The Valachi Papers

Released the same year as The Godfather and comprehensively buried by it, Terence Young's film adapts Peter Maas's book about the first member of the organisation to describe it in public.

Charles Bronson plays Valachi, which is the film's first problem: Valachi was a career subordinate of no particular presence, and Bronson could not disappear into that if he tried. The film also cannot resist making its informant more central to the events he narrates than he actually was.

Worth the time for

The structure. Because it follows the book, and the book follows the testimony, the film moves through the real sequence — the Castellammarese War, the making ceremony, the Commission, the Atlanta penitentiary and the pipe. The initiation scene is close to Valachi's own account of it, and it was the first time most audiences had seen the ritual described at all.

Treat it as an illustrated version of a witness statement rather than as history. The witness was working from thirty-year-old memories and a strong motive to be useful.