Capone
                                                                
Director: Steve Carver
Year: 1975
Rating: 6.0
Al Capone deserved a better ending in life. A bigger one. Going out with a blast in a torrent of machine-gun fire. A gangster Alamo. He has appeared as a character in so many films and TV shows and been played by some of the bigger stars - De Niro, Rod Steiger, Jason Robards, F. Murray Abraham, Mel Gibson, Tom Hardy, Ben Gazzara and many others. He needed a better ending for the movies. Instead, he goes out in a blast of syphilis that ate away at his brain. I am a big fan of these true gangster films. Maybe it was watching the TV show The Untouchables back in the early 1960s - surprisingly violent - surprised my parents allowed me to see it. But all the names of the gangsters are familiar to me through that show. Elliot Ness bless his heart brought them all to justice and cleaned up America.



This one is brought to us by Roger Corman as the producer with Steve Carver as director. Previously, Corman had stepped into the world of gangsters with films on Ma Barker and her gang (Bloody Mama), The St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Machine Gun Kelly. Now he turns to the most famous of the old-time gangsters, Al Capone played by Ben Gazzara. It is fairly by the numbers with multiple shoot-outs and Capone getting crazier as the film goes on. For the most part it sticks to the facts or semi-facts anyways. When the facts are as bloody as they were, you don't need to make up much.



Capone as a young man comes to the attention in New York of two top gangsters - Frankie Yale (John Cassavetes) and Johnny Torrio (Harry Guardino). Both real characters. Torrio works for Big Jim Colosimo (Frank Campanella) who runs a string of brothels in Chicago. When Colosimo refuses to expand into bootlegging, Torrio invites Capone to Chicago. And Colosimo is gunned down in his restaurant. Historians disagree on whether Capone or Yale was the trigger man. Either way, Torrio now heads the South Chicago crime family.



There are various crime families - others run by Italians and one by the Irish. They have to divide up Chicago but gangs tend to believe in the philosophy of grow or die, so there is constant fighting and rub-outs. Capone wants to kill them all but Torrio is the Neville Chamberlain of Organized Crime - willing to give away some of his territory for peace. The film posits that Torrio gets hit by Capone by giving the Irish gang (Hymie Weiss, Bugs Moran) Torrio's address. Not sure this was true. But after being shot Torrio has had enough and leaves for Chicago for Italy. This is true though in real life Torrio comes back later when Mussolini went after the gangs and became one of the Wise Men of the mafia.



Capone is now number one and organizes the St. Valentine Day's Massacre which wipes out much of the North Gang. He takes on a number two man. Frank Nitti. Well known to anyone who has watched either the Untouchable TV show (Bruce Gordon) or the Untouchables movie (Billy Drago). Here he is played with a suave coolness by none other than a young-looking Sylvester Stallone. A year later he made Rocky. In the film Nitti visits a senile Capone near the end of his life in 1946. In reality, Nitti committed suicide in 1943 because it looked like he was going to jail again. In 1957 Torrio had a heart attack while sitting in a barber's chair - not the way they usually died in a barber's chair.  Frankie Yale was gunned down while driving in 1928. Capone died in 1946. The first film about him was the 1959 Al Capone starring Rod Steiger. Gazzara does a decent job here but I think he was stuffing his mouth with tissue paper to make his cheeks puff out and at times is hard to understand. He gives us bursts of rage and a few moments of tenderness but I was hoping for a baseball bat. Susan Blakely plays his moll. There was another recent Capone bio-pic in 2020 starring Tom Hardy but it is Capone after he is released from jail and having dementia. That doesn't much appeal to me.