Lepke
Director: Menahem Golan
Year: 1975
Rating: 6.0
I am not sure why but I really enjoy films about the old gangsters and have
been trying to watch them when I can get a hold of them. The 1920's to the
40's were the Golden Age of Crime - the Italian gangsters like Capone, Lucky
Luciano, Frank Nitti, Albert Anastasia or the Jewish ones - Meyer Lansky,
Bugsy Siegel, Arnold Rothstein, Dutch Schultz and Louis Buchalter (aka Lepke)
and then the independents like Legs Diamond, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and
Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Dillinger and Ma Barker and her boys. Most of them
have had movies made on them and also made an appearance on The Untouchables
TV show. The good old days of crime when they did it with machine guns and
not lawyers in swanky offices. Totally amoral men who saw crime as their
only way to grab the American Dream. And what makes these films so good is
that they are always trying to kill one another either to rise in the power
structure, to kill a rival or just for the hell of it. Life expectancy in
that line of work was not long. Not many made it to retirement and Social
Security. Life insurance must have been tough to get.
This one is about Lepke. The tagline could have been: A Good Family Man,
A Better Killer. Lepke did it the old fashioned way - starting out being
a criminal as a teenager - a lot of time spent in jail - and then you kill
a few people and you are in the big time. And you kill a lot more people
and you stay on the top - until you aren't. Lepke is played by Tony Curtis
when his career was faltering from his days as a matinee idol and during
this film he got hooked badly on cocaine - maybe taking his bad boy character
as Lepke too far.
A lot of times the narratives of these gangster films are exaggerated or
just full of misinformation - what they have here is basically true - what
is strange is what they left out. Because that was the most interesting part
of his career for me. He and Anastasia formed the infamous Murder Inc. The
company that the Mafia would come to when they needed someone hit. Anastasia
was the go-between, Lepke was the head hunter. It is referenced to but mainly
ignored as it shows Lepke as a fine family man happily married and his rise
in the protection rackets, selling drugs and being part of the Syndicate.
Well, I have the film Murder Inc for that.
Curtis is fine here - the real Lepke was a decent looking guy and fairly
urbane for being a cold-blooded killer - and Curtis carries that off well
enough. There is no particular insight into why Lepke was such a rotter;
some people are just born that way. There are two good action scenes - one
in a movie theater with a gangster film being played in the background and
then another in an amusement park. This is directed by the great trash maker
Menahem Golan, but has higher production values than a lot of his over 200
films that he produced of which 95% you probably never heard of unless you
are a fan of the Cannon films. Lepke was made before Cannon was formed.
