If you want to watch Gian Maria, the greatest actor of all time, at his best, watch him in "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion", "Le Cercle Rouge", "For a Few Dollars More" or "I Am Afraid", he worked much much better with Petri, Melville, Leone and Damiani. This one is very boring and Volontè doesn't appear much. And when he appears, he has the same face that does not say too much. This role did not quite fit him. Rosi's films, most of them, are a special genre, very close to the documentary, very hard to follow, you got to have a patience of steel...

Despite its pedigree, LUCKY LUCIANO is not a particularly good movie. Gian Maria Volontè has the title role and he's fine, but the great Italian director Francesco Rosi has really misfired here. The film lacks all cohesiveness as it tries to bend time with various episodes in the turbulent life of not only Luciano but the entire Italian mafia. Volonte is gone for long stretches of the film and the likes of Rod Steiger, Charles Cioffi (as deported crime boss Vito Genovese) and Edmond O'Brien fill the voids. It's all pretty confusing rather than ambitious. The acting is very uneven. Steiger is hammy and O'Brien is all bluster while Cioffi is quite good. Rosi's direction features a number of striking images but they're obscured by the film's poor editing. There is a terrific score by Piero Piccioni.

This movie is boring. Plain boring, nothing else. And I've a great tolerance of movies that most people find boring.I still wonder what I just watched. Is it a documentary? Most gangster films are pretty slow, but this one is more than that. All action happens in 15 minutes, then...nothing. It's like there was no editor, or that the material was shot for some kind of documentary.Gian Maria Volontè plays his role very good. Rod Steiger is nice, but doesn't get enough time to be as great as he usually is. The rest of the cast is OK, not a problem here. Gangsters look like gangsters, cops look like cops and the dames are plenty.For some seven years now I have been collecting gangster films, read books about the subject and even collected news articles about the mafia and such. Most of what I saw in this film is not new for me. Luciano was famous and is nothing short of legend these days. When he moved out of the US, he kind of got into the darkness. When this film dragged on, I saw some potential stories come by, but all just passed and went on. So nothing happened until the end where that thing happened that everyone that ever read a book about the mafia knows that happened.The soundtrack doesn't help. Piero Piccioni can't even live up to his usual 'clone morricone' music and seems only to have written about 7 minutes of music.The DVD I got was a UK version without any subtitle. I can watch English spoken films without much trouble, but half of this is in Italian, so beware! At first I feared this would have been a action movie disguised as a gangster film, but even that wasn't true. It is slow and all that. Of course, I never thought I was going to watch a true classic, but I almost felt asleep. Still, I cannot give it less than a 4. Gian Maria Volontè and Rod Steiger together in a film, and the sets were good enough. The production itself felt okay. So maybe they should have fired the writer and maybe the editor.It could have been so much more!

loosely focusing on Lucanio's life in Italy, this movie combines elements of documentary, gangster flick and political movie. a Reality component is added to the movie by Charles Siragusa playing himself as prosecutor of Luciano. In the real world Siragusa failed to prove Luciano's involvement in drug trafficking from sicily into the US. and in this movie he seems to put an effort into using the results of his work to render luciano's role in the business.in the first half of the movie there is an extended sequence about vito genovese's time in italy something that seems completely disconnected from the rest of the plot, no hints are given about his actual connection to luciano and his role in the Gene Giannini hit shown later in the movie.things may be very confusing for viewer who doesn't know the biographies of people like luciano, vito genovese, joe pagano, meyer lansky and other mobsters as the movie constantly jumps between different periods of times, places and people without explaining their interconnections.so that being informed on those characters should be necessary to understand what this movie is about.for the whole time characters are elaborated very well and portrayed in a humanistic way supported by the brilliant soundtrack composed of a couple of 50ies jazz tunes and absolute top level cinematography.the performances delivered by Volonte as Lucky Luciano and Rod Steiger as Gene Giannini are on a Level that remains to be seen in other movies.culminating in the Gene Giannini hit where the atmosphere reaches a level of stunning dramatical density.