The Boss Blu-ray Review: A Gritty Italian Classic

The Boss is a 1973 Italian poliziottesco and the final film in director Fernando Di Leo’s Milieu Trilogy which also included Caliber 9 and The Italian Connection.

In this final entry, Henry Silva plays Nick Lanzetta, a mafia hitman who takes out several members of a rival crime family for his boss Don Corrasco (Richard Conte). When they retaliate by kidnapping Don Corrasco’s drug addicted, nymphomaniac daughter, Nick is sent in to rescue her and finds himself involved in a relationship with the Don’s daughter and embroiled in a violent feud between the Sicilian and Calabrian mafia.

Like The Italian Connection before it, Fernando Di Leo keeps the pace quick and the direction taut in this film. Unlike the operatic drama of The Godfather, this film is gritty, cynical, and down in the dirt. It is another mafia film from the era in Italy greatly influenced by the devastatingly violent  “Years of Lead” spurred on by the CIA’s Operation Gladio.

Silva is a dangerous and unlikable antihero at the center of the action here. There is one particular scene where he violently smacks up and verbally abuses the same woman he was sent in to save and has been sleeping with for the past week. The characters surrounding his are all despicable, backstabbers climbing the ladder to mafia and law enforcement success. In many ways, The Boss and much of Di Leo’s work and other poliziotteschi are precursors to, direct ancestors of, the gritty crime dramas of American television during its 1990s golden age, such as The Wire and The Sopranos.

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The Video

The Boss is taken from a 4K restoration from the original camera negative. Presented in a 1.85:1 AVC 1080p encodement on Blu-ray, the image looks excellent at first glance, but further, deeper inspection exposes some serious flaws. Firstly, the good: the image looks very clean with only very limited places where one can spot a scratch or tramline. There is some grain present that remains throughout, and colors look natural and vibrant. The bad is there are many instances of mild mosquito noise and scenes with film instability leading to a wobbly, shaky image. The latter is likely unavoidable based on the condition of the negative.

The Audio

The Boss has two lossless monaural audio tracks, Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The film’s production was done in English and then re-dubbed in Italian and English, so the English audio syncs better with the video but the English voice cast is awful in comparison to the Italian voice cast the script at times does not match up at all with the Italian screenplay. There is one scene where, in the English dub Nick is told to meet someone the next day and in the Italian dub he is told to wait for that person’s call later that same night. What? This is a complete shift in the timeline, albeit one that does not make much of a difference, but still a shift.

On the sound, the English track sounds louder and a little more distorted, but both tracks have a little clipping and sibilance on the dialogue in louder passages.

The Supplements

Bonus Features:

• Audio Commentary Film Historian Samm Deighan
• Archival Documentary: Mafia Stories (SD; 00:23:20)
• Milieu Trilogy Re-Release Trailer (SD; 00:01:30)
• Caliber 9 Trailer (SD; 00:03:14)
• The Italian Connection Trailer (SD; 00:01:46)

The Final Assessment

The Boss is a gritty and action-packed Italian mafia film with icy cold performances, and taut direction from Di Leo. The image is a bit flawed, but still offers a reasonable quality looking about as good or better than it ever has.

The Boss is out on Blu-ray November 12, 2024 from Raro Video

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• Rating Certificate: R
• Studios & Distributors: Cineproduzioni Daunia 70 | Raro Video
• Director: Fernando Di Leo
• Written By: Peter McCurtin | Fernando Di Leo
• Run Time: 100 Mins.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Video Format: AVC 1080p
• Primary Audio: Italian DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono
• Secondary Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono
• Subtitles: English for Italian Audio