In The Alto Knights, director Barry Levinson and his stars, Robert De Niro (as Frank Costello) and Robert De Niro (as Vito Genovese), trace the rise and fall of the real-life postwar Mafia with the speed, humor, and panache that director Raoul Walsh and his stars, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, brought to the rise and fall of fictional pre-war gangsters in The Roaring Twenties (1939).
Once again, close allies end up at homicidal loggerheads. DeNiro’s Frank Costello, like Cagney’s Eddie Bartlett, wants to establish himself as a legitimate man of means, while DeNiro’s Vito Genovese, like Bogart’s George Hally, remains a ruthless street guy. Mayhem ensues.
This movie starts where conventional films end. A hulking Genovese protégé, the amazingly named Vincent Gigante (played by Shogun’s Cosmo Jarvis, hilarious as this king-size doofus), shoots Costello in the head but fails to finish him off. Costello, who narrates, then rummages through memories of his and Genovese’s friendship as he ponders his next steps.
From the get-go, Nicholas (Goodfellas) Pileggi’s headlong and lucid script illuminates the rifts that bedeviled the Mob and exposed the tainted underside of the Fabulous Fifties. The politically connected Costello, a mainstay in New York’s café society and a cover boy for Time, sticks to traditional vices, such as gambling. The volatile Genovese hopes to conquer the burgeoning narcotics trade the way he and Costello ran bootleg liquor together during Prohibition. Genovese, who fled to Italy to dodge a murder rap, got stranded there during World War II; on his return, he wins back his Greenwich Village crew, but what he really wants is his former position as acting head of the crime family.
The double casting works like gangbusters. Always at his best for Levinson (eight years ago he was a soul-less wonder as Bernie Madoff in the director’s tiptop HBO film The Wizard of Lies), De Niro uses prosthetic makeup and wears contrasting eyewear but transforms himself mostly with attitude and style.
Genovese, all id, gesticulates and ejaculates, usually at the same time; he vents his envy and insecurity in vitriolic bursts, but he’s scariest when he’s silent. He’s also cagey: to prove himself a simple businessman, he puts on an apron in a modest house and invites reporters to a home-cooked meal.
Costello, his old pal, projects maturity and wariness. But there’s some comedy to his dignity, especially when he mans up to stroll through Central Park with a Pomeranian and a Chihuahua-Yorkie mix dressed in miniature mink coats. The slyness within Costello’s reserve emerges slowly and builds to a dynamite climax at the notorious 1957 Mob summit in rural Apalachin, New York. The summit is meant to be Genovese’s coronation, but Costello derails that expectation uproariously, a slapstick testament to his killer shrewdness.
In his dual roles, De Niro is charged up—unlike the dreary, inert figure in that cinematic mausoleum The Irishman. At times we could be watching the explosive De Niro of Johnny Boy in Mean Streets confront the deliberative De Niro of Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II. But The Alto Knights doesn’t play movie-movie games. It poses the question: What creates clashing personalities from so much common clay?
Forget nature and nurture. It’s willpower and imagination on Costello’s part, and, perhaps, his marriage. He develops a taste for deluxe domesticity with his protective wife, Bobbie (Debra Messing), a stabilizing partner, while Genovese’s Anna (Kathrine Narducci) runs a lesbian nightclub and is just as temperamental and volcanic as her husband, who grew up in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Bobbie, who’s Jewish, has an objective slant on the whole scene. As Anna and Vito cut their wedding cake, Bobbie says that Vito just married himself. Messing and Narducci are all-in as actors and comedians: they energize the film as perfect opposites.
Costello addresses the audience directly and illustrates his observations with newsreels and headlines or photos fed into a slide projector. With this unpretentious yet complex and dynamic approach, Levinson turns the story toward irony and relevance rather than nostalgia. The movie encompasses the flight from gritty ethnic enclaves to suburbia, the last gasp of a certain kind of high-low Broadway life, the golden age of radio giving way to television culture, and the growing realization that crime, like front-page politics, is no longer local but national.
The Alto Knights is named for the Little Italy social club where Frank and Vito sealed booze deals in their youth. There, Genovese and his gang watch the televised Kefauver Committee hearings on crime in interstate commerce and resent what they see. Vito thinks the senators’ Anglo-Saxon forefathers were the original super-thieves who stole Indian land; seized lumber, gold, and oil; and left nothing for them except the rackets.
Genovese may be a dangerous nutcase, but when he warns Costello against mixing with these “strange” and risky people, who could be “from another planet,” the audience laughs with him. We see that he has a point: the Senate homes in on the Mafia, but the Establishment are a Mob of their own.
The Alto Knights is now playing in theaters nationwide
Michael Sragow has been a film critic for Rolling Stone, Salon, and Film Comment, among other publications, and is the author of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
