Peter Boyle played varied roles, from the father on Everybody Loves Raymond to the monster in Young Frankenstein, but one of his earliest roles was as a super-aggressive mobster in Crazy Joe (1975). From his early years as part of a hit man squad to his final reach for power and position, Peter’s Joe knows nothing but straight-ahead ambition. Sometimes his mouth does his thinking for him as Joe’s resentment and anger boil over in front of his boss, and it all comes in like a high, hard fastball from Peter. He disregards the traditions and rules of the mob, he attempts to rub out his ailing boss, and finally he pushes his associates over the edge. He’s betrayed to the police.
In the can, his brother brings him various classics: Camus, Tolstoy, and others unmentioned, and as the years pass, he reads and learns. When the race riots come to his prison (the movie appears to be set in the 1950s), he is instrumental in negotiating modifications to prison protocols in return for peace. So is he a good man?
No!
Limitless ambition uses all the tools available, regardless of their imputed moral qualities, and from the negotiations he gains the friendship of the leader of the race riots, and thus access to his resources when they are free from jail. Joe is immediate and ruthless in his use of them, cutting a swath through the mobster families, and achieving a temporary position in the city, before, in perhaps the weakest scene in the movie, he’s rubbed out as he inexplicably celebrates his birthday in another mob family’s territory.
And yet, the inexplicability points to the film’s devotion to realism; not the overwrought hyper-realism of today, but the realism where no one bursts into song, or a happy ending is a requirement. Mobsters with both good and bad qualities live, execute their trade, and sometimes die. The traditional burial alive in concrete constitutes one scene, but it’s not the horrific, run for the bathrooms sort of scene, but a cold depiction of what the mob families could do. This may not be Casino, but for the era, it’s plenty horrid. And the inexplicability of having our lead die where any sane man wouldn’t have gone?
Crazy Joe is based on a real person, Crazy Joe Gallo. A diagnosed schizophrenic, it’s easy to think he might have thought himself safe, to have made one more mental error, and finally paid the price for it, and the film is prepared to go there, to prefer realism over the charm of a story. In fact, Joe Gallo did die in a restaurant in another mob’s territory.
All that said, the movie could have been better. Pacing is flat. Peter and the script do not allow us to see his inner dialog to any great degree, with the exception of a heroic effort to save children from a burning building; it’s as if what you see is what Joe was, through and through. It’s difficult to empathize with hoodlums, thieves, murderers, and worse, and little can be done for it, so to some extent this is, in a certain sense, a documentary for those folks who don’t know about the dark underside of everyday history. Crazy Joe existed, and while the movie brings him to life, it’s worth reading the link, above; he was a fascinating character, who moved from the bottom of the ladder to socializing with high society after a movie (not this one) was made based on himself. But read it after viewing the movie, as it’s quite interesting to see just how many elements and events in his life actually made it into the movie, albeit in slightly altered form, including an entire Italian-American Civil Rights League that I’d never heard of.
But it does take some persistence to make it to the end.
