O’Loughlin) puts him under special protection and gets out his notebook. Both men are serving long sentences but nothing has changed Joe must ward off several hit attempts abetted by the prison guards, before FBI agent Ryan (Gerald S. The story begins in the early 1960s, when mob chieftain Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson), realizing that his enemy Vito Genovese (Lino Ventura of Army of Shadows) has put a kill order out on him, decides to talk. I suppose that’s credible, but didn’t the mob put the screws to every New York production of the ’70s? The press releases for Valachi claimed that the production was threatened by the underworld, and forced to cut short its New York production schedule before heading back to the De Laurentiis studio in Rome.
Producer Dino’s flair for flaky publicity came to a peak with his mostly wretched King Kong remake, and its fraudulent claims to secure Academy nominations for special effects. Its main strengths are a quality screenplay by Stephen Geller of the superior Pretty Poison, and some excellent performances. Neither show copied the other, but it’s definitely a case of high road / low road.ĭirected by Terence Young, the man who put Sean Connery’s James Bond 007 on the map, The Valachi Papers is based on genuine mobster testimony yet is pitched as a mid-grade vehicle for action star Charles Bronson. Considered a hot film prospect, for a couple of years it shared newspaper editorial space with Paramount’s The Godfather, Mario Puzo’s fictitious tale of ‘the five families’ in New York. Peter Maas’ 1968 novel The Valachi Papers covers the history of the Mafia (the Cosa Nostra) in the U.S., as told by Joseph Valachi, a high-ranking made man in the organization who had testified for the government a few years before. Charles Bronson had a supporting part in the producer’s 1965 The Battle of the Bulge but he later came back for five starring collaborations. In the 1970s he alternated between those and some pretty obvious box office fodder. People magazine ran a sidebar article about how that particular montage had raised awareness for Powell & Pressburger movies.ĭe Laurentiis has his name on quite a few excellent movies, but most are known here only as art house obscurities. Just by luck of the draw, my montage got all of the attention. When the De Laurentiis montage went up, laughter was heard from the Academy audience. His other pictures that people will recognize are dogs or outright exploitation, even if we like some of them: Barbarella, Death Wish, Mandingo, King Kong ’76, The White Buffalo.
THE VALACHI PAPERS FULL
You can’t make a full montage just out of shots from his War and Peace, Barabbas, The Bible and Serpico. De Laurentiis was a busy producer, but once you leave the 1950s and Federico Fellini, his notable features are few and far between - and lacking in the kind of stature needed for an Oscars montage. The editors trying to make a montage of the ‘great career’ of Dino De Laurentiis were really up a tree. The cutters for screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s montage found it difficult to nail down ‘big’ movies that weren’t simply adaptations of another writer’s work. Other montage editors didn’t have it so good.
THE VALACHI PAPERS HOW TO
Mine was for cinematographer Jack Cardiff, so the problem was how to choose just 2.5 minutes of great shots from his work.
THE VALACHI PAPERS TV
In 2001 I received the plum assignment of editing a montage video for the Oscars TV broadcast. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis, Roger Duchet Written by Stephen Geller from the novel by Peter Maas Original Music: Riz Ortolani, Armando Trovajoli
O’Loughlin, Amedeo Nazzari, Fausto Tozzi, Pupella Maggio, Angelo Infanti, Guido Leontini. Starring: Charles Bronson, Lino Ventura, Jill Ireland, Walter Chiari, Joseph Wiseman, Gerald S. Street Date J/ Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95 Joseph Wiseman and Lino Ventura bring additional tough-guy star-power, and Bronson actually commits himself to the role - quite a change of pace for one of his later pictures.ġ972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 125 min. Charles Bronson plays a real-life Mafiosi in a period picture with a fine script, some good performances and a production so sloppy that the whole thing could be called The Anachronism Papers.
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