The Don is Dead (1973) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The Don is Dead is actually a mob family story which came out in between the two Godfather movies, and shares some elements with The Godfather. For example, our main man, Abe Vigoda, is in this film as well as in The Godfather, and both films feature a single day of orchestrated and synchronized violence, although there is no accompanying baptism this time.

The Godfather was directed by a 33 year old man who was creating a new Hollywood system. The Don is Dead was directed by a 57 year old man, in his 30th year as a director, who was a slave to the old Hollywood. Richard Fleischer directed his first film when Francis Coppola was five, and he was truly a product of the old studio system. Most if not all of the urban street scenes in The Don is Dead were filmed on the back lot at Universal Studios, on the same familiar intersections that have appeared in God knows how many other movies. Unlike the beautiful original symphonic compositions in the score for The Godfather, The Don is Dead film has your typical flowery Broadway type of music that one might find in nearly every mainstream Hollywood movie from the studio system era.

And then there's this:

The Godfather: Al Pacino and Marlon Brando.

The Don is Dead: Rochester's own Robert Forster* and Zorba the Crook.

In other words, it's the quickie Grade B knockoff version of The Godfather.

The plot of the film can be deduced entirely from the title. A Don dies, a power struggle ensues. Two of the three warring parties make peace, but the Machiavellian consigliere of the third family tricks the leaders of the other two factions into sleeping with the same woman, then finding out about each other, so the war resumes until a new permanent order can be determined.

* A sidebar about Robert Forster. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and lived there when Forster's career was first blossoming. In our town he had his own adjectival phrase. It is no simple matter for a noun to get an adjective permanently attached to it. Las Vegas has one - fabulous Las Vegas Nevada. The House Ways and Means Committee has one - it's always the prestigious House Ways and Means Committee. In Upstate New York, Forster was always Rochester's own Robert Forster in all newspaper and TV reports, and that phrase is so ingrained in my consciousness that even today, although I have not lived in Rochester in three decades, I still slip occasionally and refer to him as "Rochester's own Robert Forster". Any upstate New Yorker of my generation would understand the reference immediately, but my fellow Texans give my some pow'ful strange looks when I do that.