Following Snow White, a gangster film starring Robert De Niro flopped at the box office

Unlike Snow White, Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights can in no way be called a "failure", although from a financial point of view this is obvious - $3.2 million in North America and $1.8 million abroad for the first weekend with a budget of $45 million.

The thing is that, unlike Snow White, from a creative point of view, almost everything here is impeccable - the camera work, the work of the production designer, etc. The problem here is different. One of the American analysts said about this that, supposedly, a star director and a star actor in the person of De Niro are not enough to attract the public.

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However, this is not so. Let's start with the fact that De Niro is no longer a star or a great actor, as he once was, but simply an old (or rather very old) actor, who still plays in a bunch of films for no apparent reason (he probably has enough money).

Perhaps directors who have worked with De Niro for many decades, like Barry Levinson or Martin Scorsese, don't notice this - but the viewer does, as in the case, for example, when in "The Irishman" De Niro the gangster, allegedly kicking a shopkeeper, first of all tries to stay on his own feet.

Barry Levinson, one might say, multiplied this problem by two, since in his "Knights of Alto" De Niro plays two famous gangsters of the past at once - Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, once friends, and later - enemies (their relationship is the subject of the entire film).

The decision for a film that was conceived as a film for a mass audience is strange, but the point is not even that, but that here De Niro is much older than his characters - for example, during the assassination attempt on him, with which the film begins, Costello was 66 years old, and De Niro is now 81 years old. (Vito Genovese, who "ordered" Costello, was 60 years old at the time). And at the same time, the film is full of close-ups of both of its characters (that is, one De Niro in different makeup), in which the actor's age is more or less (as in the case of Genovese) clearly visible.

Some American critics explain the financial failure of the film by the fact that gangster sagas have allegedly gone out of fashion for many years. This is also impossible to agree with for one simple reason - they were "out of fashion" when "The Godfather" was released in 1972 (which we wrote about yesterday), which did not prevent its outstanding creative and financial success.

The failure of Barry Levinson, who, by the way, is 82 years old, in this sense is not much different from the failure of, for example, 82-year-old Martin Scorsese, who has long since turned his profession into a "warm bath". Another thing is surprising - that film companies continue to give huge amounts of money for their films. But this is their, the film companies', problem...

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