The Alto Knights (15) |Close-Up Film Review

This is yet another tale from the United States’ gory and colourful history of gangster culture.  Set in the 50s it’s at true life tale of two rival mob bosses, once childhood friends but now rivals – and both played by Robert De Niro. 

Frank Costello is the saner and more diplomatic of the two – a strategy which has earned him the role of head of ops for New York’s Mafia.   Vito Genovese, who is further down the pecking order, is ruthlessly ambitious for promotion and much more violent.   Indeed the story begins with a botched attempt on Frank’s life.  And it doesn’t take a genius to work out that Vito is behind it.  At first Frank handles the situation with clever diplomacy but when Vito goes too far, he snaps and comes up with a clever plan to do down  Vito and indeed the whole Mafia organisation.

De Niro, in his first ever double role, manages for most of the film to clearly differentiate between the two characters with a little help from the prosthetics department.   Frank seems to have a slightly bigger nose, whereas Vito always wears a hat and dark glasses which make his eyes look smaller.   And he shouts and swears a lot more than Frank.

Director Barry Levinson and his design team have created am impressively accurate looking New York of the fifties.  All the right cars, clothes, hair styles – and yes, hats.   There are also some strong dramatic highlights, most notably a series of court room scenes, involving both Fank and Vito and a tightly tense sequence in a barber’s shop leading up to a murder, which is what triggers off Frank’s clever plot to eliminate his rival in a well stage the climax to the tale.

Debra Messing as Bobbie Costello and Kathrine Narducci as Anna Genovese make the most of their limited but effective roles as the mobsters’ wives. It is though sometimes tricky to sort out who is who among the plethora of male supporting gang members.  But for those who like gunplay action and “wise guy” talk, there’s plenty of that. 

My reservation though is about the subject matter itself.  Film makers have mined this vein so many times, going back to James Cagney in Public Enemy et al in the thirties;  director Martin Scorsese with films such as Goodfellas, most recently The Irishman and going back even further to the dark side of history, the Protestant/Catholic rivalry between the Gangs of New York in the 19th century.  The outstanding ones for me are Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables in which De Niro was a memorable Al Capone, and of course Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy,

However maybe I’ve just seen enough of the macho gangster history of America.  Well made though Levenson’s film is, I just get a terrible sense of deja vue.  Is a history of guns and gangs, which has resulted in a society where guns are feely available and kill more  people than any other form of death, really something to be proud of?   Despite the high standard of the film I do wonder if America’s shameful gangland history has been as it were now done to death.