A Bronx Tale (1993)

Summary:  It is 1960. Lorenzo, a bus driver, lives with his wife Rosina and 9 year old son Calogero in the Bronx. Calogero and his young friends hang about in the street and constantly observe the local underworld guys who hang about on a street corner. One day Calogero is sitting on the step of their apartment block there is a car crash in the street, and one of the drivers gets out and attacks the other with a baseball bat. Suddenly Sonny, one of the guys, pulls out a revolver and shoots the assailant dead. Despite the fact that Calogero has seen the event, he does not choose to pick out Sonny from an impromptu line-up. As a result he become a favourite of the local mafia, and remains familiar with them despite all attempts by his father to prevent it. Later Calogero becomes involved with Jane, a black girl but his friends become aggressive towards passing black youths and decide to attack their barrio. Sonny, still looking out for Calogero, extracts him from their car, in which they intend to attack the black youths. This saves his life, and there is more.

Content: No sex or nudity but a lot of drinking and smoking. The mafia guys spend a lot of time on the street corner being observed by the kids. There are a number of specific moments of violence, firstly the shooting, then an attack on a bunch of Hell’s Angels who invade the bar, then two attacks by the young me on the black guys, the last with catastrophic results for both sides. Lorenzo the bus driver makes his son go on the bus with him so that they can talk, and often remonstrates with his about his association with Sonny. At times Lorenzo also approaches Sonny, on one occasion being beaten.

A View: I still can’t imagine how this went as a one man show, and apparently Chazz Palminteri last performed it in 2016. He played 18 roles. But back to the film. It has echoes in several other mafia films, mainly bits of Godfather II, Mean Streets and Goodfellas, but it is really no worse for that. Worth a watch, but make sure you are paying attention when Sonny shoots the man in the street and keep watching right to the end.