The plot of Gone with the Pope is this. A gangster kidnaps the Pope and holds him for ransom, demanding one dollar from every Catholic on the planet.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it is not a joke premise from a comedy. It is the sincere, fully committed idea of a Palm Springs nightclub crooner who financed his own movies with his singing money, and it is at the center of what might be the single greatest preservation story in cult film history. Grindhouse Releasing is finally putting both of Duke Mitchell’s features together in high definition this August, and if you care at all about how movies get rescued, this one deserves your attention.
The Man Who Answered “The Godfather” From a Nightclub
Duke Mitchell was an Italian-American singer and entertainer who called himself Mr. Palm Springs, and if his name rings a distant bell, it may be from an entirely different corner of film history. In the early fifties, Mitchell was half of a Martin and Lewis imitation act with Sammy Petrillo, a partnership immortalized in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, a film with a well-earned reputation among connoisseurs of the spectacularly misguided.
Two decades later, watching The Godfather clean up, Mitchell decided he could do it better and more honestly. So he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Massacre Mafia Style, playing Mimi Miceli, the son of a Mafia kingpin who carves a path through Hollywood. He funded it himself, out of his own pocket, from nightclub earnings. He shot in venues he actually performed in. The advertising promised more guts, more action, and more dynamite than Mario Puzo’s version, and while that is obvious hyperbole, the film delivers a species of unhinged low-budget violence that genuinely has no equivalent. It was later seized in the UK, which in that era functioned as a kind of backhanded honor.
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Then he made Gone with the Pope, shooting guerrilla style with almost nothing but 35mm short ends, the leftover scraps at the end of film reels, and somehow got footage in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Lake Arrowhead, and Rome. There are shots of Mitchell walking in slow motion past the Stardust in its full neon glory that would justify the restoration on their own.
He died in 1981, at fifty-five, with the film unfinished.
A Garage, a Mislabeled VHS, and Fifteen Years
Here is how it came back, and the chain of coincidence is remarkable.
In the mid-nineties, Bob Murawski and Sage Stallone, who would go on to found Grindhouse Releasing in 1996, were shown a rare VHS of a forgotten independent mob film circulating under the title The Executioner. That was Massacre Mafia Style. They were sufficiently astonished to track down Jeffrey Mitchell, Duke’s son, and it was only through that conversation that they learned a second film existed at all, sitting in storage as largely unassembled raw footage and a workprint.
Murawski then spent fifteen years finishing it. Assembling a dead director’s movie from surviving elements, without the man there to tell you what he intended, is an act of interpretation as much as restoration, and it is a staggering commitment of time for a film with no commercial guarantee whatsoever. Gone with the Pope finally premiered at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in 2010, roughly thirty-five years after the cameras rolled.
Murawski has said that of every film he has been involved with, this is the one he is proudest of. That is worth pausing on, because the man edited Spider-Man and Army of Darkness and won an Academy Award for The Hurt Locker. He would rather talk about the crooner’s Pope movie.
Fathers, Sons, and Unfinished Business
There is a poignancy running underneath all of this that nobody planned.
Duke Mitchell did not live to finish his film. His son Jeffrey kept the footage. It was found and championed by Sage Stallone, himself the son of an enormously famous father, who appeared in Rocky V and Daylight and then spent his energy building a company devoted to rescuing exactly this kind of orphaned cinema. Sage died in 2012 at thirty-six, two years after that Egyptian premiere and before these definitive home video editions reached shelves.
So this release is the completion of work started by two young men on behalf of a filmmaker neither of them ever met, and one of them did not live to see it finished either. That is a lot of weight for a movie about kidnapping the Pope to carry, and somehow it carries it.
What Is On the Discs
Grindhouse has earned its reputation as the Criterion Collection of cult, having previously restored Fulci’s The Beyond, Cannibal Ferox, and Cannibal Holocaust, and the supplements here are characteristically obsessive.
Massacre Mafia Style comes with interviews featuring Jeffrey Mitchell, Frankie Ray, George Jacobs, Jim LoBianco, and exploitation legend Matt Cimber, plus nearly a full hour of Duke Mitchell home movies, a lost audio recording of Mitchell performing live in June of 1960, still galleries, radio spots, and the trailer. It also includes a bonus television special, An Impressionistic Tribute to Jimmy Durante, which tells you something about how thoroughly this label documents a life rather than just a filmography.
Gone with the Pope brings interviews with Jim LoBianco, John Murgia, cinematographer Peter Santoro, editors Bob Leighton and Robert Florio, and Cimber again, alongside footage from the 2010 Hollywood premiere, deleted scenes, bloopers, liner notes by horror novelist John Skipp, and a bonus CD of the soundtrack, available for the first time.
Cimber’s presence across both is a nice bonus for anyone who has followed our coverage of his work, including The Black Six, where his strange and genuinely versatile career came up at length. He is one of the great connective figures of American exploitation, and getting him on the record twice here is its own small archival win.
Why This One Counts
We spend a great deal of time around here arguing that the object matters and that boutique labels are performing preservation work the major studios will not touch. This is the purest possible version of that argument.
Nobody was going to rescue Duke Mitchell. There was no rights holder with an incentive, no algorithm surfacing him, no institutional memory keeping his name alive. Two guys watched a mislabeled VHS, got obsessed, and gave fifteen years to finishing a stranger’s movie because they thought it deserved to exist.
