Lepke

The life and fast times of Louis ¨Lepke¨ Buchalter from his days in reform school incarnated by Barry Miller to his days as an adult : Tony Curtis when marries Bernice : Anjanette Comer and as head of Murder Inc whose syndicate spattered the headlines of the day with blood and eventually his execution in 1944 . It was 1935 , the board of Murder Inc met to discuss business , everybody was there . Dutch Schulz attempts to kill prosecutor Thomas Dewey , but it isn't accepted by the Comission, then resulting a a death warrant gainst a main mobster . There Louis ¨Lepke¨ Buchalter decided to become chairman and all hell broke loose. He was the king of crime when crime was king ¡

Exciting mobster movie packs noisy action , thrills , intense drama with romance , grisly killings with high body-count , shootouts and lots of violence. The tale sticks close to the facts , taking here and there of the actual events. Being an acceptable and passable story though weighty and uninspired , at times . In fact , it results to be a peculiar attempt to do a Jewish ¨Godfather¨ that makes nothing of all its promising material . Depicting the rise of the Syndicate and Murder Inc with intervention of notorious mobsters as Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia , Dutch Schulz and the subtle change of tack under pressure from the clean-up campaigns of the late 30s and early 40s , as well as the fall of the killer gangster Louis Lepke Buchalter . Tony Curtis gives a nice acting in the lead role as the colorful gangster who carries out a thunderous criminal career and he'll stop at nothing , at whatever cost , to get his purports, including taking down witnesses , resulting in fateful consequences . Here shows up various famous mobsters as the main chief Lucky Luciano , Albert Anastasia , Vito Genovese , Gurrah Shapiro, , Bugsy Siegel , Dutch Schulz , Frank Costello , being played by notorious actors as Gianni Russo , Vic Tayback , Warren Berlinger , John Durren , among others . And , of course , the good guys and lawmen as Prosecutor Thomas Dewey and FBI chief : J. Edward Hoover .

It displays a colorful and evocative cinematography by cameraman Andrew Davis , subsequently a successful director. As well as moving and thrilling musical score by Kenneth Wannberg. The motion picture was professionally directed by Menahem Golan who created along with Yoram Globus the famous Cannon Productions. Rating : 6/10 , acceptable and passable . It isn't a classic , but watch worth seeing.

.... although quite inaccurate! Tony Curtis gives a stellar performance. Overall Lepke is worth watching.

Lepke traces the beginnings of Louis Lepke Buchalter from his days as a child thief to his eventual demise at the hands--or feet, if you will--of Old Sparky.

Pros: Tony Curtis gives an excellent performance as Lepke, conveying charm as well as ruthlessness. The other actors involved also give decent performances, particularly Milton Berle as Lepke's father-in-law.

As for the cons, the period sets don't look authentic. There was a big change in the streets and nightclubs from the 1920's to the 1940's in New York--not in this movie. Additionally, it's shown that Jack "Legs" Diamond was murdered by a contract killer, an ice pick in his ear. Nope. He was murdered in bed by at least three people. I guess killing him the old-fashioned way wasn't colorful enough for the producers.

Altogether, the film is fun to watch, buoyed by Curtis' performance, even though he doesn't age very much during his rise and eventual fall. But it's hardly accurate.

Brutal, straightforward bio-pic of the notorious Jewish gang boss. Writers Wesley Lau and Tamar Hoffs tell their sprawling story with fidelity to the headlines and nary a hint of what made this complicated mobster-cum-family man tick. (Curiously, there's never a mention of Lepke's infamous Murder Inc. operation, opting instead to concentrate on his drug trafficking and extortion enterprises.) Luckily, Tony Curtis' riveting performance fills in what the writers' have neglected, transforming Lepke Buchalter into a disturbingly three-dimensional character. Tossing off Yiddishisms with a sneer, keeping his impish smile to a minimum, he plays Lepke as a stone-faced ruthless street thug with a yen for power and conservative family values. It's as though Sidney Falco from "Sweet Smell of Success" had finally taken over J.J. Hunsecker's column. Whether snarling out death orders or tremulously asking his prospective father in law for permission to marry, Curtis invests the role with a skillful understatement (as well as a Bronx boy's veracity).

In the film's best scene, a queasy mixture of eroticism and complex emotions, Lepke is on the lam and holed up in a trollop's apartment. As the woman brazenly tempts him, Curtis silently and eloquently conveys the anguish of a lonely man struggling to remain faithful to his wife.

The director Menachem Golan is rarely this subtle, striving for ethnic texture and period color and overdoing both. Grubby hook-nosed Jews, swarthy pasta-eating Italians, and outsize Fedoras are shoved in our face. The violence is luridly overblown (a prostitute gets an ice pick thrust in her neck during lovemaking), and sometimes downright preposterous (a plate of spaghetti camouflages an explosive device). But just try to turn away from Curtis. With Anjanette Comer as Lepke's doting wife; Milton Berle, surprisingly restrained as her father; Barry Miller as the young Lepke; Vaughn Meader as an unlikely Walter Winchell.

A cross between yet another 1970's THE GODFATHER clone and a drive-in exploitation with sex and violence, future Cannon Films co-owner Menahem Golan directs Tony Curtis as LEPKE... beginning with a younger version with an intense Barry Miller in turn-of-the-century America, committing a crime and about to be locked up... a shame since more time should have been spent on those youthful years...

Instead, right when the titular Jewish mobster gets out, he's already a 50-something miscast Tony Curtis, who at one point talks Milton Berle into marrying docile daughter Anjanette Comer... and about thirty-minutes later, when the detectives start knocking, she's supposed to have realized her mistake at marrying a lethal crime boss...

The shame is that we never experience Lepke's climb from rags to riches, nor do we get any inclination of how all the dirty work goes down... with the exception of a deliciously lethal short Italian who takes out Lepke's enemies...

So it's never exactly clear why he has either crooked friends or dangerous enemies since scene-after-scene entails dialogue more about crime than acting upon it... hopscotching into violent deaths (one has a mobster cutting the neck of a hooker while having sex) that, while pushing the R-rated envelope, has little content inside: what's here (including Vic Tayback and THE GODFATHER brother-in-law Gianni Russo) seems more of a 2-hour TV-movie trailer than a fulfilling cinematic mob biopic.