The classic movie Orson Welles blasted as “the glorification of a bunch of bums”
In addition to being one of the most influential filmmakers of his era and a wunderkind who ultimately fell by the wayside, Orson Welles was very familiar with some high-profile figures from the organised crime world.
Falling in with those circles didn’t quite fit the persona when he was directing Hollywood masterpieces in his early 20s having already made a name for himself in Broadway, but given his enigmatic nature and the way he carried himself, it’s not exactly difficult to imagine Welles sitting in a smoky room surrounded by notorious criminals and fearsome gangsters.
During the early years of his career in a period before the industry was widely unionised, Welles intimated that it was the mafia who held great sway over performers and filmmakers alike in the period prior to the formation of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933, naming Meyer Lansky as a key figure.
Alongside cohort Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, he was pivotal in forming the National Crime Syndicate, which sounds completely made-up but was very real. Crime families of different races, creeds, and backgrounds joined forces in a loose alliance to achieve a common goal, which in this case was making illicit gains and carrying out murders to eliminate either the competition or opposition.
Lansky constructed a sprawling gambling empire that stretched from the United States to the United Kingdom and back again, while he also inspired the character of Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II. The part was played by famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who was recommended to Francis Ford Coppola by former student Al Pacino.
Admitting to Henry Jaglom that he knew Lansky “very well,” Welles confirmed that “I knew them all,” before outlining why he was connected to that world. “If you lived, as I did, on Broadway during that period, if you lived in nightclubs, you could not not know them,” he said. “I liked screwing the chorus girls, and I liked meeting all the different people who would come in, and I liked staying up until five in the morning, and they used to love to go to nightclubs. They would come and sit at your table.”
More information than required, but OK. When asked for his thoughts on how his associate was portrayed on-screen, Welles praised Strasberg before immediately firing a shot at a classic. “Much better than the real thing, Meyer Lansky was a boring man,” he reflected. “Hyman Roth is who he should have been. They all should have been like that, and none of them were.”
Going one step further, Welles blasted The Godfather as “the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed,” calling the concept of “the classy gangster” a fiction created entirely by film. Coppola never claimed to be making a documentary, but that didn’t matter to somebody who was very familiar with the people the characters were based on.
