The Americanized title forces its own connection with Friedkin action, but Francesco Rosi's Italian original is Remember Palermo, setting up the inescapable connections of heritage and cultural politics. The director comes to America once again after Lucky Luciano and his daughter Carolina starts the inquiry by interviewing James Belushi, a New York City councilman on his way to City Hall. "To Make a Difference" is the campaign slogan, with Belushi planning to legalize narcotics in the streets and in the process getting a lesson in the links between drugs, business and government. "Early Frank Capra boy-crusader" is how fiancée Mimi Rogers describes him, and indeed Capra's native Sicily is where the couple spends their honeymoon, as Rosi dollies into a close-up of jowly capo Joss Ackland before dissolving to aerial views of Palermo, their tourism turned subtly ominous. Philippe Noiret ushers them into the luxurious hotel, while used syringes litter the streets; the majestic palazzo visit occasions a brisk shout-out to Visconti until Rosi cuts to a motorcycle assassination outside, helicopters surveying from above. The sightseeing tour is also a journey in time for the hero, a recording of "O Solo Mio" guiding the tracking shots through the ancient architecture of his roots -- the character confuses Caruso with Capone, just as the director needed Pacino and instead got Belushi, but no matter, for memory is the main aspect separating the cultures ("We can't even remember the Prohibition," Belushi says of American amnesia, easily a Gore Vidal line in the Rosi-Tonino Guerra screenplay). Nevertheless, the center of the structure lies in the overlapping of New York and Palermo and of the corrupt systems supporting both, Crime, Inc. across the Atlantic. For Rosi, the blood-stained inclusiveness of "Cosa Nostra" ("Our Thing") is to be taken literally in the age of criminal-economical Monopoly. With Vittorio Gassman.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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