Thirty years ago, on September 9, at the Venice Film Festival (in our cinemas only at the end of January 1994), the world premiere of the first of two films was presented, in which a sacred acting monster like Robert De Niro passed behind the scenes. Withdrawn: “The Bronx/A Bronx Tale”, adapted from the off-Broadway play by Chazz Palminteri. It was unsuccessful ($17 million worldwide versus the $20 needed to do so) and left De Niro out of a parallel career as a director. His second and so far last test, The Good Shepherd river with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, in fact, came out only in 1996 and had a more or less similar fate: he collected 100 million against an estimated cost of 80. However, it remains one of the many, too many films marred by history and surpassed by Time (even TV programs are more than rare) that do not deserve to be pariahs in the media’s great oblivion.
The film takes place in 1960., in Little Italy, in the New York area of the Bronx, where little Calogero, known as “C” (Francis Capra as a child and Lillo Brancato as an adult), son of bus driver Lorenzo (Robert De Niro), is charmed by boss Sonny (Chuzz Palminteri) ), who puts him on his “detour” after a child witness to a murder comes clean at the suggestion of his father, who doesn’t want to get in trouble with the underworld. Despite family opposition, “C” continues to see Sonny, to whom he becomes a sort of intended son. A few years later, in 1968, when big changes and racial tensions were taking place, and nerves were exposed, when Calogero, now almost an adult, grew up, almost detached from his true origin, and began to associate with violent and xenophobic young people who did not watched. After receiving overly favorable treatment from both Sonny and his father, the boy falls in love with Jane (Taral Hicks), the sister of an African-American man who was recently beaten up by his friends. During a skirmish between the white and black gang, Calogero escapes a bad end thanks to Sonny; but when he goes to his restaurant to thank him, he witnesses him being murdered at the hands of the son of a man killed in the circumstances in which he gave false testimony. At the boss’s funeral, at which many people attend without real feelings for a man more revered out of fear than truly loved, Calogero finally makes peace with Lorenzo as well, realizing, perhaps for the first time, the true importance of both his father figures. .
Written by Palminteri himself (who wrote it on the basis of one of his plays, which later became a monologue in which he played all the characters, since no theater impresario wanted to stage it), The Bronx is a small film in which, as is easy to understand from the environment and plot , in the setting and themes, all the influences of the great masters of cinema are clearly traced, in the service of which De Niro gave his all: from Scorsese in Mean Streets – Sunday in Church, Monday in Hell. Mean Streets”, 1973 and “Goodfellas / Goodfellas”, 1990, Sergio Leone from the famous and somewhat related “Once Upon a Time in America / Once Upon a Time in America”, 1984. “There is nothing more tragic than wasted talent ” is one of the teachings that the honest Lorenzo / De Niro is trying to pass on to his son. And the entire Bronx is permeated with this simple philosophy, a struggle at a distance between two men, diametrically opposed in character and lifestyle, and both in their own way loving a boy for whom they would like the future to have something more in store. and different from what both of them, without necessarily realizing it, had or had to manage. Optimistic and, despite the seeming, even sunny work, sometimes really funny, performed with confidence and the class of De Niro, who, having carved out a few moments to demonstrate all his charisma, leaves the widest space for everything functional. and absolutely necessary supporting actors (attention to Joe Pesci’s ineffable “Carmine”), demonstrating a true affection for young heroes and an extraordinary respect for Palminteri’s exceptional acting talent.
And if in this game of relationships with fathers also reflected in a peculiar form of filmed gratitude to his artistic mentors, De Niro’s ability to find the right attacks to move from comedy to tragedy and from laughter to tears also suggests the full absorption of the lessons of the great American cinema of the golden age, from Frank Capra to Preston Sturges, from Elia Kazan to Stanley Kramer. Even if the camera that lingers on the astonished face of “C” in slow motion, in which Calogero witnesses a murder in the street, undoubtedly committed by De Sica, while another unforgettable scene of the film, the only way to find out if the girl remains the only one for the whole life (it features Curtis Mayfield’s Impressions “I’m So Proud” on its soundtrack among many great songs from the Motown era), it has the lightning-fast grace of a wholly original invention.