In the Tradition

By J.C.

Machine Gun McCain is an Italian gangster film in the old American tradition, manufactured with the kind of sardonic reverence that made many of the spaghetti Westerns so much cockeyed fun. The plot creaks with age: an ex-con named Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) gets sprung from the pen after serving twelve years of a life sentence. "How's it feel to be outside again, Dad?" beams his benefactor at the prison gate. "Don't ever call me that," snarls McCain, who regards his foppish son with heavy-lidded suspicion.

Sonny, it seems, has managed to parole his old man by spending $25,000 in the right places. He needs his father's unique talents on a dodgy job in Vegas. An upwardly mobile Mafia biggie (Peter Falk) has a yen to get in on some of the casino action and has hired Sonny to help him out. McCain doesn't know about the alliance between Sonny and the mob, but he spots the deal as a setup anyway. Like any good father, he chews out his kid about his job ("Where d'ya get $25,000? Sell women? Marijuana? Hustle yourself all over the street? Small time!") and about his companions ("Fags!"). Then he cuts out to do the job on his own. Along the route to the ritual slaughter, McCain meets an old girl friend (Gena Rowlands), a new wife (Britt Ekland) and enough unsavory characters to provide a neat 94 minutes of bloodshed and nastiness.

These proceedings might have turned out to be pretty shabby without the presence of first-rate actors who can turn any scene, without warning, into a jape or a jolt. Cassavetes, who took the role to get money to finish his 1968 film, Faces, looks rumpled, intense and angry as McCain and manages to invest this antiheroic part with some characteristic bits of melancholy.

Falk has a splendid time either muscling the opposition in Vegas or quaking before the elegant threats of a capo from New York. Gena Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes outside the movies) does the tough-but-tender-broad routine with such wistful sexiness that her heart of gold is almost 24-carat. When she and Cassavetes play a boisterous reunion scene, the film, however briefly, is transformed from flyweight entertainment into something true and touching.

-J.C.

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