The point that was made in dossier dedicated to di Leo regarding the environmental choice of Il boss is still valid. The choice of drowning the city in a constant night, no light, no sea, no prickly pears, nothing that speaks of the postcard Sicilianity that was illustrated in the other films that spoke of the Mafia, even the high art films. The environmental folklore is not there. And even during the day, the sky that hangs over Palermo cathedral is ashen, livid, has the same hue as iron, it is a funeral drape or a shroud, better still, that the gods have spread over a dead city. When they announced it, it was called I bosses, in the plural, and showed a tentative cast very different from the one that went on to make the film: Romolo Valli was also in it. Di Leo had no recollection of this stage, but he said that he had thought of the film in this way right from the start: the story of a picciotto who has been raised by a mafia boss, has become loyal to him like a dog, but at a certain point is forced to obey superior orders that require him to kill his godfather. And he does it.
Lanzetta, Henry Silva, is a hitman who goes out on a limb and solves all the problems that come his way. Everyone has seen the opening scene of the film, when he breaks into the ‘porno cinema’ and massacres those present by firing grenades into the auditorium. ‘And only someone with syphilis on the brain like Lanzetta can go around firing a grenade launcher! Christ what a phenomenon!” commented an opponent. Palermo like Vietnam, we now resort to napalm. Henry Silva, who has a face that looks like a block of slate, is placed next to him, to complement and contrast, as di Leo liked to do and develop these kinds of juxtapositions, a girl who is the daughter of the godfather he killed and who is a wild amoral nymphomaniac: Antonia Santilli, a character who in another life we helped to make a cult among the initiates of the Italian encore. However, she was cast wisely, not only because of her Sicilian orthodox appearance, black hair, black eyes, but because dubbed in the right way she emerged from the film as one of those great female characters for whom Fernando’s cinema should also be remembered, as well as for everything else. Free, independent, self-possessed, avant-garde figures. Women masters of their own lives and sexuality, thrown into the middle of an ancient, immobile world, full of dust and blood.
The boss, nominally derived from an American novel by Peter McCurtin, has what is new and exciting above all this, the impossible junction between the machine gun without feelings who is Lanzetta and the libertine without morals who plays the beautiful Antonia. Di Leo has to be looked for where he is and in this case he is here, inside this impossible relationship, the noir and slaughterhouse version of a Last Tango in Paris that did not yet exist, which can only end in one way, and we know this from the beginning, but nonetheless we are sorry, or rather it puts a lump in our throat, to see the result of that volley fired inside the door that hits her, Antonia. On the ground, he caresses her head for three seconds, then gets up and leaves: that is the image for the film. Fernando wanted to create the conditions for something otherwise intimate and enclosed and precious – albeit fiercely so -, a protected bubble floating in the black and red-streaked air of the Palermo of battered corpses, grenades, betrayals, massacres, connivance. And which cannot, in the end, fail to dissolve in a burst. Indeed in a puff.
Davide Pulici
Source
Genre action crime thriller
Cast
Henry Silva: Nick Lanzetta
Richard Conte: Don Corrasco
Gianni Garko: Commissioner Torri
Antonia Santilli: Rina Daniello
Corrado Gaipa: lawyer Rizzo
Marino Masè: Pignataro
Pier Paolo Capponi: Cocchi
Howard Ross: Melende
Claudio Nicastro: Don Giuseppe Daniello
Soundtrack Luis Bacalov
