Movie Mahal

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Richard Fleischer’s The Don is Dead (1973) may have been one of those projects that was greenlit into existence on the back of the unprecedented box office success of The Godfather. Unlike The Godfather which weaves a narrative about the corporation through family, Fleischer’s instincts are somewhat different, shining a light on arguably the foot soldiers, the muscle so to speak.

Nonetheless, a repertoire of unmistakable gangster idioms still pours through including a power struggle, warring families and bouts of savage patriarchal violence. Many of Fleischer’s films even into the seventies still had a semi-studio feel to them, never quite being able to break free from his formative practices in what was the classical Hollywood era. The casting of Anthony Quinn is yet another a throwback to such an era but it is the contemporary modern faces of Robert Forster, Al Lettieri and Frederic Forrest that drag this into the realms of new Hollywood genre cinema.

Weirdly enough, it is Frederic Forrest as Tony Fargo, someone who uses his status as an outsider ‘looking in’ to stay one step ahead of the trigger-happy aficionados who are manipulated by a faux power struggle instigated by one of the Don’s closest advisers. Forrest was one of those actors who harboured an explosive trait; beneath the guarded blankness was a seething rage simmering away, and here it is alluded to throughout and perhaps to such an extent that it turns out he never loses his cool and remains as calculating as the mob bosses who attempt to tame him.