Lucky Luciano

Rosi’s inflammatory Lucky Luciano was hailed by Norman Mailer as “the finest movie yet made about the Mafia, the most careful, the most thoughtful, the truest and most sensitive to the paradoxes of a society of crime.” The film is a dossier-like dramatic investigation in the manner of the director’s Salvatore Giuliano and The Mattei Affair. Gian Maria Volonté, Rosi’s favourite actor, gives a forceful performance as Luciano, the notorious Italian-American crime lord. Handed a lengthy prison sentence by the State of New York in 1936, Luciano was mysteriously paroled to the U.S Army during WWII, and then deported in 1946 to his native Sicily, where he allegedly became a kingpin in the international drug trade. Rosi’s provocative polemic hints at dark connections between American politicos and Italian Mafiosos, and suggests that U.S. officials encouraged the Mafia as a bulwark against Communist influence in wartime Italy — only to later became alarmed by Mafia drug traffic into the U.S. “Film noir meets the conspiracy thriller . . . Rosi provides a context for the Godfather films which threatens to outdo their own cinematic forcefulness” (Paul Taylor, Time Out). “Perhaps the most interesting of Rosi’s ‘documented’ films denouncing the Italian establishment . . . A probing look into a strange history” (Peter Bondanella). Colour, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 115 mins.