Strong and Moving!

So much average

Excellent but underrated film

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

I like this movie because it takes us back in time and we get to see how the start-up was for people who came to America and why. Everyone in this movie works hard, dreams, sacrifices and wants the best for their children, themselves and their neighbors, family and friends. However, the wolves move-in and instead of everyone enjoying the fruits of their labor, they now shift from living care free into a predator prey environment. The one trying to make a go is vulnerable and the ones trying to make a quick, dishonest buck go to work ala the black hand! Pay attention to the dress, streets, shops, sights and sounds and how there was so much opportunity if one wanted to work. Note how many people share a room and how rooms where above the stores back then. In the movie, one guy points out to another that speaking English and Italian is all the edge you need to make it rich in this country at that time. There is another similar film with Ernest Borgnine call Pay or Die that covers the same subject matter and is entertaining as well. Good movie to eat and have a tasty drink plus a snack. Gene Kelly who speaks a decent Italian in the film at least and J. Carol Naish too. Enjoy this Buono Cinema

After his father is murdered for standing up to the mob Johnny Columbo swears to avenge his death. Well entrenched in Little Italy the Mafia uses violence and intimidation to keep the community in its grip and Columbo finds it difficult at first to get assistance in breaking the code of silence that solidify's their grip. When he enlists the help of detective Louis Lorelli things begin to happen and the mob responds harshly.Gene Kelly in an off type role as Johnny is a slight stretch (it begs for Richard Conti) but convincing enough. It is J. Carroll Naish as intrepid detective Lorelli though that runs away with the film. It's nice to see J. center stage and noble given his career as a venal and craven weakling in many of his films hanging on the edge of scenes, ready to pounce on someone's misfortune.Workman like director Richard Thorpe more than once allows his scenes to drag in spots but cinematographer Paul Vogels excellent camera work fills the suspense lapses with excellently lit exteriors and some nice subtle tracking work. There are Lang like moments as well with Thorpe eschewing suspense music in favor of silence and ambient noise to heighten scenes but his poor pacing and moments of incredulity prevent the film from reaching full potential. There is certainly more ugly truth to be found in the film Black Hand that deals with the same topic of the Mafia as the more sophisticated violently romantic Godfather films. Pale in comparison to the production values, vaunted cast and and directing styles of the saga it still delivers moments that rival.

**SPOILERS** Not to be confused with the ultra-nationalistic and deadly Serbian Black Hand of the same period, the early 1900's, the "Mano Nera", or "Black Hand" in Italian. The hoods operated in the heavily Italian immigrant neighborhoods in New York City were made up from of gang of ruthless thugs from the old country who used intimidation kidnapping and murder to extort the local population by paying them protection money.Roberto Columbo,Peter Brocco, had just about had it from the shake-downs he was subjected to and goes, secretly, to see a local police official to give evidence against the Black Hand. Unknown to Roberto the police, or who he thought are the police, are in together with the Black Hand and instead of being protected by them he ends up dead with a stiletto in his back. Eight years later Roberto's son Johnny, Gene Kelly,now 22 is back from Italy, after he and his mother fled for their lives to escape the Black Hand,seeking revenge for his fathers murder. Early organized crime Hollywood movie that actually uses the word "Mafia" in it long before it became commonplace in the American public's vocabulary. In fact the far more famous and highly acclaimed Academy Award winning movie "The Godfather", which was released some 22 years later in 1972, doesn't mention the word even once. Falling in love with his childhood sweetheart Isbellla Gomboli, Teresa Celli, Johnny realizes that he'll put her and her young eight year old brother Rudi, Jimmy Ragano, lives in jeopardy by trying to use violence against the shake-down artists and kidnappers of the Black Hand. With the help of an old family friend police inspector Louis Lorelli, J. Carrol Naish, Johnny opts to use the criminal Justice system to put the thugs behind bars. Getting nowhere with no one willing to testify against them and even getting worked over by the Black Hand for trying to put them out of business, and behind bars, Johnny comes up with a legal technicality that's air tight. An active criminal record, or rap sheet, of the gang members dating back to their native Italy. The Italian rap sheet would have the hoods deported back home as undesirable aliens by lying about their past convictions! It would b enough to put the Black Hand members, who all have Italian criminal records, on a boat back to Italy and a long stretch in an Italian prison. Taking a long vacation from the New York Police Department Inspector Lorelli goes to Italy to amass information on the New York based Black Hand members and mail it back, to a secret post office box, to Johhny who's now a lawyer for the NYC Justice Department but he's murdered by local mobsters. Before he was killed Lorelli did put the important envelope in a mailbox. It's now up to Johnny to get the information that the late Inspector Lorelli sent him to the courts but the Black Hand struck first by kidnapping Isbella's young brother Rudi and holding him hostage until Johnny reveals where the post office box is and gives them the key to open it. Johnny now has to choose between Rudi's life and the end of the dreaded Black Hand who murdered his father. Slam bang final with Johnny Columbo blasting his way out of the Black Hand hideout, that he was held prisoner in, and then having it out with the Black Hand's Mr. Big himself Caesar Xavier Serpi, Marc Lawrence, as he tries to keep Serpi from destroying Inspt. Lorelli's Italian police criminal records on him and his fellow hoods. "Black Hand" is much better then most crime movies made at that time that has to do with criminal organizations like the Mafia by not having the usual formalized Hollywood plot-line. The film doesn't have everything and everyone in it being either all good or all bad but a little, or a lot, bit of both.

