In the case that you have been looking to watch a promising mob or Mafia movie you may want to take a look at “Kill the Irishman” a flick based on a true story. Kill the Irishman starts an interesting group of characters that includes Ray Stevenson, Val Kilmer, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Christopher Walken. This is the story of the man that the mob couldn’t kill and his name was Danny Greene.
Story
Over the summer of 1976, thirty-six bombs detonate in the heart of Cleveland while a turf war raged between Irish mobster Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) and the Italian mafia. Based on a true story, Kill the Irishman chronicles Greene’s heroic rise from a tough Cleveland neighborhood to become an enforcer in the local mob. Turning the tables on loan shark Shondor Birns (Christopher Walken) and allying himself with gangster John Nardi (Vincent D’Onofrio), Greene stops taking orders from the mafia and pursues his own power. Surviving countless assassination attempts from the mob and killing off anyone who went after him in retaliation, Danny Greene’s infamous invincibility and notorious fearlessness eventually led to the collapse of mafia syndicates across the U.S. and also earned him the status of the man the mob couldn’t kill.
Written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh and also starring Val Kilmer, Paul Sorvino and Linda Cardellini, Kill the Irishman is inspired by Rick Porrello’s true crime account To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia.
To see the trailer and screenshots click on
Trailer
Some Screenshots
Director’s Statement
Kill the Irishman is based on true events. What drew you to the material and how did directing a film from the material come about for you?
Al Corley and Bart Rosenblatt at Code Entertainment sent me Rick Porello’s book To Kill the Irishman, and at first I had a hard time believing that what I’d read was true because Greene’s story was stranger than fiction at times.
I knew the Mafia had a presence outside New York, but I didn’t know that Cleveland was such an enormous profit center due to the successful infiltration of the dockworkers’ unions. Greene’s life covered the gamut: he rose from dock worker to Union President to fearless mob figure. The fact that Greene incited a gang war so violent that Cleveland was labeled “Bomb City, U.S.A.” and his death eventually led to the collapse of organized crime in Cleveland, well, that’s about as good as it gets.
The film features an eclectic cast of well-known actors. What led to casting them and what was it like working with them? Specifically the casting of Ray Stevenson as Danny Greene.
I wanted to work with Ray after seeing him in HBO’s “Rome”. Ray has a commanding presence, but he’s also an everyman. Though Danny Greene was the self-made president of the most powerful union in the Midwest and waged a one-man war against the Mafia, he was also a “man of the people,” so to speak, and I think Ray’s interpretation of Greene gets at that. Greene was hugely proud of his Irish heritage; he would wear a green suit, drive a green car, and write with a green pen. Ray did a great job capturing Greene’s accent and flamboyance. As for the rest of the roles, let’s just say the cast list forms a roster of my favorite actors in American cinema over the last twenty years. It was a dream come true.
