A year before The Godfather would revolutionize the crime genre, Robert De Niro replaced its star Al Pacino in the cast of a critically panned gangster comedy, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Jimmy Breslin, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight is a comedic retelling of the life of gangster Joe Gallo. Jerry Orbach starred in the lead role as Salvatore “Kid Sally” Palumbo, while an early-career De Niro played the supporting role of Mario Trantino.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was directed by James Goldstone, who had previously helmed a couple of season 1 episodes of Star Trek, from a screenplay by Waldo Salt, who wrote the Oscar-winning scripts for Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home. It was released on December 22, 1971, just a few months before The Godfather would become a blockbuster box office hit. The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was nowhere near as successful — and it could’ve kept Pacino from playing Michael Corleone.

Al Pacino Left The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight For The Godfather & Was Replaced By Robert De Niro

Francis Ford Coppola Wanted To Direct The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight Before The Godfather

Producer Irwin Winkler, who would win the Academy Award for Best Picture a few years later for his work on Rocky, opened up about what went wrong with The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight in his 2019 memoir, A Life in Movies: Stories from Fifty Years in Hollywood. Pacino was the first choice for De Niro’s role, but he dropped out when he got the opportunity to join Marlon Brando in the cast of The Godfather. De Niro, who would later win an Oscar for his role in The Godfather Part II, was brought in to replace him.

Winkler’s memoir also notes that Francis Ford Coppola originally asked if he could write and direct The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Winkler turned him down, because he didn’t think Coppola had the chops to make a movie about the mafia. After being denied the job, Coppola would get to work on the definitive mafia movie, The Godfather — and poached one of Winkler’s actors to play his lead character.

Why The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight Failed

It Just Isn’t Very Funny

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was widely panned by critics, earning a dismal Rotten Tomatoes score of just 20%. The fact of the matter is that, for a comedy, it just isn’t very funny; the performances are too broad and the direction is too heavy-handed.

In his memoir, Winkler wrote that Goldstone was more concerned with keeping the schedule than working with the cast on their characters, so the final product didn’t really work as a comedy (or even just as a story).

Source: A Life in Movies: Stories from Fifty Years in Hollywood by Irwin Winkler