The Valachi Papers

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The Valachi Papers
The Valachi Papers.jpg
Directed by Terence Young
Produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Screenplay by Stephen Geller
Massimo De Rita
Arduino Maiuri
Based on The Valachi Papers
by Peter Maas
Starring Charles Bronson
Lino Ventura
Jill Ireland
Walter Chiari
Joseph Wiseman
Music by Riz Ortolani
Cinematography Aldo Tonti
Edited byJohnny Dwyre
Monica Finzi
Production
company
De Laurentiis Intermarco S.p.A
Euro-France Films
Distributed byS.N. Prodis (France)
Columbia Pictures (US)
Release date
20 October 1972 (Chicago) [1]
Running time
125 minutes
LanguageItalian
English
Box office$17,106,087 [2]
$8,382,000 (rentals)

The Valachi Papers is a 1972 crime film directed by Terence Young and starring Charles Bronson and Lino Ventura. Adapted from the book The Valachi Papers (1969) by Peter Maas, it tells the true story of Joseph Valachi, a Mafia informant in the early 1960s. The film was partly produced in Italy, with many scenes dubbed into English.[ citation needed ]

Terence Young (director) British film director

Shaun Terence Young was a British film director and screenwriter best known for directing three James Bond films, including the first two films in the series, Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963), as well as Thunderball (1965). All three films starred Sean Connery as Bond.

Charles Bronson American actor

Charles Bronson was a Lithuanian-American actor. He was often cast in the role of a police officer, gunfighter, or vigilante in revenge-oriented plot lines, had long-term collaborations with film directors Michael Winner and J. Lee Thompson, and appeared in fifteen films with his second wife Jill Ireland.

Lino Ventura Italian actor

Angiolino Giuseppe Pasquale Ventura was an Italian actor who starred mainly in French films. Raised by his Italian mother in Paris, after a first career as a professional wrestler was ended by injury he was offered a part as a gang boss in the Jacques Becker film Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and rapidly became one of France's favourite film actors, playing opposite many other stars and working with other leading directors such as Louis Malle, Claude Sautet, and Claude Miller. Usually portraying a tough man, either a criminal or a cop, he also featured as a leader of the Resistance in the Jean-Pierre Melville directed Army of Shadows. Having a daughter born handicapped, he and his wife founded a charity Perce-Neige (Snowdrop) which aids disabled children and their parents. Though he never renounced his Italian citizenship, he was voted 23rd in a poll for the 100 greatest Frenchmen.

Contents

Plot

The movie begins in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where an aging prisoner named Joseph Valachi (Charles Bronson) is imprisoned for smuggling heroin. The boss of his crime family, Vito Genovese (Lino Ventura), is imprisoned there as well. Genovese is certain that Valachi is an informant, and gives him the "kiss of death," whereupon Valachi kisses him back.

Joseph Valachi American mobster

Joseph Michael Valachi was an American gangster in the Genovese crime family who is notable as the first member of the Italian-American Mafia to acknowledge its existence publicly. He is credited with popularization of the term cosa nostra.

Heroin Opioid drug primarily used recreationally

Heroin, also known as diamorphine among other names, is an opioid most commonly used as a recreational drug for its euphoric effects. It is used medically in several countries to relieve pain or in opioid replacement therapy. It is typically injected, usually into a vein, but it can also be smoked, snorted, or inhaled. The onset of effects is usually rapid and lasts for a few hours.

Vito Genovese Italian-born American mobster

Vito Genovese was an Italian-American mobster who rose to power during Prohibition as an enforcer in the American Mafia. A long-time associate and childhood friend of Charles Luciano, Genovese took part in the Castellammarese War and helped shape the rise of the Mafia and organized crime in the United States. He would later lead Luciano's crime family, which was renamed the Genovese crime family by the authorities.

Valachi mistakenly kills a fellow prisoner who he wrongly thinks is a mob assassin. Told of the mistake by federal agents, Valachi becomes an informant. He tells his life story in flashbacks.

A flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started.

