Inside the Mafia

Not much Inside Information on the Infamous Crime Syndicate. Just a Superficial account of Real Life country Meeting of the Mafia in upstate NY.

Just Uninspired Underworld Uttering.

Extremely Low-Budget-Look that is as Uninteresting as it is Uninvolved. The Hats and the Sunglasses are Laughable,

Supposedly this is a Sinister look to Evoke Emotion from the Audience and Hide the lack of Emoting. Persuading it is Not, just Pretensions.

The Opening Barbershop Scene is an example of Good Work.

The Voice-Over Annunciation Announcer Drops in Unexpected at times and Demands Authoritarian Authorship because his Diction is Impeccable.

The Final Shootout is as Dull as these Things Get.

This film has about as much to do with the Mafia as Chef Boyardee Spaghetti has to do with Italian food. Despite that, most of the film is fairly engaging, except for a magical flight from the house to the car by a boyfriend who must have run faster than the road runner to get to his car and start it. (You will know what I mean when you see the scene). Cameron Mitchell and a group of B actors do a decent job with the lines they are given, but the movie runs out of gas in the last fifteen minutes or so. It could have been a much better film, had it been a bit more realistic; especially at the end. There is a also a pretty hilarious statement that this event marked the end of organized crime in the US LOL. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you. Watchable for the first hour.

A bunch of non-Italian actors culturally appropriate my heritage.

The film opens with the Blues Brothers pumping four bullets into mob boss Ted de Corsia, but he manages to survive, at least for a few reels. His lieutenant, Cameron Mitchell, decides to get even with the big boss. What follows is non-stop lack of action as Mitchell and Robert Strauss take over a house at an airport, hold everyone hostage, and wait for a plane carrying the head man from Italy. This sequence is just a ripoff of "Suddenly," which at least featured a real Italian guy.

The supporting cast includes Ed Platt as another mob boss, and James Brown (not the Godfather of Soul) as one of the most useless cops in film history. Frank Gerstle plays a hitman - but at least his suit fits for a change. Louis Jean Heydt runs the airport. The characters have names like Chins, Augie, and Julie (yes, that's a guy).

The climactic shootout at the mob meeting is something you'd expect from "The Naked Gun." The narrator then tells us this may be the end of organized crime. Yeah, right. Apparently he never heard of cable companies.

Here's another one of the 25 or so films director Edward L. Cahn churned out in a three-year period for the same production company (which went under a few names), some of which are surprisingly good and most of which are at least admirable for the creative ways they get around their VERY low budgets. Cameron Mitchell starred in 3 of these (see review of PIER 5, HAVANA). Here we are in the gangland genre. These are the kind of gangsters who wear dark suits, dark hats, dark sunglasses, and chain smoke...just in case you forget who the gangsters are. The syndicate seems to have broken down into some competing factions, one led by Ed Platt of "Get Smart" fame, the other led by Cameron Mitchell. The main boss over all the units, who has been in exile in Italy, is coming back to the USA to a small airstrip in upstate New York, and the competing groups heat up the competition prior to his arrival. I won't give away any more of the plot. Like most low-budget films, this features a lot of talk, which builds up the tension, as does the tough-guy acting from the principals. The film also uses that low-budget staple--the rewrite of PETRIFIED FOREST, where a group of criminals hold some regular citizens hostage. It's cheap to film, is in one setting, and constantly refers to outside events that don't have to be filmed. As always, director Edward L. Cahn is a master of b-movie pacing, and writer Orville Hampton wrote a number of fifties b-movie classics, TV shows from Perry Mason to Scooby-Doo, and some of this group of Cahn-directed films. And of course Cameron Mitchell is convincingly tough as the gang leader--if you need any convincing of Mitchell's subtlety as an actor, watch the way his character keeps changing in small increments in the last twenty minutes of the film after gangland leader Johnny Lucero arrives back from Italy. If you like 1950s gangland b-movies and like cheap rewrites of Petrified Forest, or if you are a Cameron Mitchell fan who needs to see everything the master appeared in, you'll want to catch this film. People raised on the elegant, operatic gangsters of Coppola and Scorsese might find a film like this primitive and laughable (it's their loss!).

One of Frank Sinatra's best films was "Suddenly" and he played a sadistic assassin who held a family hostage in order to make an attempt on the President's life. In many ways, this film is like Bogart's "The Desperate Hours", in which some killers on the hideout force themselves on a family. Their choice is to hide them...or die! Both films which came out before "Inside the Mafia", and since both plots are so similar, I have to knock a point or two off this later film.

When the film begins, the mob boss Martello is gunned down by two assassins. Despite pumping four bullets into the guy, he somehow survives and his right-hand man, Tony Ledo (Cameron Mitchell) is determined to pay back the guys responsible. So, when he learns about a big conference of all the mob bosses, he and his sidekicks are determined to be there waiting and make them pay!

To do this, they go to the same tiny airport when the mobsters will soon be arriving. But here's where it gets interesting...they take the guy in the control tower prisoner as well as his family and they tell them to cooperate...or else. However, it's soon obvious that 'or else' would occur regardless, as these hoods are the smart type and won't leave any witnesses to talk.

The film is very taut and the acting is also very good. I have no complaints about the picture at all...except its similarity to the other films. Plus, they only came out a few years after...so audiences of 1959 must have also noticed the strong similarities. Despite this, however, it's worth watching as it's one of Cameron Mitchell's best roles.