Will The Dirty Rats Hurry Up And Plug Each Other?

I don't care much for mobster movies, or the mobster genre in general (or should it be the organized crime genre?). I've never had any interest in watching Godfather movies, or The Sopranos. I have seen The Untouchables a few times, and it's one of the few films Costner is in I like, but it's more an exception. I don't know precisely what the issue is. Maybe that they're thugs, but the pretend to be these classy guys, and we're supposed to be impressed with them for it. I don't know.

I figured if there was a director whose attempt at a mobster movie I'd like, it'd be Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. Problem being, I didn't bother to confirm the title of the movie before I requested it as a Christmas gift, so I wrote it down as "once upon a time in new york". Oops. Which brings us to 1931: Once Upon a Time in New York.

It's actually an Italian movie, dubbed with some pretty lousy English voices. A lot of the male voices don't match what I'd expect for how the character looks. The movie begins and ends with The Sheik of Araby playing, an upbeat sounding tune at odds with a story of murder and betrayal. There's plenty of both in the film. An illegal liquor supplier guns down a mobster who refuses to pay the price set for the watered down booze. Then he teams up with a big-talking mobster named Pete from New York who has a line on some big cash about to be shipped back to Italy. They acquire the cash, and the backstabbing begins. Pete vows to get revenge and the money, and abducts the other fellow's girl, even though he tells her he doubts her boyfriend will pay up. There's some threatened torture with razor blades, more determination to get revenge, and Pete guns down the gang with a standard shotgun he fires about 20 times without reloading. Which is not the sort of firearm inaccuracy that should surprise after years of watching action flicks, but it did stand out.

The mobsters strut around in fancy suits, having nice dinners, pretending to be friendly and civilized, but they'll calmly cut a corpse open in front of the widow to retrieve money, then throw another guy in the coffin with the body (for reasons that escaped me), and dump the whole thing in a coal mining pit. Why, considering there were any number of people at the funeral who saw them they left alone? No idea. Just for the hell of it, I guess. The upshot is, for guys who behave as if they're cock of the walk, they all end up dead.

It's really not a good movie. The poor dubbing doesn't help, but there's only a few characters that have enough dialogue for it to matter. I suppose the actors do well enough, though again, without their voices, it's hard to tell. The plot is fairly straightforward, but as I mentioned, there are certain actions that make no sense, except to highlight the mobsters have evil senses of humor. For a movie about revenge, I'd think you'd want the audience to root for the person out for revenge, or alternatively, to disapprove because of motivation, method, or it being the incorrect target. Here, I can't bring myself to want Pete to succeed, because I don't want him to benefit, but I'm not against him killing the liquor makers. I guess I could side with the girlfriend, though she's certainly an opportunist. Understandable, she learned from experts.