Zinc coffins for gold boys

There was an app on Roku called Movieland that got removed because, as I understand it, it didn't really have the rights to show the things it had on. That's a shame, because there was some interesting-looking foreign stuff on there that I haven't seen anywhere else. One of the movies I got to watch before the app was removed was a West German "gangster" movie called Battle of the Godfathers.

Henry Silva, the only recognizable name if you don't know German cinema (and even though I speak German, I don't know German cinema well enough to recognize the rest of the cast), plays Luca Messina, an American mobster who has decided that he's going to expand by going from the US to... Hamburg. Needless to say, he doesn't really know the West German market, but he just knows that he can use overwhelming force to take over the underworld there. So he packs up his American cars and his mom, and also brings over his sheltered adult daughter Sylvia who doesn't really seem to know how her father has made his money.

As for the Germans, they're led by Otto Westerman, who has two adult sons. One is into boxing; the other one, Erik, knows fully well what his father is doing and knows that he's being groomed to go into the family business, which is something he doesn't particularly want to do. This explains why he's sent south to one of the industrial cities in the Ruhr valley and is able to avoid a good deal of the violence.

While Luca and Otto are using their mobs against each other, there's a plot twist that's not much of a plot twist at all, which is that Erik and Sylvia meet and fall in love, not realizing until much later who each other's father is the danger it poses for the two of them. Indeed, Otto even tries to kill Sylvia at her birthday party, which Erik had been invited to. And when they try to break free from their respective fathers' influences, they're still in danger even as Otto and Luca are still going after each other in the climactic chase.

Battle of the Godfathers is a movie that I'm probably being a bit harsh on, largely because of the production values. The movie itself looks like it was made on the cheap, but it definitely wasn't helped by the fact that the print Movieland had was badly dubbed, with some places leaving in the German dialog for several seconds at a stretch. (No wonder Movieland got removed from Roku.) It's fun enough if you like the low-budget European stuff that's not what Criterion thinks you should be watching in the world of foreign-language movies. And as I was watching, I coudln't help but think of an old American movie called The Guilty Generation that has much the same idea of the children of two gangsters falling in love with each other, not realizing who the other's father is.

If you could find a good copy of Battle of the Godfathers, I'd suggest giving it a watch, but the trouble is going to be in finding that good copy.