La padrina

LADY DYNAMITE is an Italian gangster flick that starts with a bang - quite literally. It involves a husband being killed at his own wedding feast, at which point his wife travels to Italy to track down the mafia don responsible. As a plot that's good enough, but the execution here isn't particularly interesting, content to go through the motions with a great deal of chat without doing much about it.

"Lady Dynamite" - aka "La Padrina" which roughly translates as "The Godmother" - is a missed opportunity, for sure. When I first read the synopsis of this 1973 Poliziotesschi/euro-crime thriller, I automatically assumed those clever Italians were already following the example of movies like "Coffy" and "Foxie Brown" and bring to the foreground the character of a strong & independent woman in world usually dominated by nasty and sleazy men. That's also how the movie (promisingly) starts. At the party for their 10th wedding anniversary, Donna Constanza is abruptly widowed when her husband (and mafia boss of five influential families in the NY region) gets gunned down during his speech. With his last powers, he whispers the name of the person who hired the assassin, and she promptly travels to Palermo to avenge him.

Alas, though, as soon as she lands in Sicily, Donna Costanza once more relies on macho men like Venantino Venantini and Anthony Steffen to do her dirty work...

How awesome would it have been if "La Padrina" revolved around a Mafia Donna version of Pam Grier who seduces, misleads, and then mercilessly slays the male enemies that treat her arrogantly and underestimate her? Answer: so awesome, especially because the Poliziotesschi subgenre desperately needed some strong feminist figures and role-models. I passionately love the genre and practically every title that I have seen thus far, but I honestly can't deny it's an utmost woman-unfriendly type of cinema. Women in Poliziotesschi just serve to sleep with, slap around, and murder. "La Padrina" sadly doesn't change this routine and, to my knowledge, no other movie ever did afterwards.

So, basically, this is a very ordinary Poliziotteschi, and if I then compare it to the work of directors such as Fernando Di Leo and Umberto Lenzi, a very weak and inconspicuous one. The pacing is often slow, there are too many supportive characters that I couldn't keep apart, and the action sequences are unremarkable. There is one excessively brutal and vile strangulation, and - of course - the victim is a woman.

The copy I watched of this movie was dubbed with English, from an original VHS tape. I'm not aware of any other releases except the originals. If you like poliziotteschi movies, this one is worth checking out. If you can find it, of course. I think this print really needs to be cleaned up and re-released. It's worth it.

One on level La Padrina (original title, means, basically, "The Godmother") is very typical. It's very typical of the '70s, very typical of poliziotteschi, and pretty typical for an Euro-mafia movie. With the exception of very '70s, it's also different than those things. It's at a much slower pace than a typical poliziotteschi, though I didn't find that onerous. Typical for the scenes in Sicily, there is a strong Syracuse element rather than being purely Palermo orientated. Typical of mafiosi movies, the protagonist plays a very different role. Typical of an Italian '60s-'70s movie, it's a poliziotteschi with Anthony Steffan, rather than a Spaghetti Western. While there's nothing really outstanding about it, it's a solid, straight ahead poliziotteschi. Personally I would put it in the top tier of the sub-genre, though. My criterion for that is simple. Middle tier is for movies that are good, but you'd probably have to be a fan of the genre to like. Top tier are movies that people that aren't fans of the genre would probably like as well. I think it meets the latter criterion.

Food pairing suggestion: homemade pizza with a nice, unpretentious Cabernet. It was a great lunch combo!