TALES OF LOHR: "THE ALTO KNIGHTS"

A De Niro double play that treads on familiar turf

When it comes to movies, we all have our “things,” and for years, one of my “things” has been gangster movies. I will happily settle in to watch pretty much any picture focused on organized crime and its machinations, and count numerous mob movies among my all-time favorite films. There’s a reason this newsletter has spent as much time as it has looking at the work of Martin Scorsese: His decades-spanning 1990 black comedy crime epic Goodfellas is indeed my single favorite film. I saw it during its original theatrical release, at the tender age of twelve. Hard for me to believe, but yes, this was during my last year of elementary school. I have also savored Scorsese’s Mean Streets, The Irishman, the mob-adjacent Raging Bull, and the eminently re-watchable Casino; the last of these films was recently my answer to a Threads query about what film you would choose to watch over and over for 24 hours straight to win a million dollars. In the non-Scorsesean mob pantheon, I have of course loved The Godfather as much as many a film maven, and I likewise hold cherished places in my heart for such gems as the Coen brothers’ darkly witty Miller’s Crossing (released at almost exactly the same time as Goodfellas) and Howard Hawks’ paradigm-setting pre-Code dazzler Scarface (1932). But I carry just as brightly burning a torch for gangland pictures of a less exalted cultural position. I honestly believe Ridley Scott should have taken a Best Director Oscar for his jittery, period-saturated work on 2007’s woefully underrated American Gangster, and I was also way ahead of the curve on Jonathan Hensleigh’s fact-based, Cleveland-set Kill the Irishman, which has developed a justly deserved cult reputation since it was barely theatrically released in 2011. Hell, I even got a kick out of Ruben Fleischer’s critically derided shoot-‘em-up Gangster Squad (2013), a film that is very enjoyable, as long as you recognize that it has about as much to do with real L.A. mob history as The Flintstones does with authentic human prehistory.