The movie traces Valachi from a young punk to a gangster associating with bosses like Salvatore Maranzano (Joseph Wiseman). Maranzano tells a mourner at a funeral, "I cannot bring back the dead. I can only kill the living." Valachi marries a boss's daughter, played by Bronson's real-life wife Jill Ireland.

Salvatore Maranzano was an organized crime figure from the town of Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, and an early Cosa Nostra boss who led what later would become the Bonanno crime family in the United States. He instigated the Castellammarese War to seize control of the American Mafia operations and briefly became the Mafia's capo di tutti capi. He was murdered under the orders of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who established an arrangement in which families shared power to prevent future turf wars.

Joseph Wiseman Canadian actor

Joseph Wiseman was a Canadian American theatre and film actor, well known for starring as the villain Julius No in the first James Bond film, Dr. No in 1962. Wiseman was also known for his role as Manny Weisbord on the TV series Crime Story, and his career on Broadway. He was once called "the spookiest actor in the American theatre."

Jill Ireland British actress

Jill Dorothy Ireland was an English actress and singer. She was best known for her collaborations with her second husband, Charles Bronson.

Valachi's rise in the Mafia is hampered by his poor relations with his capo, Tony Bender (Guido Leontini). Bender is portrayed castrating a mobster for having relations with another mobster's wife. Valachi shoots the victim to put him out of his misery.

Caporegime rank in the Mafia

A caporegime or capodecina, usually shortened to just a capo, is a rank used in the Mafia for a made member of the crime family who heads a "crew" of soldiers and has major social status and influence in the organization. Caporegime is an Italian word, which is used to signify the head of a family in Sicily, but has now come to mean a ranking member, similar to captain or senior sergeant in a military unit. In general, the term indicates the head of a branch of an organized crime syndicate who commands a crew of soldiers and reports directly to the Don (Boss) or an Underboss or Streetboss. The shortened version "capo" has been used to refer to certain high-ranking members of Latin American drug cartels as well.

Anthony Strollo American mobster

Anthony C. Strollo, also known as "Tony Bender", was a New York mobster who served as a high-ranking capo of the Genovese crime family for several decades.

Castration Surgical or chemical action that removes use of testicles

Castration is any action, surgical, chemical, or otherwise, by which an individual loses use of the testicles: the male gonad. Surgical castration is bilateral orchidectomy, and chemical castration uses pharmaceutical drugs to deactivate the testes. Castration causes sterilization ; it also greatly reduces the production of certain hormones, such as testosterone. Surgical castration in animals is often called neutering.

The mayhem and murder continue to the present, with Valachi shown testifying before a Senate committee. He is upset with having to testify and attempts suicide, but in the end (according to information superimposed on the screen) outlives Genovese, who dies in prison.

Suicide Intentional act of causing ones own death

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Mental disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse—including alcoholism and the use of benzodiazepines—are risk factors. Some suicides are impulsive acts due to stress, such as from financial difficulties, relationship problems such as breakups, or bullying. Those who have previously attempted suicide are at a higher risk for future attempts. Effective suicide prevention efforts include limiting access to methods of suicide—such as firearms, drugs, and poisons; treating mental disorders and substance misuse; careful media reporting about suicide; and improving economic conditions. Even though crisis hotlines are common, there is little evidence for their effectiveness.

Cast

Production and editing

Producer Dino de Laurentiis had to convince Charles Bronson to take the role of Joe Valachi. He reportedly turned it down at least twice before accepting it when he found out the character got to age from his late teens to early 60s. [3] Bronson was also given a three-film contract that guaranteed him $1 million per picture plus a percentage of the gross. [4]

The film was shot in New York City and at De Laurentiis' studios in Rome. [1] Production began on March 20, 1972. [1]

The film shows a 1930s night street scene, 27 minutes into the film, in which numerous 1960s model cars are parked and drive by. In another scene depicted as occurring in the early 1930s, Valachi, eluding police pursuit, drives a car into the East River just north of the Brooklyn Bridge, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are clearly visible against the dawn sky; the Towers were only recently completed when the film was released in 1972.

