Flashbacks.(Movie review)

During the seventies and early eighties, American movie audiences were treated to a proliferation of Italian-American stars. In Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" (1973), the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" (1972, 1974), and Sidney Lumet's "Serpico" (1973)--films that drew a dark curtain over America's perennial optimism--the ethnic white male, as portrayed by Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and others, suddenly became an acceptable hero. By the time De Niro delivered a startling portrait of his character's dispossession in Scorsese's "Raging Bull" (1980), the cheesy savoir-faire of the Wasp matinee idol of the thirties and forties had been entirely left behind.

Freaked-out times deserve freaked-out stars. The late, great Italian-American character actor John Cazale taught us something about marginalization with his intense introspection and physical awkwardness; Cazale married a Brando-influenced naturalism to a nearly mute, neurotic poeticism that was all his own. If we look back even farther, we can see that the Italian-American star in all his florid glory wouldn't even have existed had American audiences not first taken an interest in his Jewish counterpart. In "Body and Soul" and "Gentleman's Agreement" (both 1947), the first-generation American Jewish actor John Garfield captured a certain jittery postwar angst; no girl, it seemed, could kiss his anxiety away.

While some producers these days seem to prefer their ethnicity served up with jokes, the actor Chazz Palminteri (born Calogero Lorenzo Palminteri) has in the past done "ethnic" in a way that doesn't debase his Italian-American heritage. As Cheech, a gangster with the unsparing heart of a dramaturge, in Woody Allen's 1994 film "Bullets Over Broadway," Palminteri--who was nominated for an Oscar for the role--was, by turns, menacing, funny, and intelligent. He was just the kind of thug you'd like to have in your book group. He not only cut through all the intellectual pretensions that got on his nerves; he liked and understood what words could do.

With his hooded eyes, receding hairline, and long, expressive fingers, Palminteri has always had his own brand of sex appeal--one that is less frenetic than Pacino's, and deeper than De Niro's. In a way, the only thing that has kept him from being a star of their magnitude is his lack of idiosyncrasy. No matter what role Palminteri plays, you never get the sense that he is anything less than solid. He's no showoff. He wants to tell the story he needs to tell, and then get on with the day's work.

Palminteri began performing his one-man show, "A Bronx Tale" (now in revival at the Walter Kerr), Off Broadway in 1989. In this semi-autobiographical play about Italian-American life in a Bronx neighborhood in the nineteen-sixties, Palminteri takes on eighteen roles, including those of his younger self, his father, and a neighborhood gangster. This kind of approach--a script that doesn't require the star to interact with or play against other performers--offers a curious kind of freedom. But that freedom can be lethal for an actor who doesn't have a terrific range or a brutally honest director. Sadly, for this performance, Palminteri has neither. As helmed by the veteran director Jerry Zaks, who has won four Tonys (and who directed some twenty episodes of the hit television sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond"), "A Bronx Tale" is ultimately sunk by its weakest element: its sentimentality.

Here the young Palminteri is torn between being loyal to his father's views--respect your neighbors, don't hang with hoodlums or date black girls--and finding his own footing in life. All fluttery gestures and rapid breathing, he confronts the new world he longs to join. (And, of course, he eventually falls for a black woman.) When playing his younger self, Palminteri projects a kind of befuddled innocence. But it is "innocence" in quotation marks--it feels pasted on rather than lived. Oddly, the actor doesn't seem real in any of the parts that he has written for himself. And that's because the characters he ...