The elemental seed of ‘A Bronx Tale’ (1993) was a cold-blooded shooting outside actor and producer Chazz Palminteri’s door step, which along with other key memories of growing up in the Bronx Burrough of the sixties prompted him to write and perform a one-man play, enacting as many as 18 characters, helped by a single chair on stage.
Narrating the film story based on the play is Calogero (Francis Capra), an inquisitive resident of Belmont, Bronx, who is torn between two distinct and divergent philosophies, one sermonised by his biological dad, the conscientious MTA bus driver Lorenzo (De Niro) and the other advocated by his neighborhood mentor Sonny (Palminteri.)
The harder Lorenzo tries hard to keep Calogero away from Sonny’s world of crime and shady dealings, the more the son gets closer to the gang lord, who fondly calls him C. However, Sonny’s deep interest in C’s love life, as also the strong insistence on keeping him away from his foolish, spoilt brat friends ideally called for a more defined character arc; all of a sudden, Sonny ceases to look like a crime lord, as if he were the head of some parish, not some dreaded gangster.
How and why Lorenzo failed to keep his adolescent son away from Sonny also demanded some convincing preface, especially given his watchful guard ever since Calogero was a small child. The racial undercurrents of the narrative are rather hurriedly dealt with, and support characters like that of Calogero’s mom and girl friend are hazy at best.
The play couldn’t have asked for a better producer-director than Robert De Niro for the cinematic adaptation, who creates enduring magic on celluloid. The treatment is discernibly mathematical in its approach, neatly contextualizing key homilies and emblematic pieces of music from start till end. At times, it does feel a tad too simplistic for comfort (along the way, you get the hunch that the most powerful line "the saddest thing in life is wasted talent" will be echoed at the very end), yet, the predictability doesn’t take away even an ounce of the film’s earthy charm, largely given the powerful performances of the lead players. The dialogue is pithy and witty and rendered with aplomb.
Little surprise that the revival tour of the play is running to packed houses even in 2023.