Why are movies about mobsters popular?
Perhaps some of our most colourful, even delightful, nouns have been infused into everyday language by the genre: “gang(ster)”/“mob(ster)”/“hit(man)”/“hood(lum)”/“underworld”/“shootout”/“boss”/“whack.” These words are visible: when we use them, we can see them. They are exciting. They don’t need adjectives as amplifiers. Take “hit:” as a verb (“to hit”), it could mean to achieve a goal or target, or perhaps to strike someone. But as a noun, amongst other things, the word evokes mobsters (“a hit,” a “shootout”), dark-suited men bearing machine guns standing in a line shooting first and asking questions later, neat rows of bottles and glasses behind a bar being smashed to pieces, several dead bodies collapsing to the floor oozing blood from multiple wounds.
“The Alto Knights” (Warner Bros), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is a classical mobster caper. It opens with the non-fatal shooting of “boss of bosses,” Frank Costello, in the lobby of his New York apartment building. We then wind back in time to the beginning of his mobster career; the bulk of the movie is concerned with his close-friendship-turned-spectacular-rivalry with another gangster, Vito Genovese. Both of these parts, confusingly enough, are played, with admittedly great relish, by Robert De Niro. The movie becomes stuffed with additional hoods, their henchmen, and assorted illegal businesses; but we are kept waiting until towards the end to discover the consequences for the culprit of the opening scene’s “hit,” whether in the courts-and-judges sense or otherwise.
A real strength of the screenplay, by Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist who spent his career investigating the Mafia, and who co-wrote Goodfellas (1990, also starring De Niro), is how it illustrates the way in which we can say something very important without actually saying anything at all. Take a sequence towards the end: “It’s what I have to do”/“You know what I’m talking about”/“The less he knows the better.” Or earlier still: “THAT is something I cannot do.” (The word “that” is emphasised but not further qualified; it is likely about smuggling drugs but we aren’t sure). The art form “I know that you know that I know” is rock solid De Niro territory. He knows how to play the powerful man who appears to fumble, to change his mind about what he is about to say, to try to find the precise word with just the optimal degree of vagueness. In the hands of a less capable actor, the falsehood would be blunt, obvious, too heavy-handed. But De Niro has unparalleled expertise: according to two separate film-ranking websites, he has played a gangster 14 times and starred in crime-genre movies 27 times, most recently in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023), a modern epic.
The domestic life of a mob-boss seems to consist of chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking, waiting for the telephone to ring, and mindlessly watching television game-shows. And so we come to the substantive problem with the whole lazy mobster genre: the rose-tinted spectacles through which we (both in the sense of the studio and of the audience) can be tempted to see mid–20th-century Americana. Take the need for women to be strictly subservient: at one point, Frank tells his wife Bobbie, played by Debra Messing, to persuade another mobster’s wife (who has recently been bereaved) to take her kids (who presumably just lost their dad) and stay with her mother in Toronto: it doesn’t matter one jot what any of the three women involved might think. Or the brazen legal defence mounted by Vito after he steals from his wife Anna (played by Kathrine Narducci) which could be paraphrased as: “She is a woman! Of course she is completely hysterical! We all know that women are insane and that you can’t believe a word they say.” The men tell the women what to do and the women obey. But surely the world has moved on; like so many British films which tell tired stories of the imagined past over and over, is yet another movie set in mid-century white, male America really good enough in 2025?
On the other hand, there are a number of exceptional courtroom scenes. To take just one, the US Congressional investigation into the bribery of politicians in New York City. All the other bosses, when summoned to give evidence, plead the Fifth (Amendment), therefore refusing to answer any of the senators’ questions. Frank, however, has decided upon a different approach: to provide evidence to the Committee, against the advice of his own lawyer. During the scene, the other bosses are huddled together in a bar watching Frank’s televised testimony, shouting at the screen play-by-play, like rugby fans during the Six Nations, noting at one point “it’s like a cigarette commercial” (a comment true of the whole movie).
“The Alto Knights” is lucky to have escaped an 18-rating. A Hollywood script arguably playing for laughs risks flattening the compassion we might feel for the poor crushed by gambling debt, the heroin addicts, the wives and children of the murdered. I would have preferred a higher age-rating and a stronger warning about levels of violence.
Still, “The Alto Knights” cogently tells its story, and the penultimate scene, with the whole Mafia on a New York farm, is one of the strongest of all, combining as it does the movie’s signature themes: violent undercurrents, nervous comedy, preposterous costumes and, to use a much more modern phrase, toxic masculinity. What is wickedly clever is pairing all this with the main theme from the musical “Anything Goes,” which perfectly sums up this infamous group of men. A bit like the song, it is probably wise not to take the whole too seriously – after all, perhaps that’s why mobster movies are so popular.
Adam Poole
22 March 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
