MAFIA PRINCESS (1986) * Tony Curtis is Sam Giancana and Susan Lucci is his daughter that wrote about it. So it's kind of like Danielle Steele does the Godfather, starring Mickey Mouse. Lucci's as bad as you would hope and Tony's the way he is when he doesn't have a decent director, but it still isn't all that funny. I think partly because there are decent excuses for the actors being what they are. I mean, there's no way Giancana was the lightweight presented here, but it's entirely possible that his daughter saw him as something like this. Meanwhile it's fairly clear that the daughter was an overwrought dimwit, so even though there's no way she sounded as feeble and misplaced as Lucci, the displacement might have inadvertently scored some kind of extremely lower-tier poetic truth. To compound the problem all of the other actors are terrible too, so the leads don't really stand out. Somehow Giancana the younger apparently wrote an entire book without touching on her father's extraordinary relationship with JFK (which involved, depending on whom you're talking to, vote fraud, sharing girlfriends, and/or assassination, or all that and more)...or was that what they were driving at with Giancana's last words (which the Giancana bimbo wouldn't have witnessed). I enjoy a truly bad movie nearly as much as a good one, and had very high hopes for this flick on the former grounds. Only Lucci's mirror scene delivered.
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