Lucky Luciano (1973)

Director:

Francesco Rosi

Writers:

Jerome Chodorov (English adaptation)
Tonino Guerra (writer)

Release Date:

November 1974 (USA)

Genre:

Biography | Crime | Drama

Tagline:

The real story behind Lucky Luciano, the high priest of crime.

Plot:

Lucky Luciano is one of the bosses of the Mafia. He orders the slaughter of 40 other responsibles, therefore becoming the only boss...

Plot Keywords:

Mafia | U.S. Army | Post WWII | Kingpin | Sicilian

Cast

Gian Maria Volonté	...	Charles 'Lucky' Luciano
Vincent Gardenia	...	Colonel Charles Poletti
Silverio Blasi	...	Italian Captain
Charles Cioffi	...	Vito Genovese
Larry Gates	...	Judge Herlands
Magda Konopka	...	Contessa
Dino Curcio	...	Don Ciccio
Jacques Monod
Karin Petersen	...	Igea Lissoni
Edmond O'Brien	...	Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger (as Edmund O'Brien)
Charles Siragusa	...	Himself
Rod Steiger	...	Gene Giannini
Pier Maria Pasinetti		(as P.M. Pasinetti)
Luigi Infantino
Carlo Mazzarella	...	Radio Journalist

Also Known As:

A proposito Lucky Luciano (Italy)
Lucky Luciano (France)
Re: Lucky Luciano (International: English title)

Runtime:

105 min

Country:

USA | France | Italy

Language:

English | Italian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Australia:R | Norway:16 | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | UK:18 (re-rating) (1987) | UK:X (original rating) | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Lercara Friddi, Palermo, Sicily, Italy

Company:

Harbor Productions

Movie Connections:

Referenced in A Sicilian Odyssey (2009)

Lucky(?) Luciano

This movie is boring. Plain boring, nothing else. And I've a great tolerance of movies that most people find boring.

I still wonder what I just watched. Is it a documentary? Most gangster films are pretty slow, but this one is more than that. All action happens in 15 minutes, then...nothing. It's like there was no editor, or that the material was shot for some kind of documentary.

Gian Maria Volontè plays his role very good. Rod Steiger is nice, but doesn't get enough time to be as great as he usually is. The rest of the cast is OK, not a problem here. Gangsters look like gangsters, cops look like cops and the dames are plenty.

For some seven years now I have been collecting gangster films, read books about the subject and even collected news articles about the mafia and such. Most of what I saw in this film is not new for me. Luciano was famous and is nothing short of legend these days. When he moved out of the US, he kind of got into the darkness. When this film dragged on, I saw some potential stories come by, but all just passed and went on. So nothing happened until the end where that thing happened that everyone that ever read a book about the mafia knows that happened.

The soundtrack doesn't help. Piero Piccioni can't even live up to his usual 'clone morricone' music and seems only to have written about 7 minutes of music.

The DVD I got was a UK version without any subtitle. I can watch English spoken films without much trouble, but half of this is in Italian, so beware! At first I feared this would have been a action movie disguised as a gangster film, but even that wasn't true. It is slow and all that. Of course, I never thought I was going to watch a true classic, but I almost felt asleep. Still, I cannot give it less than a 4. Gian Maria Volontè and Rod Steiger together in a film, and the sets were good enough. The production itself felt okay. So maybe they should have fired the writer and maybe the editor.

It could have been so much more!