Paramount, the film's original distributor, had planned to release the film in February 1973, but the premiere date was moved up to capitalize on the popularity of the similarly-themed film The Godfather . [4] Bronson's opinion of Francis Ford Coppola's gangster epic, although he admired Marlon Brando's performance, was "The Godfather? that was the shittiest movie I've ever seen in my entire life." [5]

Fact versus fiction

The film departed from the true story of Joseph Valachi, as recounted in the Peter Maas book, in a number of ways. Though using real names and depicting real events, the film also contained numerous events that were fictionalized. Among them was the castration scene (the mobster in question was ordered killed, not castrated). [4]

Box office

The film earned rentals of $9.3 million. [6]

Critical reception

Reviews were mostly negative, as many critics inevitably compared the film unfavorably to The Godfather. [4] Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote, "Often ludicrous and often just dull, Terence Young's 'The Valachi Papers' has the look of a movie project that ran short of ideas before it was finished, and ran out of class almost before it was begun." [7] A positive review in Variety called the film "a hard-hitting, violence-ridden documented melodrama of the underworld" that "carries a fine sweep that immediately projects it as an important crime picture." [8] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "an ambitious but not inspired movie about the mob." [9] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded two stars out of four and wrote, "Generally, 'The Valachi Papers' tries to cover too many years, and thus provides paper-thin treatment of each event. As a result, the film implies power and violence, but rarely shows it. The visual power of 'The Godfather' has been replaced with meaningless names and dates." [10] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times dismissed the film as "two hours of relentless tedium, interrupted from time to time by savage violence." [11] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post declared the film "a stiff. It may be possible to make a duller gangster melodrama, but I would hate to sit through the attempt ... It takes considerable ineptitude to produce a gangster movie this enervating." [12] John Raisbeck wrote in The Monthly Film Bulletin , "Inviting inevitable comparisons with The Godfather, Terence Young's film proves markedly, even surprisingly, inferior to Coppola's on every level. Young and his screenwriter Stephen Geller, though faithful in fact to Peter Maas' original document, have simply plodded through a catalogue of events, content to name names but failing to treat the material with any consistency of form or theme." [13]

DVD and Blu-Ray

The Valachi Papers was released on DVD on 3 January 2006 by Sony Pictures Home Video. The film was also released on blu-ray by Mill Creek Entertainment in 2018 as part of a 4-film set that also included high-def transfers of The Stone Killer, Breakout, and Hard Times.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

Lucky Luciano Italian-American mobster

Charles Luciano, known as "Lucky Luciano", was an influential Italian-born mobster, criminal mastermind, and crime boss who operated mainly in the United States. Luciano is considered the father of modern organized crime in the United States for the establishment of the first Commission. He was also the first official boss of the modern Genovese crime family. Along with his associates, he was instrumental in the development of the National Crime Syndicate.

Joe Masseria Italian-born American gangster

Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria was an early Italian-American Mafia boss in New York City. He was boss of what is now called the Genovese crime family, one of the New York City Mafia's Five Families, from 1922 to 1931. He waged a bloody war to take over the criminal activities in New York City, gaining considerable power for himself. He was killed in 1931 in a hit ordered by his own lieutenant, Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

The Castellammarese War was a bloody power struggle for control of the Italian-American Mafia, from February, 1930 to April 15, 1931, between partisans of Joe "The Boss" Masseria and those of Salvatore Maranzano. It was so called because Maranzano was based in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily. Maranzano's faction won, and he declared himself capo di tutti capi, the undisputed leader of the entire Mafia. However, he was soon murdered in turn by a faction of young upstarts led by Lucky Luciano, who established a power-sharing arrangement called "The Commission", a group of five Mafia families of equal stature, to avoid such wars in the future.

Genovese crime family Organized Crime Group

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Five Families Five major New York City organized crime families of the Italian American Mafia

The Five Families are the five major New York City organized crime families of the Italian American Mafia.

See also: 1929 in organized crime, 1931 in organized crime and the list of 'years in Organized Crime'.

