Inside the Mafia (Premium Pictures, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 18) my husband Charles came home from work about a half-hour earlier than usual given his 1 to 10 p.m. work shift and demanded that we watch a movie instead of staying on the MS-NBC news channel. The only one I could find on YouTube that was short enough we could watch it and still catch Stephen Colbert’s show later on was Inside the Mafia, a 1959 “ripped from the headlines” drama done in semi-documentary fashion by our old friend, producer Robert E. “Baseball” Kent (I’ve nicknamed him that because of the anecdote that as a writer he was able to chatter away about the ballgame he’d been to the night before while simultaneously writing the latest pile of clichés that constituted his new script), directed by Edward L. Cahn from a script by Orville H. Hampton. The real-life event this film was based on was a 1957 conference of America’s organized crime leaders in a remote village called Apalachin, New York (called “Apple Lake”) in the movie. Officers of the New York State Police noticed all those middle-aged men in black suits converging on this tiny town and wondered why, and in their investigation they stumbled on a major meeting of America’s crime bosses and busted it. From that screenwriter Hampton developed a story about a bitter rivalry for control of America’s crime syndicate between Augie Martello (Ted de Corsia) and his lieutenant, Tony Ledo (Cameron Mitchell, top-billed), on one side and Dan Regent (Edward Platt, unusually cast in an unsympathetic role; we know him as the understanding social worker in Rebel Without a Cause and the chief of CONTROL in the James Bond TV spoof Get Smart!) and his men on the other. The two factions converge on a tiny general-aviation airport in Apple Lake and take hostage the family who run it: Rod Balcom (Louis Jean Heydt) and his daughters Anne (Elaine Edwards) and Sandy (Carol Nugent). Both the women have boyfriends: Anne’s is New York State Police Captain Doug Blair (Jim Brown) and Sandy’s is a clueless young blond who stumbles into the action when he shows up with the airport’s station wagon, which he had borrowed so he could fix it.

Narrated in the usual sententious voice-of-God tones by William Woodson, Inside the Mafia is basically a surprisingly dull drama set mostly inside Rod Balcom’s living room (with occasional cutaways to the airport’s control room, which seems to be located above the living space). The gangsters are waiting for the arrival of the overall head of the syndicate, “Johnny Lucero” (Grant Richards) – think Lucky Luciano – who fled to Naples when he was wanted for too many things in the U.S. but is willing to risk a return for one day only because the syndicate’s meeting is too important to miss. Tony Ledo plots to assassinate Lucero as soon as he gets off the plane, only his plans change when Augie Martello finally dies in a secret nursing home of the bullet wounds he sustained in the opening scene. Now he wants Lucero alive so he can be appointed to take over Augie’s wing of the Mafia now that Augie is dead. Having Lucero’s exile be in Naples instead of Sicily (where the real Luciano hid out during his exile) was a major mistake on Orville Hampton’s part; the Neapolitan gangsters called themselves the Camorra, after the bandit bands that beset central Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The term Mafia – originally an Italian acronym for “Anti-French Society,” since it began as a resistance movement against Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the early 1800’s and turned to crime once Napoleon was defeated – was Sicilian, and the later phrase “La Cosa Nostra” (“This Thing of Ours”) was concocted so members of the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia could work together instead of fighting each other. Another mistake was having Lucero fly across the Atlantic in a small private plane that didn’t look big enough to get him that far.

After a brief attempt to take on one of the gangsters that gets foiled easily, Rod Balcom (ya remember Rod Balcom?) and Captain Blair (ya remember Captain Blair?) manage to sneak into the air control tower and send a message in Morse code that alerts the state police to what’s going on in Apple Lake, though by the time the cops arrive most of the gangsters have killed each other in a bloodbath and the police show up to arrest the survivors. Charles questioned the ending, noting that even if the police hadn’t arrived there wouldn’t have been enough Mafiosi to continue the syndicate as a going concern now that so many of them had killed each other. Another oddity about this movie is the plethora of non-Italian names among the gangsters; one of the major plot points of the script Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi worked into their script for Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) was that only full-blooded Sicilians or Italians could become Mafia members. The plot of GoodFellas was largely driven by gangster Henry Hill’s (Ray Liotta) frustration that because he had an Irish father he could never become a “made man”; his mom was Sicilian, but half-breeds didn’t count. Inside the Mafia has some well-done moments of genuine terror as the Balcoms and their significant others realize that once the gangsters are done with their business, they’ll slaughter them all because they won’t want to leave behind any witnesses. Other than that, though, it’s a mediocre movie, one of a chain of gangster films produced by Robert E. Kent and directed by Edward L. Cahn, and lacking the sick thrills of The Music Box Kid (1960), a 1920’s-set period piece they came up with that featured a truly great performance by Ron Foster as the psychotic hit man who nicknamed his Thompson submachine gun his “music box.” Inside the Mafia is a mixed movie, too good to be entirely dismissable but nowhere near classic status, though at the very least it’s an interesting benchmark in the history of the depiction of organized crime in film and one of the first films that actually used the “M”-word to describe it. Still, Charles was struck by the fact that the script made much of the fact that the climax takes place on September 18 – the very date on which we were watching it!