It's every marketer's dream. To tie the customer to a chair, threaten them with dastardly consequences and say: "I'm making you an offer you can't refuse". Then offer up their product whether it's cars or meat or the end of season sale.
The line was first whispered by Don Corleone in The Godfather in 1973 - Marlon Brando was planning to transfer a horse's head to a film producer's bed I recall - and it has been rumbled out in countless commercials ever since. Yes, marketers like that kind of offer.
I don't. I find gangsters and their bullying and torturing, stomach-churning. They do not favourably dispose me to a product. So am I supposed to laugh and enjoy a sense of fellow-feeling when a South American drug boss tortures a bound and hooded Aussie chef with a meat cleaver?
The product in this case is the Oporto chicken restaurant chain. The premise is strong - they are adding steak to the menu after nearly 30 years of chickens so they have a high perception wall to climb.
The commercials are cleverly made and acted parodies of the gangster movie, talking about only the finest Aussie grass-fed steak and beating up on a chef who had produced microwaved frozen steaks.
But under the comedy there is the violence that is too real in places like Mexico and Colombia. Remember it is happening right now across the Pacific.
Even M&Ms face gangland butchery. The round yellow chocolate bean sits innocently as a fierce Russian gangster don vividly describes how the sweet will be chopped and diced and sprinkled on ice cream. Fortunately in Russian, which M&Ms don't understand.
Who would have thought of a Mafia scenario to sell e cigarettes? Remember I've been telling you about their booming growth? Well now they're even in the hands of the Mob. Redon Productions of the UK have made a typical 'victim in the back of the ute' commercial. This time he escapes by showing off his cigarettes - electronic cigarettes called White Fog. Well, it's nicely filmed even if I don't get the connection.
What about exaggeration? Last year a European commercial for Nissan Patrol depicted a mafioso leaving an assignation when his car is blown up. Massive clouds of smoke, car disappears. Some seconds later it lands back on earth, intact, and is driven away. That's puffery.
When The Godfather was first filmed, the Italian community in New York objected to what they regard as the dark side of their history. Its huge success confirmed their fears that they would be seen as brutal gangsters and they are still sensitive to the parody.
In Spain a restaurant chain called La Mafia traded from 2000. But last year they started to be noticed in Italy and the pizza hit the fan. “Can you imagine what would happen in Spain, if Italy opened a pair of restaurants dedicated to terrorists from ETA?” La Repubblica’s veteran Mafia writer, Attilio Bolzoni, declared. And certainly the 34 eateries are already doing a roaring trade in Italian dishes at a price range you can't refuse.
This fascination with crime is an ancient expression. You'd always raise a good crowd for the public executions in days gone by. Quentin Tarantino creates brutal characters who audiences find funny because they spout poetry even as they murder.
And we're prime subjects here in Melbourne, where the string of Underbelly TV series have brought this town fame and notoriety, and coach tours of the killing streets of Melbourne.
