The Boss (1973)

Original title: Il Boss

Sicily. After the old bosses have been driven into exile by the authorities, everyone left, be it newcomers from Calabria, the former small fry, or those dons not deemed important enough to get rid of, begins to violently scrabble for territory and influence. Gang wars minor and major flare up.

Right in the middle of it is Nick Lanzetta (Henry Silva), a guy who won’t think twice blowing up a private porn cinema exhibition for an enemy clan with some well-placed grenades. When the daughter (Antonia Santilli) of his boss Don Giuseppe (Claudio Nicastro) is kidnapped by the Calabrians of Don Corrasco (Richard Conte), the old man asks Nick to get her back. The first problem with this project is that the guy the next step up the ladder of Don Giuseppe has explicitly forbidden any action, literally leaving the girl’s fate up to God with a nice little shrug; the second one is that Nick has plans of his own.

If you’re one of the people who tend to be taken aback by how polite the portrayal of the mafia can get in many gangster movies, and how much films can buy into the concepts of honour etc that make up the PR of the group, you won’t need to approach Fernando Di Leo’s Il Boss with any trepidation.

This is a film very much working the same field as the post Battles without Honour and Humanity yakuza film, portraying the mafia and its members as brutal, traitorous thugs who only ever use their fabled honour and responsibility when it is useful as a weapon for them, otherwise breaking trusts with not even the slightest sign of second thoughts. Not that the film is any nicer to the legal authorities - those are either too cynical to even still be able to countenance any kind of action beyond mopping up the blood the gangsters leave, or corrupt to the bone like Gianni Garko’s Commissario Torri here. Also not getting away un-scorned are politicians (as corrupt as Torri just more polite about it) and the youth movement (only in it for sex and drugs). Needless to say, this is about as angrily political a movie as you’ll find in the field.

Di Leo portrays his cast of bastards and assholes – the least immoral character is probably Don Giuseppe’s nymphomaniac daughter (the portrayal of women isn’t great by today’s or even 1973’s standards) – with what feels like seething anger, barely held in check, and no hope for anything about the way Italy was in the 70s changing at all. You might call it nihilist, but in my experience, true nihilists don’t get angry at the state of the world like this, but revel in it.

Because Di Leo is also one of the great commercial directors of this genre, he packages his rage in a series of (often darkly funny) dialogue scenes that bitterly portray the state of his country, and just as many brutal, tight and absolutely relentless action scenes that do tend to get more than a little crazy. Henry Silva and the rest of the cast are of course perfect for portraying these specific kinds of assholes and monsters, often adding a self-conscious theatricality to their scenes that’s an ideal way of demonstrating that their characters’ only real use for emotion is faking it to look like human beings. They’d also rip the hearts out of Coppola’s mannered Mafiosi in the blink of an eye, making this a rather useful antidote to The Godfather (which is nonetheless a great film trilogy, don’t get me wrong).

Il Boss may very well be one of the very best European gangster movies, blowing up the competition before desecrating their graves, one supposes.