Doppelgänger: Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights centers on the complicated relationship of two legendary Mafiosi, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were both recruited to work for bootlegger Giuseppe Masseria in the 1920s alongside Lucky Luciano. After the murders of Masseria and his successor, Salvatore Maranzano, Genovese became Luciano’s second in command with Costello, who claimed to have abjured violence at the end of the First World War and stopped carrying a gun, as his consigliere. Genovese took over in 1936 when Luciano went to prison and expanded the operations of the organization Luciano had reconfigured as the Commission into narcotics. But he had to flee the U.S. to avoid a murder charge and took sanctuary in Italy. (Both men had been born there: Costello in Naples, Genovese in Calabria.) Costello took over, trading drugs for gambling. When Genovese returned to the States after the war – neatly bypassing conviction for that old killing when two key witnesses against him turned up dead – he didn’t take well to being his former colleague’s underboss. All of this narrative is background, much of it unstated or understated, to Levinson’s picture, which takes place in 1957, the year Costello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating the Mafia, and the year Genovese engineered the assassination of the former head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia, and attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate Costello.

True-life mob stories often seem to cross the line into the fantastic, like Al Capone’s landing in prison not for the men he killed but for tax evasion. But the tale of these two aging Italian gangsters, which has been written for the screen by Nicholas Pileggi, is so nutty that you can’t believe it’s taken so long for someone to make it the focus of a movie. Others have tried, and of course both men have made appearances in a variety of gangster pictures, and Mario Puzo drew from both in his portrayal of Don Corleone in The Godfather. The major set pieces of The Alto Knights – the title is an allusion to a social club frequented by mobsters during Prohibition – are so wild that that one can only imagine that Pileggi and Levinson must have had the time of their lives dramatizing them. It sure feels that way: they collaborate superbly. The centerpiece is the failed hit on Costello – Genovese’s hit man Vincent Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis, in a marvelous comic turn) shoots him in the head but miraculously he survives. The finale, where Costello brings about the end of the golden age of the Mafia, is an unpredictable and hilarious farce.

There’s a trick at the heart of The Alto Knights: both Costello and Genovese are played by Robert De Niro. But it’s no gimmick. De Niro has acquired a reputation for phoning in his performances. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to pick up the phone, as in the recent limited series Zero Day, where he plays a former U.S. president whose successor persuades him to head a commission to uncover the perpetrators of a lethal one-minute shutdown of every computer in the country. De Niro doesn’t act at all: he barely moves a facial muscle and offers no clue to what his character is thinking. But in The Alto Knights he delivers a tour de force double-barreled piece of acting. De Niro has consistently come to life under Levinson’s direction: in Wag the Dog, What Just Happened and especially The Wizard of Lies, where he played Bernie Madoff. (Levinson also has a tendency to bring the best out in Al Pacino.)

As Costello, whom the film portrays as sage and forward-thinking, with a long fuse, De Niro returns to the contemplative man of power type he’s played time and again through his long career, usually in what I think of as his deep-six approach: he doesn’t let us in so we don’t know what makes these characters tick. And increasingly he hasn’t bothered to show us that they’re ticking at all (The Irishman). But he animates the part of Costello, using the fabled specificity and authenticity he developed as a young actor not to mask the character’s interior workings but to signal them. He also draws on wit and humor. Frank Costello has a genius for survival – his uncanny recovery from a bullet to the head operates as a symbol for a quietly ferocious life force – and a subtle slyness. The movie dramatizes Frank’s transition out of mob activities: to prevent a second assassination attempt he refuses to identify Gigante, and he uses the moment to bow out of gangland. But he still manages to get the last laugh. (I won’t spoil the fun for my readers by elaborating.) His most compelling scene, I think, is the one where he volunteers to appear before the Senate committee, refuses to plead the Fifth as each of his confrères, who were compelled to testify, has done, yet he never answers the questions his interrogator, Estes Kefauver, puts to him. (Kefauver is played by Wallace Langham under a convincing make-up job that makes him almost unrecognizable.) Levinson keeps cross-cutting from this scene, which carries its own unusual kind of suspense, with one in which Vito watches the hearings on TV with mounting fury, jeering at Frank: the call-and-response nature of the sequence allows the filmmaker to keep shifting tones while the two De Niros combine not just to contrast the two men but also to fill out the character of the one who’s under fire before the committee.

As Vito, De Niro uses a thinner, higher voice; he’s very funny but he never reduces the man to a caricature. Genovese is a loose cannon, like Johnny Boy, the character De Niro played for Scorsese in Mean Streets more than half a century ago but without Johnny’s sociopathic playfulness. It’s the showier role; Costello is the deeper one. Dramatically the movie needs them both in equal measure. I know I’m an outlier here, but frankly I’ve always had a hard time with Pileggi’s script, co-written with Martin Scorsese, for Goodfellas. (I don’t care much for any of Scorsese’s gangster pictures.) The source material, his book Wiseguy, has a great ironic punchline: its mobster anti-hero, Henry Hill, manages to stay alive and out of prison while all of his cohort suffer either a violent death or a long sentence. But a movie can’t move forward dramatically unless the main character changes; that’s the definition of a protagonist. The character in Goodfellas who undergoes a change isn’t Hill (Ray Liotta) but his wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco); if it were her story Scorsese and Pileggi were telling, it would be dramatic. I’ve always had the sense that the visual pyrotechnics Scorsese applies to the movie, enjoyable and impressive as they are, are embellishment meant to cover for this structural flaw – to make it seem as if there’s something going on. Pileggi must have been drawn to The Alto Knights at least partly by the similar irony at the end of the story, but this time he solves the dramatic problem by using Frank and Vito as dual protagonists who function together as a Jekyll-and-Hyde alter-ego combination. We see it early on, when the two men meet over coffee so that Costello can try to tamp down Genovese’s excesses. The movie employs the two men in tandem to move the story forward.

Debra Messing and Robert De Niro. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Vito has no filter, he has a hard time staying still, and he can’t stop yelling, just as he can’t stop looking for trouble. He marries Anna (Kathrine Narducci, who played Charmaine Bucco on The Sopranos), a local club owner, but their union is volatile because she’s as explosive as he is, and inevitably it falls apart. When they’re in court neither of them can shut up, so the divorce proceedings are an extended marital squabble that even the judge can’t squash. (Her beef is that he helped himself to her club’s earnings.) Narducci fills out this classic hard-boiled dame part with a sashaying sensuality, and her comic timing is inspired. Their courtroom set-to is outrageous, and it’s not the only sequence in The Alto Knights that manages to crack you up while your jaw is hitting the floor, like some of the courtroom hijinks in Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor. Narducci’s opposite number is Frank’s Jewish wife Bobbie, whom Debra Messing plays (beautifully) with a maternal warmth and a lush elegance.

Levinson gets fine work out of the whole large cast, including another Sopranos alumnus, Michael Rispoli, as Albert Anastasia. This director has been around for more than four decades and he made Bugsy, the best American gangster movie after The Godfather Part II, yet he’s rarely celebrated for his command of style and tone and his shepherding of extraordinarily complicated big scenes so that they feel tossed off. Young filmmakers should be paying closer attention.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.