Al Capone shooting up the big screen with 'Cicero'

By Sarah Sluis

Can there ever be too many gangster movies? I've been dying over the bus ads for HBO's "Boardwalk Empire," which follows glamorous low-lifes in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the prohibition era. While I'll only have to wait a week to see "Boardwalk Empire," I'll also have a gangster movie to look forward to sometime in the future: Cicero.

Based on a screenplay by Walon Green, Cicero will follow Al Capone from his early days in Brooklyn through his move to Chicago. Variety described it as an old-fashioned story in the vein of 1930s gangster movies like Public Enemy, and I suspect that the script itself is also ancient. Green, who wrote The Wild Bunch back in 1965, has been working in television for the past decade, so it's likely that this script has been around for awhile--but that doesn't mean it won't be good.

There's some concern, however, that the gangster genre may be getting old. After all, 2009's Public Enemies made just under $100 million with a budget just that high. And Al Capone was covered in 1987's The Untouchables, and still sees frequent play on cable channels--could there be topic fatigue? On the flip side, the idea of American gangsters has traditionally been popular abroad, even more so than domestically, so unlike many movies about American history, this one won't have any problem appealing to international audiences.

Over at Cinematical, they put together a list of potential actors to play Al Capone. None of them seem quite right to me, but one had me intrigued. Could James Gandolfini pull off playing another gangster character believably, or is he so tied to his Tony Soprano character he could never don the gunstrap of Al Capone?