The verdict: One of those movies you shouldn't refuse.
That North vs. South thing causes agita in Italy, too

Ten years before Marlon Brando's Don Corleone made anyone an offer he couldn't refuse, there was "Mafioso," a cunning Mafia-themed movie that's partly a broad comedy and partly an almost existential meditation on identity.
Released in 1962, but only briefly glimpsed in the United States two years later, the film stars the incomparable Alberto Sordi, whom some may remember from the early Fellini films "The White Sheik" and "I Vitelloni." He plays Antonio "Nino" Badalamenti, a supervisor at a gleamingly sterile, white-on-white Fiat factory in Milan, who decides to take his family to visit his birthplace, Calamo, in Sicily, which they've never seen. It's also a homecoming of sorts for Nino; he hasn't been back in eight years.

A refined northern Italian blonde with those pert Barbie features so popular in the early '60s, Nino's wife, Marta (Norma Bengell), and their fair-haired little daughters make a striking contrast to the ebullience and earth tones prevalent in tiny Calamo. Think "Meet the Parents," Italian style (only much better).

The town's de facto patriarch is the elderly Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio), a mob boss who's known how to get things done for decades. One character recalls a company from the mainland that "didn't kiss our backs, so their equipment caught fire."

As Marta slowly wins over her in-laws (who include Nino's malevolent mom and mustachioed sister), her husband is ecstatically proud, with a sort of puppylike rapture Sordi captures brilliantly. Everything's perfect, except, Don Vincenzo wants one little favor ...

One doesn't want to fall into the trap of trumpeting every little-known movie made before 1970 as a masterwork, but "Mafioso" is, in its way, a minor classic. Alberto Lattuada (who co-directed Fellini's "Variety Lights") deftly lays out the culture clash between hard-working, humorless northern Italy vs. the opera buffo enthusiasm of the south, most particularly Sicily.

Further, the film ripens in an unanticipated way, nimbly shifting from near-farce to something quite a bit darker.

Thomas Wolfe said it most famously: You can't go home again. "Mafioso" tells us we can, but at our own risk.

Starring Alberto Sordi and Norma Bengell. Directed by Alberto Lattuada.
Not rated but there is brief, Mafia-style violence. In Italian with subtitles.
At Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema. 1 hour, 39 minutes.