I hate the 1970s, and anybody sane must. This is a movie with a stuff that I'm trying to imagine who can be attracted by?!
The direction is TV-ish, with the ugliest meanings of the term. In other words, there is no creativeness or craftsmanship. It's tragic that this is directed by (Richard Fleischer); the same man who made, once upon a time, The Vikings (1958), and The Boston Strangler (1968). Now here's a new characteristic for the 1970s, it makes even the good directors do BAD!
Forget about the music, originally I thought there was none, asking myself was it the 1970s realism?!! But after a while, I discovered that (Jerry Goldsmith) himself composed the music to it. Ok, no need to repeat the characteristic that I just said earlier!
The sets are poor. The drama is a joke; being just a dumb war over a girl (Troy? Even if, this is the weakest of them all!). It goes on boringly, because it's nothing but a meaningless thriller, with pure killings and no thrill. The script itself is arithmetical; kill so-and-so, then a response by killing else so-and-so yet from the other side, then kill another so-and-so, to have another so-and-so killed, and so on with the killer killed so-and-sos! The characters are trivially written; compared to them, Donald Duck got interesting psychological dimensions!
Everyone was moving like dummies, and talking like robots. (Robert Forster) looks handsome with cool jackets; that's all the good things that I can tell about him here. After notable and so energetic career that includes 3 and 4 films a year, except for his role in (The Marseille Contract), (Anthony Quinn) would be out of job for the next 3 years. Hence, (The Don Is Dead) is the only movie he did in 1973. It says a lot about how he was having such a big problem working in real movies during the 1970s. No doubt it's one of his worst, if not The Worst!
The effect of (The Godfather) is more than perceptible (2 mob generations, a conflict over power, assassinations' sequences...). However, it's part of the exploitation's wave. Well, the lousy exploitation's wave to be precise. And with having catchy names, like (Quinn), (Goldsmith) and (Fleischer), then it is disappointing, deepening the deplorable irony between Hollywood's golden age, and its tin one!
Save the chilly explosion at the garage, nothing is distinguished, or rather watchable. From a long experience of miserable devoted viewer, take it from me: in the 1970s, all what it took to make a gangster movie was enough guns, fires, blood, added to zero direction, terrible actors, and female nudity. The thing is; after 40 years they still do the same, but as straight-to-video; namely, they became more truthful and explicit.
According to the TV quality, the Italian characters, the set in which Forster's character Frank was hiding; this is not a movie, this is Kojack: The Lost Episode, and it's a low-grade one too. Otherwise, it's long shoddy massacre of a movie. I give it just 2 stars; one for (Quinn)'s suits, and the other is for (Forster)'s suits!
Finally, my title is just a way to express some anger, since the real idiot wasn't the don; it's ME for wasting nearly 2 hours of my life watching him. Simply, the don is dead, so this movie too!
The direction is TV-ish, with the ugliest meanings of the term. In other words, there is no creativeness or craftsmanship. It's tragic that this is directed by (Richard Fleischer); the same man who made, once upon a time, The Vikings (1958), and The Boston Strangler (1968). Now here's a new characteristic for the 1970s, it makes even the good directors do BAD!
Forget about the music, originally I thought there was none, asking myself was it the 1970s realism?!! But after a while, I discovered that (Jerry Goldsmith) himself composed the music to it. Ok, no need to repeat the characteristic that I just said earlier!
The sets are poor. The drama is a joke; being just a dumb war over a girl (Troy? Even if, this is the weakest of them all!). It goes on boringly, because it's nothing but a meaningless thriller, with pure killings and no thrill. The script itself is arithmetical; kill so-and-so, then a response by killing else so-and-so yet from the other side, then kill another so-and-so, to have another so-and-so killed, and so on with the killer killed so-and-sos! The characters are trivially written; compared to them, Donald Duck got interesting psychological dimensions!
Everyone was moving like dummies, and talking like robots. (Robert Forster) looks handsome with cool jackets; that's all the good things that I can tell about him here. After notable and so energetic career that includes 3 and 4 films a year, except for his role in (The Marseille Contract), (Anthony Quinn) would be out of job for the next 3 years. Hence, (The Don Is Dead) is the only movie he did in 1973. It says a lot about how he was having such a big problem working in real movies during the 1970s. No doubt it's one of his worst, if not The Worst!
The effect of (The Godfather) is more than perceptible (2 mob generations, a conflict over power, assassinations' sequences...). However, it's part of the exploitation's wave. Well, the lousy exploitation's wave to be precise. And with having catchy names, like (Quinn), (Goldsmith) and (Fleischer), then it is disappointing, deepening the deplorable irony between Hollywood's golden age, and its tin one!
Save the chilly explosion at the garage, nothing is distinguished, or rather watchable. From a long experience of miserable devoted viewer, take it from me: in the 1970s, all what it took to make a gangster movie was enough guns, fires, blood, added to zero direction, terrible actors, and female nudity. The thing is; after 40 years they still do the same, but as straight-to-video; namely, they became more truthful and explicit.
According to the TV quality, the Italian characters, the set in which Forster's character Frank was hiding; this is not a movie, this is Kojack: The Lost Episode, and it's a low-grade one too. Otherwise, it's long shoddy massacre of a movie. I give it just 2 stars; one for (Quinn)'s suits, and the other is for (Forster)'s suits!
Finally, my title is just a way to express some anger, since the real idiot wasn't the don; it's ME for wasting nearly 2 hours of my life watching him. Simply, the don is dead, so this movie too!