Mobsters (1991) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Mobsters (1991) is to Goodfellas (1990)

as

The Don is Dead (1973) is to The Godfather (1972)

Both Mobsters and The Don is Dead came out a year after their better-known counterparts, presumably hoping to capitalize on the then-current interest in wiseguys. Both of them starred Zorba the Crook as a Mafia Don. Apparently, Zorba is the official grade-B knock-off movie Don.

Mobsters follows the friendship of four real-life gangsters who grew up together: Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Ben "Bugsy" Siegel. Their unlikely alliance (two were Italian, two Jewish) was based on true friendship, mutual trust, and mutual benefit. None of them ever tried to take more than a fair share. None of them ever betrayed any of the others. At least that's the way it went down in the film.

Now that I think about it, I probably should have gone in another direction with this introduction. I think this movie probably owes as much or more to Young Guns than it does to Goodfellas. Young Guns (1988) and Young Guns II (1990) were attempts to tailor western scripts to feature a bunch of hot, rising, good-looking young actors thrown together in an ensemble cast. Young Guns was the movie equivalent of a boy band. I suppose Mobsters was trying to do the same thing with a gangster script. Maybe it could have succeeded if it could have come up with young actors who were more in demand, but three of the gangsters were played by the usual B-list actors.

The film did manage to latch on to the then-rising star of Christian Slater, who played Luciano, the first among equals in the criminal band. Slater delivered an intriguing performance, portraying Luciano as a mostly regular and fairly laid-back guy who stayed away from major vices, was always loyal to his friends, kept his word, and had a sense of humor. I don't know how that corresponds to reality, but the character in the movie was essentially likeable, a guy who relied on violence only as a last resort, in defense of himself and his friends. Filtered through Slater, he was a regular Joe, with just a slight hint of eccentricity, the latter mostly supplied by Slater's personal mannerisms and not by the words in the script.

Irrespective of the historical accuracy, the film is quite static and its technique is old-fashioned. In a typical scene transition, we might see anonymous guys firing tommy guns at the camera while newspaper headlines waft past the camera in a time-passage montage. At least three times, the film fades completely to black, then  starts up abruptly in a new scene, as if leaving a space to insert a commercial.

This film doesn't look bad at all. It fact it looks so damned good that I probably shouldn't have suggested in the Anthony Quinn remarks that this was a grade-B effort, because the cinematography alone lifted it above that level. D.P. Lajos Koltai is another in the seemingly endless list of brilliant cinematographers produced in Hungary who later developed reputations in American and international productions. His recent successes include some works of true genius, like Malena and Sunshine. He got an Oscar nomination for Malena, and could easily have gotten another one for Sunshine without raising any eyebrows. And his work on The Legend of 1900 is as good as in either of those two films.

Koltai created the interiors in Mobsters using the same general russet/gold/brown interior palette as The Godfather.

One scene seemed strange to me. Some of the gangsters had a meeting on Staten Island, a beautifully filmed outdoor affair with mountains in the background. That surprised me. I've never been to S.I., except to ride the ferry there and back, so I may have been confused out of ignorance, but that scene sure confused me when I was watching the film. I thought that Slater had been kidnapped and forced to meet with the old Don somewhere else, like Western Pennsylvania, but that didn't turn out to be the case. I guess I need to go to NYC and climb Todt Hill to see if it can really pass as a movie mountain.