Wonder mikes: Chazz Palminteri (above) and Robert Davi as The Dukes.
Perhaps in declaration that he’s more
than a reliable heavy, Davi softens his hard-boiled persona for the
lighthearted caper comedy The Dukes (Cavu Pictures; 97 minutes;
PG-13; 2008), while also passing himself off as a triple-threat
hyphenate: actor, co-writer and director. Hell, Davi even sings in this
one; that’s because his character, Danny DePasquale, is the former lead
vocalist of the Dukes, a fictional doo-wop troupe that was huge in the
early 1960s, although now their chart hits would rate as trivia
stumpers among the music cognoscenti. Bookings are scarce despite the
best efforts of longtime manager Lou Fiola (Paper Moon director
Peter Bogdanovich) although, as viewers learn, Danny’s volatile
temperament has led to the exit of a key Duke member, so they can’t be
billed as the original Dukes. (These flourishes in the script by Davi
and James Andronica seem to take their cue from Jon “Bowzer” Bauman’s
real-life legal battles with in-name-only oldies groups that still bill
themselves as the genuine article.)
The other Dukes who have stayed close to
Danny include his chubby-chaser cousin George Zucco (Chazz Palminteri),
wheelchair-bound diabetic Armond Kaputo (late stand-up comic Frank
D’Amico) and pothead 747 mechanic Murph Sinitsky (Elya Baskin). But
financial problems plague the quartet and Lou’s desperate booking
attempts, like getting the boys into tomato costumes for a TV
commercial for salsa, don’t help the cause. So Danny hatches a nutty
scheme that involves the foursome knocking over a Los Angeles dental
lab’s safe containing 35 pounds of gold, a score that seems so easy
that a retired safecracker (Bruce Weitz) also wants in on the action.
There is a movie sub-genre devoted to geezer crooks, like Art Carney, Lee Strasberg and George Burns in Going in Style (1979) and Burt Reynolds and Richard Dreyfuss in The Crew (2000), but The Dukes
doesn’t really fall into that category. In fact, the heist sequence,
usually the centerpiece of such flicks, almost seems incidental when
compared to the easy-going mood and textures that first-time director
Davi is striving to capture. Like a casting director on a
Manhattan-based movie melodrama, Davi has populated The Dukes with familiar mugs like Weitz, still best known for his stint as Belker on Hill Street Blues, and Baskin, who always fills Tinseltown’s need for Russian characters in features such as Moscow on the Hudson. (Andronica, whose career dates back to his writing-acting chores in the little-seen 1978 drama Nunzio, also pops up as a kitchen assistant named Peppe.)
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Sandwiched between these been-around-the-block faces, British actress Miriam Margolyes (The Age of Innocence)
surprises as Danny and George’s Aunt Vee, an Italian restaurateur who
talks with her hands and cuts a broadly amusing ethnic swath.
Palminteri’s George gets laughs, too, as a lover of all zaftig females,
especially when his vanity is compromised by a missing front tooth as
he gets derailed by an unmanly lisp. (His character’s name, George
Zucco, must be an inside reference to the 1940s-era character actor.)
Even Melora Hardin, who plays Steve Carell’s pregnant gal pal in The Office, manages to lighten the role of Danny’s divorced spouse, which in other hands might have resulted in a shrewish stereotype.
Davi develops a nice pace for The Dukes,
with a likable cast that ensures audience-friendly vibes and a
soundtrack that’s chockablock with vintage tunes; the last reel,
however, is a bit top-heavy with sudden crises that conspire to prevent
the group from achieving its dream. Still, there’s more good vibrations
concerning the behind-the-scenes stories of how Davi put together this
modest indie. Cavu Pictures’ distribution president Isil Bagdadi stated
during a phone conversation that Davi maintained his steadfast alliance
to co-star D’Amico, who was battling the effects of his own diabetes
during the movie’s production, and was considered an insurance risk.
(D’Amico can also be seen in Flyboys, which screened during last spring’s Syracuse International Film Festival.)
The Dukes also lists a Syracuse
connection: executive producer Frank Visco, a 1962 Central High School
graduate who performed with Father Charles Borgognoni’s Pompeian
Players in the early 1960s and also worked as a furniture salesman at
Dey Brothers. Visco, who later headed west, got into politics alongside
Ronald Reagan, and became chair of the California Republican Party from
1989 to 1991, now heads a financial insurance firm.
Just like its central characters, however, The Dukes
may suffer a bad case of timing. Small-scale pictures can get easily
lost in the multiplex shuffle during December, when screens are usually
contractually committed to big-time studio fare, and Davi’s appealing
indie will need all the box-office help it can get.
