Mobsters

This youth movie sees Slater leading a group of apprentice gangsters to the top of the bloody heap: Young Guns meets The Untouchables with a vengeance. But it has all the morals of the average clam: Slater plays the young Charlie 'Lucky' Luciano who, along with charming pals like Grieco's Bugsy Siegel and Dempsey's bookish Meyer Lansky, was a far more loathsome mobster than the Moustache Petes from the Old Country who came before him and his pals. In order to show these charmers in an attractive light as they scheme and plot and fight, Karbelnikoff makes sure that their wrinkly rivals, Don Masseria (Quinn) and Don Faranzano (Gambon) are depicted as, respectively, sadistic and pig-like, racist and rapacious. This is ageism with knobs on. A noisy, silly, rather immature film. (The US versions runs at 104 minutes.) SGr.