Him? Act? Ba-Da Bing!

Maybe it was the cannoli.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time a man lost his head over the crisp, delicate pastry shells stuffed with sweet mascarpone filling and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Didn’t “The Godfather’s” Clemenza urge an underling who had just carried out his kill order to “leave the gun, take the cannoli”?

When filmmaker Adam Rifkin became acquainted with Donnie Montemarano and his home-cooked Italian dishes at a Monday night football party more than a year ago, he fell under a spell. It was as if the indie director had met muse and dream chef rolled into one. Week after week he returned to Montemarano’s kitchen, where the 63-year-old charismatic cook, onetime capo in an organized crime syndicate on New York’s East Side and former federal convict, entertained with food and war stories.

The pasta puttanesca was good, but the banter was better. Whether Montemarano and his boyhood pal Vinny Argiro, 62, set out to argue politics, reminisce about growing up on the same street in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood or debate the merits of L.A. pastry shops, their dialogue crackled with the kind of pizazz screenwriters dream about.

“I came for the food, but the company was so good that I kept coming back,” Rifkin remembers. It soon occurred to him that Montemarano and Argiro were two characters in search of their own movie.

They now have it in “Night at the Golden Eagle,” a stylish neo-noir film that Rifkin wrote, directed and co-financed with producer and fellow gourmand Steve Bing. In the film, which opens Friday in limited release, Montemarano and Argiro play fictional characters loosely inspired by their real selves, and their chemistry on screen lends a lived-in charm to an otherwise intensely dark picture.

Montemarano makes a remarkable debut as Tommy, an ex-con protagonist all too eager to stumble back on the wrong side of the law on the day of his release from prison. He’s the kind of guy who can only play roughhouse and wreaks havoc on all those around him, especially his reformed lifelong buddy Mic, played by Argiro. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the title’s Golden Eagle, a crack-house hotel in downtown L.A. where ghosts of faded Hollywood glamour, pimping and murder are all among one night’s attractions.

On a recent spring afternoon, the two leading men, the director and the co-producer converged in Montemarano’s sunny Art Deco apartment in Westwood to talk about the movie. The setting was the well-stocked kitchen where “Night at the Golden Eagle” was hatched.

For most movie casts, reunions are rare, but in this case it was the replay of a weekly ritual: Montemarano and Argiro cooking and swapping repartee, with Rifkin and Bing piping up every now and then, but for the most part, eating and listening.

Scene: Montemarano is in the throes of preparing what everybody agrees is a “low-key” lunch, which comes with four courses and dessert. Below a battery of copper pots lined on the shelves of the kitchen cabinet, a large cooking stove has five burners going. Out of the industrial-size fridge, Montemarano whips out a bag of turkey sausages, fresh cuts of salmon and Chilean sea bass. He juggles the pots with the panache of a chef, even though his hands are sometimes unsure and things almost slip out of his grip.

Montemarano (stirring sauce in a monstrously large pan): “I never acted a day in my life. I had no idea I could act.”

Rifkin: “I told him, ‘Did you see the movie “Babe”? That pig looked like a good actor, didn’t he? You and Vinny are natural actors, just like the pig in “Babe.”’”

Montemarano: “I would just listen for my cue to come up. I was oblivious to everything else going on in a scene.

Argiro: “If I wanted to trip him up, I would say the script lines in my own words, and he would lose it.”

Rifkin (nibbling on French baguette topped with slivers of Fontina cheese and salami): “Donnie didn’t realize he was acting, but in fact he was.”

Montemarano: “That’s because my character in this movie was easy. Do I know how to curse? Yes! Do I know how to yell? Yes! Really, it’s just, ‘Say the words!’ A lot of words, if you ask me.”

The scene continues until all the cooking is done and everybody files into the dining room to eat.

