Pizza Connection

Italy, 1985

Director: Damiano Damiani

Script: Damiano Damiani, Ernesto Gastaldi, Franco Marotta, Laura Toscano

Performers: Michele Placido (Mario Aloia), Mark Chase (Michele Aloia), Simona Cavallari (Cecilia Smedile), Tony Sperandeo (Vincenzo), Leonardo Marino (Chief of Police)

Music: Carlo Savina

Story

The taciturn and reserved Mario (Michele Placido) is a Sicilian owner of a pizzeria in New York, who is involved in the business of Italian-American organized crime. One day he receives a visit from a Mafia intermediary from Sicily, the sinister Armando Ognibene, who instructs him to liquidate a competitor and then return to Palermo to organize an attack on the public prosecutor, a prosecutor willing to fight the Mafia, which has become very dangerous for the organization.

In Palermo, the young Michele works as a salesman in a street market. One day his boss is shot dead by a hitman, and he, who has seen the delinquent’s face, is tempted to testify. He starts talking to the police but backs down when he sees that the other witnesses disapprove of the dealings with the authorities, because of the prevailing omertà or law of silence. During the attack, Michele has protected a girl who was among the buyers at the market, with whom he soon begins a romantic and idyllic friendship.

When he returns home, Michele (who has been fired from his job for talking to the police) is pleasantly surprised to find that his older brother has returned from across the Atlantic. His “American” brother is none other than Mario, who is trying to make Michele (a good shot with guns) an assistant for the project of liquidating the prosecutor. But Michele’s character is completely different from that of his older brother, and he doesn’t have the mentality, interest or audacity to get involved voluntarily in Mafia-related matters. Nevertheless, Mario will persist in trying to make an accomplice of his younger brother.

Michele, worried after losing his job and finding out that Mario is a hitman, is dating young Cecilia, about 14, the girl he met in the market during the attack. They are both attracted to each other, but he is very worried about money and the issue with his brother.

The teenager is not in an easy situation either. She lives with her mother, who forces her into prostitution. In addition, her brother is a drug addict and her mother’s boyfriend, the disturbing Vincenzo, is a dangerous and violent pimp.

When Michele discovers the horrendous exploitation to which Cecilia is subjected, he rages and tries to take her away from the nightmarish family home, but is reduced by Vincenzo and other neighbours, and after a street fight in which, in desperation and armed with a metal bar, he damages a car, he is arrested and sent to prison. His brother Mario pays the bail to get him out of jail and also pays the Smediles’ (Cecilia’s family) to “forget” what happened.

When Michele goes to the Smediles’ house to take Cecilia away, he is frustrated to find that she no longer lives there. Shortly after, he receives a phone call from Vincenzo, who lets him know that he will only see the girl again if he pays two million lire. To get this money, the naive, idealistic and romantic Michele is forced to collaborate with his brother the hitman.

The organization that Mario “works” for informs him that he must immediately send a “message” to the prosecutor, eliminating one of his closest collaborators. Mario offers his brother the opportunity to carry out the murder. Michele agrees, not without great doubts and anguish. When he is about to finish off Agent Mancuso, Michele does not have the courage to pull the trigger, Mancuso prepares to draw his gun to defend himself and Mario intervenes swiftly by shooting the agent to save his brother (and fulfill the order).

Michele fails miserably in his (involuntary) role as an aspiring mobster. He and his older brother become embroiled in fierce disputes, the great difference between the two’s temperaments coming to light. Michele knows that Mario has been hired to assassinate the attorney general, and he wants to prevent the attack from being committed, but at the same time he wants to avoid problems for his brother (whether with the justice system or with the organization). The young man decides to call the police anonymously (and from a phone booth) to report that an attack on the attorney general is about to be committed. Shortly afterwards, he tells Mario what he has just done, but (to his surprise) he already knows, since the organization has infiltrated informants within the police.

The prosecutor is guarded at all times by a large number of escorts armed to the teeth, and only moves around Palermo in the midst of a complex security device, but Mario and his people have devised a spectacular and effective plan to get rid of him, and finally succeed in shooting the prosecutor’s car with bazookas and perpetrating a massacre. The stunned Michele happens to be an eyewitness to the carnage caused by the explosion, and recognizes his brother on board a truck speeding away from the scene.

Later, Mario drives away in another car to hinder the police investigation. With him are his accomplices Ognibene (the middleman who ordered the hit) and Nicola (the hitman who killed the market vendor, Michele’s boss). Both have discovered that the informer who called the police to warn them about the attack that was about to be committed was Mario’s brother, and they are letting him know. It is also subtly perceived that Ognibene and Nicola intend to kill Michele as a snitch (although in the call he did not accuse anyone). Mario reacts quickly, parks the car behind some bushes and to save his brother he is forced to kill Nicola and the intermediary Ognibene. He buries the former and leaves the body of the latter in the car to give the impression that Nicola shot Ognibene and escaped.

Soon after, Mario meets his little brother and gives him the money to rescue Cecilia. Michele reacts furiously when he discovers that Mario knew where the girl was all along, telling him that he “has lost his respect”, that he “doesn’t want his dirty money”. Mario also leaves behind the cassette of his call to the police, the evidence he has taken from Ognibene and Nicola, the evidence that incriminated him as an informer.

Michele goes to the house where Cecilia is and frees her from her tyrannical mother. Meanwhile, Mario goes to the airport to return to New York, accompanied by Masseria, the head of the Palermo Mafia, who is now safer in his position after the elimination of the prosecutor. But even though the operation has been successfully conducted, Mario feels uneasy; for Ognibene was one of boss Masseria’s closest collaborators, and he fears that sooner or later suspicions will fall on him.

Once at his pizzeria in Brooklyn, Mario is still worried and calls Palermo to talk to his brother, with whom he wants to reconcile. Michele is happy to hear his voice, but before they can cross the second line, he is dismayed to hear on the other side of the line a burst of gunfire and then silence. Michele has been shot by two individuals who had previously entered the premises sitting quietly to consume something while waiting for the other customers to leave.

Commentary

Very good polizziesco from the eighties with achieved dramatic touches. The plot keeps the viewer on edge at all times; the conflict between the brothers (who love each other despite being incompatible), the idyll between the innocent Michele and the tormented teenager Cecilia, the intrigues within the Mafia and the portrait of the Palermo of those years manage to create a growing interest not only for the genre’s regular followers, but also for a wider audience. In Italy, the well-known actor Michele Placido, who plays Mario, directed more than 20 years later the also very interesting “Romanzo Criminale” (2008). For his part, the young Mark Chase (who gives life to Michele) has a remarkable physical resemblance to José Luis Manzano, the protagonist of “El Pico” and other Eloy de la Iglesia’s films in Spain.

However, the story of “Pizza Connection” filmed by Damiano Damiani has nothing to do with the real Pizza Connection (mediatic successor of the “French Connection”) that existed in the seventies and was disrupted shortly before the release of this film; the drug smuggling network that operated by importing opium from Turkey to Sicily for processing in laboratories on the Italian island, transforming it into heroin that was then exported to the US and distributed from New York pizza parlors.

Although not based on the true story, the film is worth watching.

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