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.

Nick the Sting

aka Gli Amici Di Nick Hezard

The dirty rotten American businessman Robert Clark (Lee J. Cobb) spends most of his business life doing extremely illegal deals. His newest one is a little insurance fraud. He hires a burglar to steal highly valuable jewelry from his own villa to get at the insurance money and be able to sell the valuables later on. Usually, that's the sort of theft we here approve of, but Clark also kills the burglar, just to be sure he isn't talking.

And that's not safe enough Clark. He also puts the small-time conman Nick Hezard (Luc Meranda) in possession of a piece of the stolen jewelry, so that the police and the insurance company will blame the whole business on Nick and unknown accomplices. Then it's just the little business of murdering Nick and his fence and Clark's perfect crime is done. Too bad for Clark that he doesn't kill Nick, but a friend of Nick's.

The young conman wants revenge, although he isn't the type to go into all guns blazing action hero mode, so he plans on doing the biggest con of his career on Clark. With the help of his pimp mother (Valentina Cortese) and a bunch of old partners of his conman father, he gets to work. However, it's not as easy as he would have wished for, with Clark's henchmen and an insurance inspector (William Berger) and a cop on his trail.

Did you love The Sting? Well, a lot of people in Italy obviously did, and if there is one thing for certain when it comes to the Italian film industry of the time, then it's its incredible hunger for the production of cheap rip-offs of everything that has made even a little money.

Nick the Sting has the definite advantage over other second row caper movies of having been directed by Fernando Di Leo. Today (at least outside of Italy), Di Leo is mostly known for his harder Eurocrime and cop movies, but he of course also made a lot of Western or whatever else the genre of the day might have been.

It turns out that Di Leo's snappy sense of pacing is useful in a caper movie as well as when showing the more brutal film version of gangster life like in Milano Calibro 9, and so whatever faults Nick the Sting may have, being slow or boring certainly isn't one of them. And if any kind of chase or a little brawl is needed to liven up the proceedings, Di Leo is the right man to deliver them with surehanded enthusiasm.

Neither is the acting a problem, although I find Meranda more convincing when he is not donning silly disguises, but I'd put that inherent ridiculousness more on the genre conventions (which require broadness and obviousness of disguises as to let the viewer feel superior over the hero's victims) as on the actor. Everyone else seems to have a lot of fun with her or his role, giving the film a bit of a party feeling that seems only too fitting when one keeps in mind that one of the pleasures of films of this type has always been to watch clever working class criminals sticking it to the rich, brutal gangster types in a less bloody variation on the "little man strikes back" theme. Nick the Sting even puts further emphasis on this part of its subtext by giving the conpeople an appearance of community and social responsibility for each other the big gangsters and the police seem to lack.

One could of course go on and criticize the film's script for the much too complicated scam its heroes are setting up, but another pleasure of the genre lies exactly in this baroque complexity that is meant to demonstrate the good guys' cleverness. After all, it's not supposed to be a realistic scam, because then the victims would be poor old people and the protagonists much less sympathetic, it's supposed to be an idealized and utopian version of a scam where no one really gets physically hurt, and only the real bad guys are hurt at all - where it truly hurts them, their bank accounts. (Please imagine Billy Bragg and Wilco playing "The Unwelcome Guest" here).

A more troubling problem of the plot is its closeness to the original The Sting, and I would decry the film's near plagiarism loudly and violently if not for the fact that I didn't find myself caring much about things like intellectual property while watching.

Instead, I was having quite a fun time with one of the friendlier genre films coming from Italy.

 

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