Crazy Joe: A Review (1974)
Another GODFATHER-inspired film featuring violence and the berserk ambitions of one of Brooklyn's toughest hoodlums, Joey Gallo, a Sartre-reading thug who confused class with brass. Boyle and his brother Torn pull off a routine caper, and Boyle is sent to Attica. Here he forms alliances with NYC black gangs, which he trades on to buck the Manhattan Mafia when he is released. At first Adler, the shifty Mafia don, tells Boyle "Take all you can hold," believing the young Turk doesn't have enough "soldiers" to launch a full-scale war. When he realizes that Boyle has ranks of black criminals behind him, Adler panics and orders Boyle killed. Just as he is about to take control of the Mafia organization, Boyle is gunned down in a restaurant (exactly like Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy, where the real Crazy Joe was shot to death in 1972). Boyle gives a fascinating performance, but the excessive violence is jarring, disturbing even for adults. (This is not one for the children.) Torn renders a solid performance as Boyle's brother who commits suicide when he realizes that the two are pawns in a bloody crusade to dominate a system that will eventually gobble them up. To avoid problems with the Gallo family, Boyle is never referred to by his last name--it is suggested, however, when the camera lingers on a case of Gallo Wine in a scene showing a liquor-store robbery. The story is based on a poor profile by Gage, which offers little or no background information on Gallo other than to stereotype him as a trigger-happy lout with intellectual pretensions. A minor but persistent distraction is the ill-fitting rug adorning Boyle's famous bald pate. Tonti's camera is swift and sharp, but the story lags in spots while, to compensate for the absence of plot, Boyle's bursts of anger explode--as when Boyle, being hailed as a hero by street children, buys them gum from a machine that moments later he smashes to pieces because the sweetshop owner refuses to pay weekly extortion money.