Montemarano towers at the head of the table. He looks fit in spite of the array of health troubles that have plagued him since childhood. He wears glasses with a thin gold frame, a gold watch and a gold necklace. His hair is thinning, but he has powerful arms. A faded tattoo peeks from under the sleeve of his Taj Mahal concert T-shirt.

Only in the five years since he’s been out of prison has Montemarano begun going to rock concerts. He even checked out the Rolling Stones on their last U.S. tour, and you know what? He enjoyed it.

In his earlier years, Montemarano was involved with the Colombo family, one of New York’s organized crime clans. According to mid-’80s court documents, he rose to the rank of crew leader, or capo, under don Carmine Persico, and was known by the underworld moniker Donny Shacks. Tried in 1987 on charges of extorting money from New York City construction companies, he spent more than a decade in federal prisons serving part of an 18-year racketeering conviction.

It was behind bars that Montemarano took up cooking. He would fry onions and steam broccoli in his cell, on the back of an iron turned upside down.

“Cooking took my mind off where I was,” he says with a sigh. “It’s a joy to cook food and see people enjoy it.” Yet he cannot enjoy it much anymore. He’s on a special diet because of longtime heart troubles--which was why the day’s menu was steamed fish for himself and pan-fried turkey sausage for guests. He lost his bladder in 1985, and a bout with cancer in prison proved so debilitating that it resulted in Montemarano’s early release on probation in 1996.

When asked if he drew on experience to play the small-potatoes ex-con in “Night at the Golden Eagle,” Montemarano said all Tommy and he had in common was a prolonged stint “on vacation.” He certainly didn’t share his character’s basic philosophy. “This guy was robbing gas stations and stealing cars. He was a low-class criminal; he made $2,500 a week,” Montemarano says, wincing in distaste. “He wasn’t in the Mafia.”

“But both you and Vinny said that you knew guys like that,” director Rifkin interjected, and Montemarano agreed that they did.

These days, Montemarano is reluctant to discuss his onetime connection with the mob and looks almost pained by any mention of it. That’s because he made a break with his past, he declares; now he sticks to the roles of father, grandparent, friend and host in real life, and breaks the law only on screen.

If trouble seems to seek out the character Montemarano plays in the movie, it has clung to the actor himself.

Montemarano landed back in jail last year for allegedly violating the conditions of his parole. After four months in custody, he was released on bail at a February hearing where “Golden Eagle” co-producer Bing carted a prototype of the movie’s poster to court and showed it to the judge. For the time being, Montemarano whiles away in his apartment, where he has been under house arrest, awaiting, his lawyer explained, a resolution to his pending charges.

Montemarano may be grounded, but his acting career is taking off. Casting agents have gotten word of his performance in “Night at the Golden Eagle,” according to Bing, who says, “Donnie’s been terrific, and he and Vinny will surely be in more of our projects. It’s been a second career for someone in his 60s, and he’s still shocked about it himself.”

Shocked maybe, but not averse to it. “Being in a movie was such fun,” Montemarano says. He enjoyed the ambience on the set, which was familial and relaxed. “I never worked a day in my life, and I was there 17 hours a day,” he quips.

His own taste in movies favors old Hollywood pictures like “Gunga Din” and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” and John Wayne flicks. As for Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal Mafia trilogy, Argiro says, “I can recite every line from ‘The Godfather’ I and II. ‘The Godfather’ III, I refuse to watch again.”

“‘GoodFellas’ was terrible! How can you root for a rat?” he marvels.

Having finished the main courses, the table seems ready to debate the truly important matters. Like who portrays mobsters best in the movies. “The best Mafia guys are played by Jewish men like James Caan,” proclaims Montemarano. (Caan has a cameo role in the film.)

How about Al Pacino?

He’s good all right, accedes Montemarano, “but he also made a good cop in ‘Serpico’!” Pacino’s record as cinematic mobster is thus deemed inconclusive, and with that, the assembly attacks dessert: cannoli shipped from a Brooklyn pastry shop that has been stored in the freezer and thawed to delicious, airy perfection.