Review of Inside the Mafia

Here's another one of the 25 or so films director Edward L. Cahn churned out in a three-year period for the same production company (which went under a few names), some of which are surprisingly good and most of which are at least admirable for the creative ways they get around their VERY low budgets. Cameron Mitchell starred in 3 of these (see review of PIER 5, HAVANA). Here we are in the gangland genre. These are the kind of gangsters who wear dark suits, dark hats, dark sunglasses, and chain smoke...just in case you forget who the gangsters are. The syndicate seems to have broken down into some competing factions, one led by Ed Platt of "Get Smart" fame, the other led by Cameron Mitchell. The main boss over all the units, who has been in exile in Italy, is coming back to the USA to a small airstrip in upstate New York, and the competing groups heat up the competition prior to his arrival. I won't give away any more of the plot. Like most low-budget films, this features a lot of talk, which builds up the tension, as does the tough-guy acting from the principals. The film also uses that low-budget staple--the rewrite of PETRIFIED FOREST, where a group of criminals hold some regular citizens hostage. It's cheap to film, is in one setting, and constantly refers to outside events that don't have to be filmed. As always, director Edward L. Cahn is a master of b-movie pacing, and writer Orville Hampton wrote a number of fifties b-movie classics, TV shows from Perry Mason to Scooby-Doo, and some of this group of Cahn-directed films. And of course Cameron Mitchell is convincingly tough as the gang leader--if you need any convincing of Mitchell's subtlety as an actor, watch the way his character keeps changing in small increments in the last twenty minutes of the film after gangland leader Johnny Lucero arrives back from Italy. If you like 1950s gangland b-movies and like cheap rewrites of Petrified Forest, or if you are a Cameron Mitchell fan who needs to see everything the master appeared in, you'll want to catch this film. People raised on the elegant, operatic gangsters of Coppola and Scorsese might find a film like this primitive and laughable (it's their loss!).