Joseph Valachi is an aging prisoner in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, who was imprisoned for smuggling heroin. The boss of his crime family, Vito Genovese, is imprisoned there as well. Genovese is certain that Valachi is an informant, and gives him the "kiss of death," whereupon Valachi kisses him back. Valachi has also been the focus of an attempted attack in the shower days before, which might have been caused by Genovese.
Valachi mistakenly kills a fellow prisoner, Joseph Saupp, who he wrongly thinks is a mob assassin. Told of the mistake by federal agent Ryan, Valachi becomes an informant, and is then transferred to Quantico to begin telling Ryan all that he knows. He tells his life story in flashbacks, from when he was a young criminal to a gangster associating with bosses such as Salvatore Maranzano. Maranzano initiates Valachi into the Mafia, and then assigns Gaetano Reina to be Valachi's boss. Valachi serves Reina well until the day that Reina is murdered in a drive-by shooting during the Castellammarese War, forcing Valachi to hide out at Reina's house, where he meets and falls in love with Reina's daughter, Maria. At the funeral for Reina, Maranzano consoles Reina's widow by saying "I cannot bring back the dead. I can only kill the living." After the funeral, Joe Masseria--Reina's murderer--is himself killed by 'Lucky' Luciano. Valachi then marries Maria after getting the blessing to do so by her mother.
Valachi's rise in the Mafia is hampered by his poor relations with his capo, Tony Bender. Bender orders the emasculation of Valachi's business partner, Dominick 'Gap' Petrilli, for having relations with Genovese's wife. Valachi shoots Gap to put him out of his misery.
The mayhem and murder continue to the present, with Valachi shown testifying before a Senate committee. He is upset with having to testify and attempts suicide, but in the end (according to information superimposed on the screen) outlives Genovese, who dies in prison.
Producer Dino de Laurentiis acquired rights to the book in 1969.[2] He had to convince Charles Bronson to take the role of Joe Valachi. He reportedly turned it down at least twice before accepting it when he found out the character got to age from his late teens to early 60s.[4] Bronson was also given a three-film contract that guaranteed him $1 million per picture plus a percentage of the gross.[5]
The film was shot in New York City and at De Laurentiis' studios in Rome.[1] Production began on March 20, 1972.[1]
The film shows a 1930s night street scene, 27 minutes into the film, in which numerous 1960s model cars are parked and drive by. In another scene depicted as occurring in the early 1930s, Valachi, eluding police pursuit, drives a car into the East River just north of the Brooklyn Bridge, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are clearly visible against the dawn sky; the Towers were only recently completed when the film was released in 1972.
Paramount, the film's original distributor, had planned to release the film in February 1973, but the premiere date was moved up to capitalize on the popularity of the similarly-themed film The Godfather.[5] Bronson's opinion of Francis Ford Coppola's gangster epic, although he admired Marlon Brando's performance, was "The Godfather? that was the shittiest movie I've ever seen in my entire life."[6] On The Dick Cavett Show however, he called The Godfather a good picture.[7]
The film departed from the true story of Joseph Valachi, as recounted in the Peter Maas book, in a number of ways. Though using real names and depicting real events, the film also contained numerous events that were fictionalized. Among them was the castration scene (the mobster in question was ordered killed, not castrated).[5]
Reception
Box office
The Valachi Papers grossed about $17 million domestically,[3] generating theatrical rentals of $9.3 million.[8]
Critical response
Reviews were mostly negative, as many critics inevitably compared the film unfavorably to The Godfather.[5]Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote, "Often ludicrous and often just dull, Terence Young's 'The Valachi Papers' has the look of a movie project that ran short of ideas before it was finished, and ran out of class almost before it was begun."[9] A positive review in Variety called the film "a hard-hitting, violence-ridden documented melodrama of the underworld" that "carries a fine sweep that immediately projects it as an important crime picture."[10]Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "an ambitious but not inspired movie about the mob."[11]Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded two stars out of four and wrote, "Generally, 'The Valachi Papers' tries to cover too many years, and thus provides paper-thin treatment of each event. As a result, the film implies power and violence, but rarely shows it. The visual power of 'The Godfather' has been replaced with meaningless names and dates."[12]Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times dismissed the film as "two hours of relentless tedium, interrupted from time to time by savage violence."[13] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post declared the film "a stiff. It may be possible to make a duller gangster melodrama, but I would hate to sit through the attempt ... It takes considerable ineptitude to produce a gangster movie this enervating."[14] John Raisbeck wrote in The Monthly Film Bulletin, "Inviting inevitable comparisons with The Godfather, Terence Young's film proves markedly, even surprisingly, inferior to Coppola's on every level. Young and his screenwriter Stephen Geller, though faithful in fact to Peter Maas' original document, have simply plodded through a catalogue of events, content to name names but failing to treat the material with any consistency of form or theme."[15]
Other media
In popular culture
In the October 27, 1973, Season 2, Episode 7 of The Bob Newhart Show, entitled "Old Man Rivers," Bob, his wife, Emily, Bob's receptionist and friend Carol, and her date go to see a film entitled Big Al, which is being promoted with the tagline, "If you liked The Godfather and The Valachi Papers," you'll love Big Al."
In Season 1, Episode 21 of the 1970s television sitcom Maude, titled "The Perfect Couple", Walter tells Maude that he loves her more today than he did yesterday. Maude's response is, "Oh, darling. Oh, Walter. You're so sweet and poetic. If Shakespeare had known you, he never would have written Romeo and Juliet. He would have written The Valachi Papers!"
In Season 5, Episode 11 of the HBO series The Sopranos, titled "The Test Dream", Tony Soprano holds a copy of the novel the movie is based upon during a complicated dream sequence. He is standing at a urinal next to a corrupt police officer who questions Tony's resolve in taking action. Tony holds up a copy of the book and replies, "I've done my homework."
