Movie Details
| Title: | The Don is Dead | |
| Director: | Richard Fleischer | |
| Year: | 1973 | |
| Genre: | Crime | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.02.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- The Narrow Margin
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.02.06 | Netflix | So I finally got around to going through my notebooks and listing out all the movies I had written down in little "check this out" circles in the margins of my QTfest notes. Basically, they are movies QT mentioned in intros, movies with cool trailers, or movies I otherwise heard about during the two fests I've been to of his. The list came out to 30 movies. This is one of them. It has a really good trailer, told with mostly stills from the film either panned or zoomed or zoom-panned with dialogue and sound effects overtop. The title appears written in blood on a wall over a dead man. It's a crime story starring Anthony Quinn, Frederic Forrest, Robert Forster, Al Lettieri (he played Sollozzo in The Godfather) and a host of other familiar Italian-American faces of the period. The reigning don dies, making room for one guy to hatch a subtle plan to start a war that would eliminate his colleagues and allow him to assume power over the entire city instead of just the half he has now. So basically it starts very small and escalates (kind of sort of similar to City of God) to the point where everyone's going gun crazy. The Godfather overtones are pretty blatant here: the guy who wants out but gets pulled back in, the sick father figure, the montage of cool mob killings, Abe Vigoda... but you know, I'll take all the quality Godfather clones I can get. While I wouldn't say it's anywhere as good as The Godfather, the story is compelling and the acting is good and Richard Fleischer's direction is competant and you know... it exists. I hate it when I really love one movie and there's absolutely no other movies out there anything like it. Same with music by the way... so yeah, I enjoyed watching this one a lot, but then again 702 crime movies are like crack to me right now. |
