is the misnaming of Maranzano as Faranzano. Apparently some wise old development exec decided that having two of the key characters with names that began with "Ma" was simply too confusing, so they kept Masseria and renamed Maranzano. There are several other inaccuracies as well. The movie is more fiction than fact, and not good fiction at that. It adds nothing of value to the body of gangland cinema.
The beauty of "The Godfather" was that the writer researched the story he was telling and translated it into an epic tale that captured the spirit and reality of the mafia, changing the names of the characters but preserving the essence of their experience. "Mobsters" kept the names and threw everything else out the window.
On top of all that, even the action sucked.
That said, there is one redeeming moment in the movie. The chorus girls dancing in the club looked great and the dance routine was fairly good. Too bad it wasn't 90 minutes longer.