It doesn't make a good impression. It's in black and white, involves Gene Kelly in a strictly dramatic role, has low production values, and is rarely shown and never publicized. All the trappings of a B feature when movie theaters still showed double bills. Yet it's interesting, for three main reasons. One is that the story itself simply isn't too bad. Unlike many of the Godfather-type epics, Italian immigrant life isn't romanticized. The settings are grungy. Families don't live in secluded splendor. If the plot isn't nearly as nuanced as more modern stories on the subject, neither does it falsify the nature of criminal groups. There are clearly good guys here, and clearly bad guys, and a couple of guys squeezed in the middle.Two questions are raised that have little to do with the Black Hand. Few of the principal actors are Italian. Does it matter? Kelly, curly haired and wearing dark make up, looks the part, although he sounds like a Mid-Westerner rather than an Italian immigrant to New York. (He pronounces his Italian correctly, though.) J. Carrol Naish, an Irishman from New York, is also made to look swarthy and gives what is for him a modulated performance. The man specialized in ethnic universality. He played Arabs, Asiatic Indians, lots of Italians, and God know what else, except an Irishman. Like Lawrence Olivier, he had only one accent that seemed to fit all of his parts. Some years ago, Vanessa Redgrave, a virulent pro-Palestinian, played a Jewish violinist in a pretty decent TV movie -- "Playing for Time," I think was the title -- about survival in Theresenstadt. Whew! What a brouhaha! Imagine an anti-Zionist playing a Jew in a concentration camp! Before that, Freddie Prinz came in for a blistering because he played a Mexicano in "Chico and the Man," a TV series, and Prinz was half Hungarian and half Puerto Rican. Again, it seems to matter, but should it? Doesn't the essence of acting involve playing the part of someone else? Unless the portrayal is so far off the mark that it works only as parody, why should it matter to us? Reduced to the absurd, the argument would have us never playing anyone other than ourselves. The same logic would have us object to every performance on screen or stage, because the actors are pretending to be something that -- genetically and culturally -- they are not. The second question, and the third thing about the movie that I found impressive, had to do with the sets. The production is studio bound. Large scale location shooting was only beginning in 1949. The sets are clearly artificial. But, although not as convincing as on-location shooting, the production is at least as suggestive, seeming a bit stylized and stylized in the right direction. Turn-of-the-century New York City poverty has rarely been so well captured. The head of the local Black Hand is arrested while taking a bath. He is in his cellar. (It's a definite "cellar," not a "basement"!) There is a single naked overhead light. The cellar walls seem made of large bricks hastily thrown together. The man is naked in a bathtub that has no running water. (He undoubtedly filled it with water from kettles warmed on the top of a coal burning range in the upstairs kitchen.) A goat stands placidly next to the tub, ignoring the intrusion of the cops. Now THAT is production design. Studio sets can be taken even further and still be effective. A scene in "Mystery of the Wax Museum" or "Horrors of same" has Phyllis Kirk being chased through turn-of-the-century New York streets by a deformed and murderous madman. The streets through which she runs and he shuffles bear the same resemblance to real streets that a schematic diagram does to the inside of a TV set. The apartment fronts look made of thin plywood. The windows -- all equally lighted with bland yellow -- are of identical size and all have their shades drawn, like glowing but blank and impenetrable eyes, suggesting there is no succor for the heroine behind any of them, only thin buttresses propping up the false fronts and a couple of lights strung by the grip. And of course, there are no pedestrians, there is no garbage in the gutters or the streets, let alone garbage cans, no vehicles, no nothing except those surrealistically empty streets. "The Black Hand" doesn't go this far, but is an effective suspension of realism and stylization. The scenes in "Naples" are almost overboard. The night-time streets of Italy are well enough done but Naish eats in a Neapolitan restaurant with a view overlooking a patently false bay. It's the kind of "staged authenticity" that the sociologist Dean MacCannell described. All that was needed, besides that blow up, would be a couple of fish nets and phony salamis and provolones hanging from the walls. There are three kinds of phoniness here: (1) the plot that pits good against evil; (2) the substitution of non-Italian actors for Italian characters; and (3) the use of studio sound stages as substitutes for real locations. None of it matters. It's not a bad flick. Not very good -- no one could argue that -- but simply not bad. I enjoyed it anyway. I mean, in a way, its phoniness is emblematic of our own realities. Are you really everything you claim to be?