A big, sad-eyed man who took up acting at 53 and spent the next twelve years playing the mobster who stands behind the mobster. Joe Viterelli did one thing, did it with patience and good timing, and knew exactly what it was worth.
Fi1m perspective
Look for him at the edge of the frame. He is the large man behind the boss, hands folded, face like something left out in the rain, waiting for other people to finish talking. Joe Viterelli spent his whole career as the mobster's mobster, the enforcer, the loyal one, and he played it with a deadpan so complete that the joke was usually that nothing on his face moved at all. The menace was in the size. The comedy was in the stillness.
He did not act until 1990, when Sean Penn talked him into a part in State of Grace. He was 53. Before that he had run music schools, bars and a cleaning service, and driven a truck, and none of it seems to have been wasted: he sounded like New York because he was New York, and directors casting gangsters could hear it. Woody Allen gave him Nick Valenti, the gangster who bankrolls the play in Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and people started to notice. The part they remember is Jelly, Robert De Niro's endlessly patient henchman in Analyze This (1999), directed by Harold Ramis, which he played again in Analyze That (2002). That was his last film. He died in 2004, after more than forty of them.
What he had was timing, and a way of letting a little sadness show through a face built for intimidation, so that the henchman seemed to have a life he was not telling you about. Our review of Bullets Over Broadway had no room for him, and that is fair; it is Dianne Wiest's and Chazz Palminteri's film. But we will admit that every time Allen's camera found him we felt a small, disproportionate pleasure, because a man that size doing that little is funny before he opens his mouth, and Allen knew it. Shallow Hal (2001), where he played Steve Shanahan, was his one step away from the gangster type, and the film around him was too busy with its own sermon to give him much to do.
The complaint against him is the obvious one. The parts followed the Mafia stereotype and never asked him to stretch, and there is not much in the record to argue with that. He would not have argued either. Told that his fan mail came mostly from children, he said, "Look at me, I'm a role model." Forty films, one part, and no complaints from the man himself. Most actors who started at twenty would take that.
Biography
Joe Viterelli was an American actor best known for playing Italian-American mobsters. Born in New York City on 10 March 1937, he worked in business before entering acting in his early fifties.
He made his screen debut in State of Grace (1990) after Sean Penn offered him a role. Viterelli appeared in more than forty films, including The Firm (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994) as Nick Valenti, Eraser (1996), Analyze This (1999) and its 2002 sequel as Jelly, Mickey Blue Eyes (1999) and Shallow Hal (2001).
He died in Las Vegas on 28 January 2004, aged 66, from complications following heart surgery.
