Gli intoccabili
D: Guiliano Montaldo. P: Bino Cocogna, Marco Vicario. W: Giuliano Montaldo, Mino
Roli, Ovid Demaris (novel). Ph: Erico Menczer. M: Ennio Morricone. St: John
Cassavetes (Hank McCain), Britt Ekland (Irene Tucker), Peter Falk (Charlie
Adamo), Gabriele Ferzetti (Don Francesco DeMarco), Luigi Pistilli (Duke
Mazzagna)
“A man who thinks he’s free knocks his head against a wall”
A straightforward
melding of motifs from the gangster and heist genres, with a frisson of film
noir and a fatalistic, dour tone common to Italian crime pictures of the period
– viz The Detective, Assassination, The Falling Man.
This
is the kind of film that, if not written out of Cassavetes’ life story, is
usually relegated to a footnote – a project undertaken to mark time, and make
money, between the directorial works that would shape his legacy.[i]
The same might be said of Montaldo, assistant in the mid-Sixties to the likes
of Lizzani and Pontecorvo (he steered the second unit on The Battle of Algiers); an award-winner at Berlin with Una bella grinta (1965) and later at
Cannes with Sacco and Vanzetti (1971).
Both men do solid work here. Cassavetes, smirking and smouldering, channels the alienation and volatility of a career felon, sprung from jail to help rob a casino only to be ensnared in a mafia turf war. Montaldo, fresh from wrangling a multinational cast on the glossy caper movie Grand Slam, opts for a starker, more restrained approach this time (as stark as the Vegas locations will allow), although stabs at documentary-like objectivity, via intermittent narration, are unconvincing.
McCain’s
counterpart is the ambitious mafioso Charlie Adamo, who arranges for the
former’s release and attempts to manipulate him through his son, a criminal neophyte,
who claims the plan to loot the mob-owned Royal Casino is his own. McCain’s
disdain for his offspring is no less disturbing for being deserved, and he
reacts with Jack Carter-esque coldness when the youngster is killed by one of
Adamo’s hirelings. Both men are loose cannons – Adamo’s designs on the Royal constitute
a challenge to his mafia masters; McCain goes ahead with the raid even after Adamo
calls it off – and it is regrettable that the script keeps them apart. Had they
shared any scenes, Cassavetes and Falk, playing Adamo like a lit fuse, would
have sent sparks flying.
There is little new here, but Montaldo keeps the narrative lean and pointed, its moments of urgency propelled by a strident Morricone score. (The Ballad of Hank McCain, sung by Jackie Lynton, covers much the same ground, in a different milieu, as the composer’s impassioned songs for The Big Gundown and Montaldo’s Sacco and Vanzetti.) There are forceful reminders of the mob bosses’ remote-control rule and rigid hierarchy. The latter is enforced by Gabriele Ferzetti, calmly authoritative as Adamo’s superior, who jets over to Vegas to keep his errant underling in line (“You think we want an ape like you as a partner?”), to dally with his wife (an underused if spectacularly coiffed Florinda Bolkan) and ultimately to orchestrate the upstart’s downfall.
Not everything works. As the girl McCain picks up in a bar and later impulsively weds, Britt Ekland has merely to look pretty and follow her husband’s lead. Hers is a purely reactive role. By contrast, in just a few late scenes, Gena Rowlands paints a vivid picture of street-hardened tenderness and dogged loyalty – inklings of her terrific performance in Cassavetes’ own crime drama, Gloria. Her cameo as McCain’s old flame burns brightly, but frustratingly briefly.[ii]
Montaldo recalled the experience of working with Cassavetes with mixed feelings – the latter ‘advising’ Montaldo rather more than the director would have liked. Nevertheless, the star’s combustible performance – a step up from his disengaged turn in his previous Italian crime film, Alberto De Martino’s inferior Bandits in Rome – makes McCain more than adequate as a noir-inflected character piece, the third act reprising the oft-used couple-on-the-run motif. Its generic elements, meanwhile, are slickly packaged, with almost seamless transitions between US locations and Italian studio interiors – not always the case with subsequent Italian-American mob movies, especially those that trawled in the wake of The Godfather.[iii]
Kevin Grant
[i] It was on this
film that Cassavetes really got to know Peter Falk, leading to their
collaboration on the former’s next directed film, Husbands. It is also said that McCain’s
producer, Bino Cicogna, provided start-up funding for that project
[ii] Italian sources,
including the venerable Gremese dictionary, list an original running time of
close to two hours, whereas the ‘international’ version clocks in at 95
minutes. Such a discrepancy may account for the brevity of Rowlands’ appearance
(and perhaps the undercooked relationships between McCain and Irene, and McCain
and his son), but Montaldo assured Bill Lustig – whose Blue Underground label
distributes the film on disc – there never was a longer version
[iii] According to
Roberto Curti, “The fact that Italian distributors didn’t believe in gangster
stories set in their country partially explains why [the] producers… and
director Giuliano Montaldo fled overseas to shoot Machine Gun McCain” (Italian
Crime Dictionary 1968-1980, McFarland)
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