The opening credits of Spike of Bensonhurst (1988) play over a boxing match in which our hero, Spike Fumo (Sasha Mitchell), takes a theatrical dive. Yet when he wakes up the next morning there’s nary “a scratch on the kid,” as he narrates to his reflection in the bedroom mirror, a satisfied spectator to his own beauty, combing and primping before coming downstairs to the family table to be met by disapproving looks from the older generation for his elaborate coif and loud shirt. Like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977), which this early scene consciously quotes, Spike is an agile, shimmering, maybe only medium-sized fish in a small South Brooklyn pond. Like Tony, he looks forward to a climactic athletic competition. In his case, a big fight against an opponent with “both parents Italian.” And, he is marked for bigger things, namely an entry-level position with room for growth in the operation of local mafia boss Baldo Cacetti (Ernest Borgnine), while also being attracted to two young women who exert opposite gravitational pulls on him: Maria Pitillo, as Cacetti’s hair-crimping upwardly mobile daughter, and Talisa Soto as India, a Nuyorican from the slums of Red Hook, to which Spike is banished by Cacetti’s goons after his foot struts its way into his mouth one too many times. Also like Tony, Spike is an avatar of blue-collar virility, his head swollen with sexual self-confidence, his swagger so essentially guileless that it’s charming rather than threatening, cutting a more homoerotic figure than he knows.
Paul Morrissey’s camera adores this pouty, affable, casually idiotic stud, as it adored Joe Dallesandro in Flesh (1968). But as paired with the androgynous Soto, particularly when clad in matching skintight heroin-chic tank tops under the baking sun in a then-abandoned McCarren Pool, Mitchell is glossier than any Factory Superstar. Mitchell had modeled for the photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber, and Spike wears his hair in a pompadour, like two of Weber’s other fixations of the time, Chet Baker, subject of Let’s Get Lost (which, like Spike of Bensonhurst, had its world premiere at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival), and rockabilly throwback Chris Isaak, whom Weber photographed for Rolling Stone’s 1988 Fall Fashion special. In fact, there’s a distinct retro doo-wop vibe to the film, whose characters drive around in shark-finned vintage convertibles and chat in old Italian bakeries, and even, in Spike’s case, wear a covetable black satin baseball jacket with “Spike of Bensonhurst” in white lettering on the back.
The soundtrack, though, is contemporary, featuring wall-to-wall ‘80s Italian pop that’s too tinny, sincere, and cheesy to qualify as Eurodisco. There are multiple songs by the vocal group Ricchi e Poveri, 12th-place finishers at the 1978 Eurovision Song Competition. Most notable among these is the sugar-sweet “Sarà perché ti amo” (“It Must Be Because I Love You”), which plays over a slapstick race riot that looks backwards to the turf wars of Saturday Night Fever and also forward—strikingly so, with a pizza-place confrontation and baseball bat taken to a boombox—to the following summer’s Do the Right Thing. (Possibly this scene, triggered by the presence of Puerto Ricans in Bensonhurst, is Morrissey’s comparatively lighthearted take on the December 1986 hate-crime murder of Michael Griffith, a Black man set upon by neighborhood thugs in the unfamiliar territory of Howard Beach, Queens—an incident which heavily informed the racial politics of Spike Lee’s subsequent films.)
The loving, playful music covers everything, even Spike’s unresolved Madonna-whore issues and his Italian-chauvinistic disgust at the eye-opening poverty of Red Hook. Domestic scenes are seasoned with cussing more oafishly emphatic than flavorsome, and the mafia elements, with Borgnine playing bug-eyed and Annie De Salvo as his nails-on-chalkboard trophy wife, settle on a cutely mocking tone. Upon release, Roger Ebert compared the film to Married to the Mob (1988)—there are hoarse-voiced character actors and cameos like Sylvia Miles as a coked-up Bella Abzug type—but it’s a stretch in terms of the execution. The likable looseness of Morrissey’s filmmaking must be chalked up at least in part to an evidently choppy edit and a default to broadness for every setpiece. It might be more accurate to say that the film, with its guy-on-the-block grab-assy high spirits, bootstrappy moralism, and veneration of organized crime, attempts Demme-style humanism, but from the right. Its openness follows Spike’s own mookish and regressive, but essentially tractable naïveté about urban problems. And, the supporting actors who play the most problematic racial caricatures seem to be having fun with them. The ending, which flashes forward to an older, hardly streetwiser Spike muddling through domestic life, is a fascinating, unresolved jumble which builds on The Landlord’s ideas about the opposed forces of Brooklyn tribalism and interracial love, big themes that Spike meets with one last hapless, flirty shrug, showing off an easy-come-easy-go charisma not yet coarsened and ground down into bitter passivity by the realities of working-class life.
Spike of Bensonhurst screens tonight, September 5, at Metrograph on 35mm as part of the series “Leaving the Factory: Morrissey After Warhol.”
