The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic. With his track record of crime-dynasty epics including The Godfather Part II, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas and Casino, De Niro is able to inhabit the gangster milieu merely by slipping on a favourite overcoat and homburg hat, but watching him play both Genovese and Costello here creates a sort of visual dyslexia.
While his Costello feels like a fully-rounded character, both as his career progresses over the years and as the ageing narrator looking back, De Niro’s Genovese is like an angrier, more irrational mini-me. Despite some prosthetic tweaks, he kinda looks like De Niro and sounds like him too, though not quite as much as the other guy. It is, at the very least, distracting. The double-De Niro scheme was apparently producer Irwin Winkler’s idea, but surely there’s no shortage of actors who could have handled the Genovese role.
This conundrum aside, The Alto Knights – named for a Manhattan social club run by the Genovese crime family – does at least score big with its depiction of the development of the New York crime dynasties and the passage of the decades rolling by. The Prohibition era and its irresistible invitation to get into the liquor trade was where these characters began sinking their claws into the roots of the city, and period black and white footage and sepia-tinted still photos evoke the period with an almost elegiac touch, as if these were the good old days for organised crime. Throughout, there’s an almost fetishistic fascination with classic American automobiles, all looking pristine and beautifully preserved, in a variety of seductive shades. Clothes, interior design and period street life have likewise been rendered with love and affection.
The film opens in May 1957, with the attempted killing of Costello by Genovese’s inept hitman Vincent Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis), whose bullet somehow slithered round the outside of Costello’s skull instead of going through it (pictured above). Clearly something had gone badly awry in the Genovese-Costello relationship, and here it’s traced back to the way that Genovese spent the World War Two years in Italy (where he engaged in some black-bag work for Mussolini). On his return to New York he wants to seize back his share of the rackets which Costello has been overseeing. Costello tries to explain that times have changed and it wasn’t that simple, and Vito would have to be patient.
However, while Frank was a careful planner who believed violence was bad for business, Vito was a vicious and merciless killer, and “patience” was not in his vocabulary. Thus a struggle between their two irreconcilable viewpoints develops, with Costello playing a shrewd and strategic game as he aims to extricate himself from the Mob without becoming a bullet-riddled corpse.
It’s a serviceable plot, though sorely lacks the explosive tension-and-release and cathartic mayhem you might have expected from a Scorsese-ised version of it. Putting the failed hit at the beginning seems like a curious choice, since it pre-emptively undermines the relationship between the protagonists, while the film glides gently to a close rather than hurtling to a climactic meltdown.
Screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (also the writer of Goodfellas and Casino) first produced a version of the story back in the Seventies, when it was known as Wise Guys. Also this is director Barry Levinson’s first movie in a decade, so there’s a faint air of veterans-drifting-into-the-sunset about proceedings, much as there is with its on-screen protagonists.
Ironically, for such a male-centric story, it’s the women who provide some much-needed emotional colour. Debra Messing brings an empathetic and slightly Susan Hayward-ish tone to her portrayal of Frank’s wife Bobbie, while, by contrast, Kathrine Narducci comes out spitting fire and nails as Genovese’s wife Anna. Vito has been trying to skim off profits from Anna’s nightclub, and she’s not having it. Maybe this guy wasn’t so wise, at that.
