Gangster Genealogy

By J.C.

THE VALACHI PAPERS Directed by TERENCE YOUNG Screenplay by STEPHEN GELLER

If The Godfather had been cast with lugs and directed by remote control, it would have looked a lot like The Valachi Papers.

Joe 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 of us.

The plot is just the kind of gangster genealogy that, as they say, names names (Genovese, Anastasia, Profaci, Luciano), although the movie actually has less relation to the underworld history of the past four decades than to old Edward G. Robinson bloodlettings on the Warner Brothers back lot. In the traditional Robinson role of the chairman of the thugs is Joseph Wiseman, a usually reliable actor who has mysteriously decided to portray the Sicilian overlord Salvatore Maranzano in an accent that is pure Transylvanian. Maranzano divides the gangs all over the country into families, then stands back and watches the fun, quoting Julius Caesar and letting the profits accrue until he himself is finally eliminated by an enterprising rival. Various beatings, tortures and murders ensue, although The Valachi Papers reserves its worst maulings for the audience. qedJ.C.

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