Too much of everything

Best movie of this year hands down!

Best movie ever!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

"The Don is Dead" is one of the worst films of the 1970s. There is no creative output of any kind and the whole is just one extended television film (no offense meant to T.V films). Any potential was gone after the opening 15 minutes. The meeting with the Mafia Godfathers was mildly diverting but that is about all. Anthony Quinn is actually well cast as one of the Mafia Dons, why couldn't a better screenplay have been written? The use of "Universal's" backlot is painfully obvious and robs the film of any kind of scale it might otherwise have had. There is some action but so what? Anyone can put together a scene involving a gunfight. Any comparison between "The Don is Dead" and "The Godfather" is purely coincidental and I'm not the biggest fan of the latter movie.

Sigh... I have never been able to sit through the 175 mins of The Godfather something interferes like bed or food or something a little more interesting on the other channel.The 115 min The Don Is Dead on the other hand is/was tailor made for my (gnat like?) attention span. Wish they'd show it some time! I saw this when I was 10 - 12 years old and thought it was great. Loadsa guys talking tough easy to keep track of plot loadsa machine gun action and stuff. Maybe even a good performance or two tho I can't recollect much about it.Wish I could remember better and do a proper synopsis. The mob war erupts when one guy finds out that one of the other family is sleeping with a woman, wife/daughter/girlfriend? After a violent conflict the survivors are gathered together to discuss a peace. I remember Angelo? pointing the informant out to the peacemaker type and saying "he was the only one who had anything to gain". He is then taken out and disposed of, Angelo becomes the new Don. Is this actually worth a spoiler?Is it a rip off? Kinda hard to say seeing as I can't remember one and haven't seen the other lolz - probably! You wanna tell me Godfather is way better I'm not arguing (internet arguments are for idiots anyhow).You wanna watch a mafia movie and only have 2 hours rather than 3 to spare then this is for you.

OK, so i saw maybe only half an hour of it in the middle, and after the first five minutes, most of that was like staring at a train wreck. a ripoff that took advantage of the godfather fever back in 70's and probably took 10 days to make. even the guy who played 'salazzo' in the G-F cashed in on this one. i didn't see any abe vigoda scenes thankfully. the acting was so bad i don't even think they took more than one take in any scene. the characters were wooden , the accents were laughable, the dialog hopeless, and i think the sets were borrowed from 'chico and the man'. movies like these are why people make fun of the 70's.

Like quite a few other of the 70's crime dramas that were not classics, but still of more grit and consequence than many of those churned out in the last two decades, this interestingly plotted mob film is a frustrating mix of a really good scene or two followed by a painfully predictable and badly presented one. Anthony Quinn is top billed but largely wasted as the boss whose romantic liaison triggers a war of wills and weapons with some headstrong younger members (led by Robert Forster, Frederic Forrest and Al Lettieri.) Some good action scenes follow, but, like the rest of the film, some of them are quite impressive while others fall flat. A mixed bag, not often seen but worth watching, with limited expectations.