Capone (1975)

A Major Disappointment

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This movie tells the story of gangster Al Capone.The director of Capone (1975) is Steve Carver.The producer of the movie is Roger Corman.The role of Al Capone is played by Ben Gazzara.One week ago we sadly lost this terrific actor to cancer at the age of 81.He will be missed.Harry Guardino is brilliant as Johnny Torrio.Susan Blakely is a real foxy lady and he does a wonderful job as Iris Crawford.Sylvester Stallone is seen here before his Rocky success playing Frank Nitti, and he does a really great job.John Cassavetes is excellent as Frankie Yale.Dick Miller is marvelous as Joe Pryor.This movie has got a lot of good stuff.There's one terrific car chase scene.It's a heartbreaking scene where Iris is shot to death and Al mourns next to her dead body.And the fall of a big man in the end is really touching to watch.Sure this biographical movie tells a fictionalized story of Capone being inspired by the real events.But it's all OK, since the story is so well told.

Although it plays quite liberally with the documented facts and makes a sizable number of historical blunders, this film nonetheless manages to be a worthy and engrossing presentation of the cagey and ambitious, but hot-headed and sadistic Al Capone's rise to power during the Prohibition era. Ben Gazzara delivers a marvelously fierce and volcanic portrayal of the notorious Capone: Cheeks stuffed with cotton, spitting out his profane dialogue with venomous aplomb, and glowering at his minions and enemies alike with unbridled seething rage, Gazzara's Capone makes for an appropriately loathsome and frightening psychopathic hoodlum. The strong supporting cast likewise do well in their parts: Harry Guardino as Capone's shrewd mentor Johnny Torrio, Susan Blakely as brash and free-spirited flapper Iris Crawford, Sylvestor Stallone as the traitorous Frank Nitti, Carmen Argenziano as loyal bodyguard Jack McGurn, John Davis Chandler as hateful rival Hymie Weiss, Royal Dano as crooked politician Anton J. Cermak, Dick Miller as wormy corrupt cop Joe Pryor, and Martin Kove as brutish strong-arm flunky Pete. John Cassavetes makes the most out of his regrettably small role as smooth capo Frankie Yale. Director Steve Carver, working from a tough no-nonsense script by Howard Browne, relates the absorbing story at a constant brisk pace, stages the thrilling shoot-outs with considerable muscular aplomb, and maintains a suitably gritty and hard-hitting tone throughout. Moreover, Carver deserves extra points for his decidedly harsh and unsentimental warts'n'all evocation of the 1920's period setting and his unsparingly graphic and equally unromanticized depiction of the more seamy and vulgar aspects of the mob. Vilis Lapenicks' cinematography makes nifty occasional use of slow motion and freeze frames. David Grisman's tuneful and jaunty score also does the trick. A solid and satisfying movie.

This film is a real curiosity.It is notable for a few reasons: raw language that would not have been allowed prior to the Seventies, but might be close to the way real gangsters would have spoken to each other; total frontal nudity, and an early appearance by Sylvester Stallone. The portrayal of Al Capone by Ben Gazzara is so broad as to be farcical, apparently on purpose.There is a lot of exaggerated humor and comic antics in the film that make it seem like it wasn't meant to be taken too seriously. By contrast, the 1959 Al Capone with Rod Steiger had a certain gallows humor and bleak comedy, but never at the expense of the historical figures being portrayed. When Rod Steiger bellows and blusters, connives and threatens, you believe he's Al Capone. Gazzara seems almost to play Capone as if he were in a Saturday Night Live sketch. I saw this movie in its original release to theaters, with a high degree of audience involvement. An elderly gentleman, who had apparently had a few too many before the show, talked to characters in the movie and gave advice and pointed out things throughout the screening, climaxing with a gunfight where Al Capone was ambushed by rivals, and the elderly viewer stood up in the aisle, pointed his cane at the screen like a tommy gun and hollered "I'll help you, Al!", while firing his cane at the screen. This somehow seems the appropriate spirit in which to view this film.

If you were looking for an Al Capone biography that was more exciting than the 1959 film with Rod Steiger, you might like this one, but the only exciting thing for me were the gun battles. Ben Gazzara does well in the title role, but you can tell he has cotton in his jowls because some of his dialogue is incomprehensible. The casting was ideal, having Italian-American actors playing a gang of Italian-American mobsters (especially Sylvester Stallone as Frank Nitti). There is one point the film gets wrong. At the end of the movie, Nitti travels to Florida in 1946 to visit Capone, who is dying of syphilis. In real life, Nitti committed suicide in 1943, before Capone died.Recommended only for a boring day.