The Sicilian Clan

The Sicilian ClanThe Sicilian Clan is a super-cool crime film from 1969, which stars three of the biggest names in French cinema – Alain Delon, Lino Ventura and Jean Gabin – is directed by a master of the genre (Henri Verneuil), based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton (who also wrote Rififi and Bob le flambeur) and boasts a screenplay Jose Giovanni, who would later make a number of highly acclaimed crime films in his own right. With that level of talent behind it, it’s hardly surprising that it’s a goodie.

When career criminal Roger Sartet (Delon) is arrested for armed robbery and murder, he turns to some associates of his, a Sicilian family called the Manalese’s, to help him escape. This they do, in exchange for a considerable amount of money and a book of valuable stamps that he’s previously stolen. He also has a proposition for them: while he was in jail, he shared a cell with a talkative electronics expert who had set up the security system for a valuable display of jewelry in an Roman museum, and he now knows exactly how to disable it. Only trouble is, it’s also fitted out with a fancy new device that’s able to detect any kind of movement, which means that even a ticking watch is liable to trigger the alarms.

Depite this, and his distrust of the trigger-happy Sartet, Vittorio (Jean Gabin), the head of the Manalese’s, decides to run with the plan, mainly because he wants to do one final job before retiring. He shifts the plan, so that they now plan to snatch the jewels while they’re being transported to a museum in New York, and everything seems thoroughly hunky-dory. Unfortunately, however, things are never that easy: Sartet is soon having an illicit affair with Manalese’s daughter-in-law, one of the gang turns out to be a heavy drinker, their forger is arrested and a persistent cop, Inspector Le Goff (Lino Ventura), is on their trail.

This is a stylish, compulsive affair that’s extremely easy on the eyes and highly entertaining. It could possibly be accused of superficiliaty – it certainly has less existential angst that the films of Melville, for instance – but it makes up for it by upping the pace and throwing in some excellent action set-pieces, so it actually feels more like an Italian crime film than French (it reminded me a lot of Giuliano Montaldo’s Machine Gun McCain). This impression is furthered by the excellent Ennio Morricone soundtrack, which includes all the twanging jews harps that you’d normally expect from his compositions for spaghetti westerns.

And, in fact, The Sicilian Clan also owes a considerable debt to Morricone’s regular collaborator, Sergio Leone. The plot has a lot of similarities to For a Few Dollars More (in which a gangster finds out how to crack open a safe while in a cell with the person who installed it) and even some of the set pieces are notably spaghetti-esque in feel (such as the climax, in which Gabin, Delon and Irina Demick face off in quarry (the crime film equivalent of an arena or graveyard)).

It certainly isn’t perfect, there are some problems with the screenplay: the central heist itself is actually rather confused and the Manalese’s, with the exception of Vittorio, are almost totally underdeveloped, hardly having a word of dialogue between them (both of these could have been intentional). Similarly, the affair between Delon and Demick feels rather perfunctory, mainly because both of them are frankly rather unappealing characters, and Lino Ventura’s cop is left on the sidelines for large stretches of the running time.

Also in the cast are a couple of other performers who made an improtant contribution to the crime film genre. Marc Porel – who plays one of the Maranese sons – went on to become a poliziotteschi star in his own right, appearing in films such as Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man and Blazing Flowers. Amedeo Nazzari, who steals the show, rather, as a dapper don, had been the biggest star of Italian cinema in the late 40s and 50s, the King of the Melodrama, a genre which often featured aspects that would later become incorporated into later crime films, albeit in a very different way. Meanwhile there are also tiny roles for a couple of interesting actresses – Alice Arno, who would later become a Jesus Franco regular, plays a girl at a pornographic shoot, and Sabine Sun, who appeared in several crime and spy films, plays a prostitute. Sydney Chaplin, who also had a brief career in Cinecitta at the time, also has a smallish rile as the drunken pilot (both he and Sun appeared in Sartana the previous year)

About Matt Blake 890 Articles
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

*