Like a Warners 30s Gangster Film. Giuliano Gemma is former car thief now gone straight. He’s out of jail, running a street stall and doing well for his family, when a place he delivers coffee to becomes the site of a mafia hit. A coffee cup carelessly left there implicates him and puts him on a mafia hit list. The film is all about how society dictates what a man should be and the impossibility of living up to it. The hero loses everything, is forced on his knees to kiss the mafia don’s ring in public, all so he could get back what had been robbed from him but with the addition of now being at the Mafia’s beck and call. But the hitman hired to off him (Michele Placido) is in no better position: the sole breadwinner of a rural family taking lives because he has no other way of maintaining his own.  How to get out of this one? Will he get out this one? An exciting male melodrama, visually inventive with long takes, hand-held camera, and film noir lighting, shot on the streets of Palermo, where a man constantly tries to do right by his family even as the society that requires that from him prevents him from doing so. Interesting too in that the mafia is here seeing exploiting poor people, pitting them against each other, extracting everything possible from the already poor and desperate. A film to see.

Jose Arroyo