Tommy Lucchese was an Italian American gangster and founding member of the Mafia in the United States, an offshoot of the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. From 1951 until 1967, he was the boss of the Lucchese crime family, one of the Five Families that dominates organized crime in New York City.

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See also: 1971 in organized crime, other events of 1972, 1973 in organized crime and the list of 'years in Organized Crime'.

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The Valachi hearings, also known as the McClellan hearings, investigated organized crime activities across America and investigated leading mafia figures of the era such as Sam Giancana of Chicago. The hearings were initiated by Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan in 1963. The hearings were named after the major government witness against the American Mafia, Joseph Valachi.

Lucchese crime family one of the "Five Families" that dominates organized crime activities in New York City, United States

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<i>The Valachi Papers</i> (book) book by Peter Maas

The Valachi Papers is a biography written by Peter Maas, telling the true story of former mafia member Joe Valachi, a low-ranking member of the New York-based Genovese crime family, who was the first ever government witness coming from the American Mafia itself. His account of his criminal past revealed many previously unknown details of the Mafia. The book was made into a film, released in 1972, starring Charles Bronson as Valachi.

The kiss of death is the sign given by a mafioso boss or capo that signifies that a member of the crime family has been marked for death, usually as a result of some perceived betrayal. How much is based on fact and how much on the imagination of authors, it remains a cultural meme and appears in literature and films. Illustrative is the scene in the film The Valachi Papers when Vito Genovese gives the kiss of death to Joe Valachi to inform him that his betrayal of "the family" is known, and that he will be executed.

Albert Anastasia Italian-American Costa Nostra mobster

Albert Anastasia was an Italian-born American mobster, hitman and crime lord, and one of the most ruthless and feared organized crime figures in United States history. One of the founders of the modern American Mafia and the founder and boss of Murder, Inc., Anastasia was boss of what became the modern Gambino crime family. Anastasia is considered by the FBI to be one of the deadliest criminals of all time. According to former NYPD Detective Ralph Salerno, Anastasia murdered tens of thousands of people during his reign of terror, while former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom believes the number of people that Anastasia has killed is unquestionably in the thousands. The exact number is unknown. These claims are called into question by the fact that during prohibition the number of murders per year in New York City was around 500. To kill thousands Anastasia would have to have committed every murder in New York for several years.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "The Valachi Papers - Details". AFI Catalog of Feature Films . American Film Institute . Retrieved May 27, 2019.
  2. ↑ "The Valachi Papers, Box Office Information". The Numbers. Retrieved January 21, 2012.
  3. ↑ Whitney, Steven (1975). Charles Bronson Superstar. Robert Hale Limited. pp. 169–170. ISBN   0-7091-7134-X.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "The Valachi Papers - History". AFI Catalog of Feature Films . American Film Institute . Retrieved May 27, 2019.
  5. ↑ Whitney, Steven (1975). Charles Bronson Superstar. Robert Hale Limited. p. 170. ISBN   0-7091-7134-X.
  6. ↑ "All-time Film Rental Champs", Variety, 7 January 1976 p 44
  7. ↑ Greenspun, Roger (November 4, 1972). "The Screen: 'Valachi Papers' Arrives". The New York Times . 21.
  8. ↑ "Film Reviews: The Valachi Papers". Variety . October 25, 1972. 22.
  9. ↑ Ebert, Roger (October 24, 1972). "The Valachi Papers". RogerEbert.com . Retrieved May 27, 2019.
  10. ↑ Siskel, Gene (October 24, 1972). "Valachi Papers". Chicago Tribune . Section 2, p. 4.
  11. ↑ Thomas, Kevin (October 26, 1972). "Valachi Spills the Beans". Los Angeles Times . Part IV, p. 26.
  12. ↑ Arnold, Gary (November 10, 1972). "'Valachi': Dull and Dilatory". The Washington Post . B11.
  13. ↑ Raisbeck, John (February 1973). "The Valachi Papers". The Monthly Film Bulletin . 40 (469): 25.
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