Word: valachi
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...VALACHI PAPERS Directed by TERENCE YOUNG Screenplay by STEPHEN GELLER
...Godfather had been cast with lugs and directed by remote control, it would have looked a lot like The Valachi Papers...
...Valachi, it will be recalled, was a Brooklyn hood of the lower echelon who sang arias for the McClellan Committee in the fall of 1963, giving the general public its first peek into the intricacies of the Cosa Nostra. Peter Maas's bestselling Valachi Papers was based largely on the testimony, and the movie, if we are to believe the screen credits, is based upon Maas's book, although it could just as easily have been lifted from Dick Tracy's Crimestoppers Textbook. The entire cast, in fact, look as if they were drawn by Chester Gould...
Charles Bronson, who resembles a housebroken Attila the Hun, stars as the vocal and murderous Valachi. An American by birth, Bronson played a lot of character roles in movies like The Great Escape before becoming a star in Europe, where his poignant struggle with polysyllables is presumably lost in translation. The Valachi Papers, shot almost totally in Rome, is in English, a bad break for Bronson, worse luck for the scenarist and the rest...
...ceiling insulation and tenderly removed a tiny microphone and a transmitter slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes. The bugging device, Gold explained, had been eavesdropping on the Mafia inner sanctum for six months, dutifully recording what his aides described as "a crime story bigger than Appalachin and the Valachi papers combined...