Lucky Luciano [1973]

 Rosi’s terrific film Lucky Luciano – with its rigorous aesthetic palette, overarching thematic preoccupations and an overriding sense of mundaneness that made it radically antithetical to the gangster genre – released between Coppola’s epic and baroque gangland sagas The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. No wonder, it didn’t receive the attention that it should’ve, even though it was as riveting and stylistically flamboyant as anything that he’d made. Like his masterworks Salvatore Guiliano and The Mattei Affair, this too was a boldly kaleidoscopic piece of investigative and political filmmaking centred on actual, ferocious and powerful Sicilian men – where sequences freely segued from one timeline and location to another – thus connecting them into a cinematic trilogy. Furthermore, like those films, we see “Lucky” Luciano (Gian Maria Volonté in a exquisitely restrained turn) – the formidable “boss of bosses” who, upon being exiled to Italy by the US, set-up a sprawling international empire – and are informed of the political contexts that enabled his rise and presaged his death, without any intimate peeks into him whose bespectacled, unassuming and routine-bound nature, ironically, belied his mythic persona. This grand indictment of the US’ Machiavellian political machinations, which enabled the rise of the Mafiosi only for it to become a Frankenstein’s Monster, also starred Rod Steiger as a loquacious informant and – continuing Rosi’s love for “authentic” casting – Charles Siragusa, the American narcotics agent who’d relentlessly pursued Luciano, as himself. While shot like a journalistic docudrama, it veered briefly for a hypnotic, breathtaking and operatic montage – recalling The Godfather, albeit near the beginning itself – that dizzyingly intercut between the clinical elimination of all his rivals on the same day that Luciano had orchestrated and his celebratory dinner.

Director: Francesco Rosi

Genre: Drama/Crime Drama/Historical Drama/Gangster Movie/Biopic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy