Word: gangsterized
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...baroque atmospherics, the Gallo assassination was more than merely an episode of gangster nostalgia. As Gallo lay in his open casket, his face a mask of mortuary prettification, his sister Carmella promised: "The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey." Within the space of six days, a total of five other bodies turned up, and the word was around that three more executions had been approved by the family of New York Mafia Overlord Carlo Gambino...
...brother, Albert. Says an acquaintance of the family: "They are all scared to death." Even though their position is now mainly defensive, the Gallos have put out contracts for the deaths of three enemies: 1) Alphonse ("Alley Boy") Persico, the Colombo war chieftain; 2) Nick Bianco, a New England gangster whom the Gallos want killed because he arranged the treaty that ended the Gallo-Profaci war ten years ago while Joey was in jail; and 3) Joe Yacovelli, a Colombo capo. The Gallos believe that Yacovelli had a hand in Joey's murder...
...rejects that view, calling the movie a "chronicle of corruption, savage death and malignant sentimentality" that wreaks harm by forcing the viewer "to take sides in a situation that is totally without moral substance." It was chilling, he says, "to hear an audience roar its approval when a young gangster on 'our' side blew the brains out of two gangsters on 'their' side...
After the first hurrahs for The Godfather, critical reaction to the movie has snagged on a few key questions. Does it revel in Hollywood gangster melodrama? Does it sentimentalize the Mafia? Does it present the Mob as a metaphor for all business or politics? One of TIME's cinema critics gives his assessment...
Although it is nominally about crime, The Godfather has no more in common with the razzle-dazzle Warner Bros, gangster yarns of the '30s than The Wild Bunch had with Shane. The Godfather's primary concern is not bullets and murders but dynasties and power. In the cool savagery of its ironies, expressed within a traditional framework, it is much closer to, say, Bertolucci's The Conformist. In its blending of new depth with an old genre, it becomes that rarity, a mass entertainment that is also great movie art. &3183; Jay Cocks