I, MOBSTER

"He's been having you tailed, blueprinting every move you've made...he's ordered you rubbed out."
From Sony's Gangsters Guns & Floozies Crime Collection come comes an interesting, albeit overly moralistic, look at the life and times of `the world's most notorious crime boss' in the film I, Mobster (1958), based on a novel by Joseph Hilton Smyth, adapted for the screen by Steve Fisher ("Peter Gunn", "Cannon", "Barnaby Jones"), and co-producer and directed by Roger Corman (It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Machine-Gun Kelly). The film stars Steve Cochran (The Damned Don't Cry, The Big Operator), along with Lita Milan (The Violent Men), and Robert Strauss, probably best known (to me, at least) for his memorable role in the film Stalag 17 (1953), as the character Stanislas 'Animal' Kasava. Also appearing is Celia Lovsky (Man of a Thousand Faces), Corman regular John Brinkley (Teenage Doll, War of the Satellites), and veteran actor of over 200 films Grant Withers (The Fighting Kentuckian, Hoodlum Empire), in his last feature.

The movie opens as we see a...

Pushing the envelope of "B-ness"
Roger Corman pushes the envelope of "B-ness" with this B-movie detailing the rise and fall of a small-time gangster (played by Steve Cochran, contender in the Elvis-lookalike contest and winner of the hair-grease semifinals). The casting is riotous, with his supposedly Italian immigrant parents played by two oldsters who speak with Austrian-German accents, and a girfriend who speaks with an Italian accent and has a WASP name. Robert Strauss, famous Jewish comedian, plays a vicious Italian gangster with about as much credibility as did Eli Wallach in "Godfather 3." Nonetheless, "I, Mobster" is enjoyable in broad, B-ways that only Corman can bring off.

Cheaply made movie, and even cheaper DVD.
This film is worth viewing for two reasons - Steve Cochran and Robert Strauss. They are both as good as it gets. But you would have to be as big a fan of Steve Cochran as I to make this product worth even its extremely low price.

The film is choppy with lines and distortions in some places. The story doesn't hold together very well, and, as pointed out by another reviewer, the obviously Italian Lita Milan plays a character named "Teresa Porter," and Austrian born and accented Celia Lovsky plays Cochran's long suffering Italian mother. The DVD is so cheap that they couldn't even get the character's name right on the back cover. Cochran plays Joe Sante, but, on the DVD case, his character is referred to as "Steve Fisher," who was actually the writer of the film. And there are no features whatsoever - the only two options are "watch the movie" and "scene selections."

The film jumps from a child playing the part of 11-year old Joe to a 40-year old Cochran...

Click to Editorial Reviews