THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH
Directed by STEPHEN F. VERONA
and MARTIN DAVIDSON
Screenplay by STEPHEN F. VERONA, GAYLE
GLECKLER and MARTIN DAVIDSON
Too much here looks familiar. The Lords of Flatbush is about growing up tough in New York, like Mean Streets, and being a teen-ager in the 1950s, like American Graffiti. Although it was conceived before either of those films came out, The Lords occupies the same turf, without the same assurance.
Lacking the benefit of novelty, or of consistent personal voice, The Lords seems like pretty flimsy stuff. The script is a loosely structured series of anecdotes strung around the lives of several members of a Brooklyn street gang. Chico (Perry King) has the hots for a sprightly blonde (Susie Blakely) who occupies a bourgeois world he is both reacting against and aspiring to. Stanley (Sylvester Stallone), beefy and dim, is manipulated into marriage as easily as if he were some garden implement. The others, like Butchey (Henry Winkler) and Wimpy (Paul Mace), just sort of hang out and wait for the future to pass by.
The movie is adept at portraying aimlessness, getting at the greasy anomie that was so much a part of that time. But there is a lack of ambition, as if no one involved in creating the film wanted to cut deeper than a little double-edged nostalgia. The performances are mostly steady and likable, and there is a truly exceptional characterization by Sylvester Stallone, who invests the hulking Stanley with a punky dignity. In the movie's best scene, Stanley is wheedled, wept and screeched into buying a $1,600 engagement ring by his strident fiancee and her harpy pal. As the pressure mounts, Stallone's face goes through a generation of changes. In these few desperate moments, the viewer can see everything slipping away from Stanley, watch him feeling a loss that has not quite happened. J.C.