All in the Family

The Sicilian Clan is a tidy, entertaining Mafia melodrama about the biggest don in Paris; it is also a glossy, suspenseful heist film, dealing with what sounds, on paper, like the world's most impossible robbery. Directed with taut professionalism by France's Henri Verneuil, the movie is just absurd enough to amuse those who like their capers with a grain of salt.

Papa (Jean Cabin) is the leader of the Manalese family, a friendly bunch of transplanted Sicilians who operate a nice business selling jukeboxes and pinball machines. The big profits, however, are made in the office up the warehouse stairs, where Papa and his boys plot some elegant crimes, like springing a fellow countryman (Alain Delon) from a locked police van. Delon has managed to wangle some inside dope about the alarm system at a big jewel show in Rome's Villa Borghese. Gabin sees this as potentially the biggest heist of all time. In company with a couple of American colleagues, he sets off with the clan on one of those intricate jobs that require split-second timing, a cool eye, a steady hand, and complete suspension of disbelief.

As in almost all cinematic robberies, things work marvelously well on the mechanical level and fail dismally on the human. Among the cast, Delon is effective as a cold-blooded killer whose attention is invariably diverted whenever one of Papa's daughters-in-law (Irina Demick) slinks across his pearl-handled pistol sights. Immobile and imperturbable of feature, Gabin looks more and more as if his stolid face belonged on a French equivalent of Mount Rushmore. The final and inevitable disintegration of his family may lack the tragic intensity of King Lear, but it will please devotees of The Godfather well enough.

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