Tony Musante

Tony Musante, the fine character player and sometime leading man, passed away just before Thanksgiving.  As a belated tribute, I've extracted this excerpt from Dirty Old New York Subway, entirely devoted to Larry Peerce's overwrought, though not uninteresting post-Kitty Genovese drama The Incident, which marked Musante's first starring role in a feature film.

Musante later headlined the tv series Toma, which was reworked into Baretta, starring Bobby Blake. Some of his subsequent feature roles included starring in Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Fleischer's sublime The Last Run, Corbucci's The Mercenary, Stuart Rosenberg's The Pope of Greenwich Village, and Aldrich's The Grissom Gang.  He slowed down in the '80s and '90s, but was quite memorable as Nino Schibetta in the first season of Oz and later appeared in James Gray's much-admired We Own the Night.  

I had the good fortune to see Musante at Anthology Film Archives in the last year or so, on hand to discuss his work in Bird with the Crystal Plumage following a 35mm screening.  

From the pre-PG-13 days, when a GP (later PG) often indicated a film made by and for adults.