At least this one, based on a comic bestseller, came out before "The Godfather". Other mob movies spoofs and many ripoffs came years later. Of course, this easily could easily have been influenced by the Mario Puzo novel the movie adapted, but the mood is different, the length is less than half, yet it has just as many characters, possibly more. For me, the joke went on about a half an hour too long, amusing in spots but tiresome after a while. The phony accents, even by Italian American actors, reminded me of my Sicilian American relatives who would tell Sicilian based jokes to get laughter out of the younger non- Sicilian kids, funny then but silly now, especially when it goes on for over an hour and a half.
It's ironic that Robert de Niro, who plays one of the major characters here and sporting a heavy accent, would spend 90 minutes as part of "Godfather 2" flashbacks, speaking only in Italian, and won his first Oscar for doing so. He plays Mario, who's dating one of the Palumbo girls (Leigh Taylor-Young), whose brother (Jerry Orbach) has broken away from mob boss Lionel Stander's Corleone like Baccsla family (who lives in a gated community but still checks the car for bombs every morning), and joins Orbach in his war against Stander. The veteran actor is in a rivalry with Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet to see who can have the thickest phony accent. Hervé Villechaize, years before "Fantasy Island", is badly dubbed to have an Italian accent as well.
The comedy comes fast and furious, and a few jokes land but a lot of it is flat and unfunny. I found that DeNiro, who had only been in films for about 3 years up to this point, highly resembled a young Richard Gere who would come along a few years later. Of course they look nothing alike as older men, but that was an interesting little observation. The film gets far too frenetic to the point where I felt like I had drank a whole bottle of chianti and that my head was spinning from trying to gather everything that was going on. The presence of a seemingly tame lion figures into the film (although this was not made by MGM), and there are jokes at the expense by how much it is and how bad it smells. Kids may have gotten a kick out of this back then, and indeed, there is no violence to speak of, but perhaps it's because many of these characters and situations are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon.
It's ironic that Robert de Niro, who plays one of the major characters here and sporting a heavy accent, would spend 90 minutes as part of "Godfather 2" flashbacks, speaking only in Italian, and won his first Oscar for doing so. He plays Mario, who's dating one of the Palumbo girls (Leigh Taylor-Young), whose brother (Jerry Orbach) has broken away from mob boss Lionel Stander's Corleone like Baccsla family (who lives in a gated community but still checks the car for bombs every morning), and joins Orbach in his war against Stander. The veteran actor is in a rivalry with Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet to see who can have the thickest phony accent. Hervé Villechaize, years before "Fantasy Island", is badly dubbed to have an Italian accent as well.
The comedy comes fast and furious, and a few jokes land but a lot of it is flat and unfunny. I found that DeNiro, who had only been in films for about 3 years up to this point, highly resembled a young Richard Gere who would come along a few years later. Of course they look nothing alike as older men, but that was an interesting little observation. The film gets far too frenetic to the point where I felt like I had drank a whole bottle of chianti and that my head was spinning from trying to gather everything that was going on. The presence of a seemingly tame lion figures into the film (although this was not made by MGM), and there are jokes at the expense by how much it is and how bad it smells. Kids may have gotten a kick out of this back then, and indeed, there is no violence to speak of, but perhaps it's because many of these characters and situations are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon.