His story is based on a series of accidents, coincidences and misunderstandings. It begins when Gino, the old Chicago shoeshine man (Don Ameche), is escorted from his shop and taken into the presence of a local crime chief (Mike Nussbaum) and asked to confess to a murder.
If Gino agrees, he will be back on the street in three years, and the mob will give him his dream - a fishing boat of his own in Sicily.
First he refuses. Then he changes his mind. The dialogue in this scene is pure Mamet, the repetition of ordinary phrases that take on sinister meanings. Describing the murder of a man in the street, a mobster punctuates each paragraph with the line "This is public knowledge" before finally coming to his point: "What I am now about to tell you is not public knowledge." When I write it down, it doesn’t sound funny. When you hear it, you laugh. It is Mamet” gift to know how words work aloud.
Gino is assigned to Jerry, a younger syndicate underling (Joe Mantegna), whose job is to guard him over the weekend until he can confess on Monday. The two men retire to a hotel room, where Jerry grows restless, says the hell with it, and decides to take the old guy to Tahoe for the weekend. In Nevada, Jerry is spotted by a chauffeur as a guy from the Chicago mob, and Gino is immediately assumed to be very important. No one has ever seen him before - but that” just proof of how important he is. Of course they get the suite with the sunken tub, free of charge, plus unlimited credit in the casino. Mamet and Silverstein now unspin a labyrinthine plot, in which half-truths and assumptions follow one after another until Gino is in the presence of the Lake Tahoe organized crime boss (Robert Prosky). The don has invited Gino and Jerry to his mountain estate for two reasons: to embrace them if they are the real thing, and to kill them if they are not. In a scene involving exquisite timing and painfully drawn-out silences, the boss tries to get answers without seeming to ask questions, and Gino tries to answer without saying anything. There is not a word or a glance or a moment of body language that feels wrong in this scene - and the scene is the crux of the movie.
More complications follow, which I will leave for you to discover.
The chief delight in the movie is the joining of comedy and menace. The Mantegna character is keenly aware that one wrong step will result in instant death, but the Ameche character is able to save them both by simply being himself. There is a moment when Ameche and Prosky sit against a wall in the sun, two old men with their shoes off, and we sense that the local guy would almost rather not know that his visitor is not a crime syndicate don, because he plays the part so well.
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