“Beware the ides of March,” said the soothsayer to Julius Caesar. Like their ancient forebear, Italian-Americans should have heeded such an augury. For on March 14, 1972, The Godfather premiered at the Loew’s State Theatre in New York. On March 24, it would open nationwide.
Though widely regarded as a cinematic masterwork, this motion picture resurrected a hoary stereotype, triggering the character assassination of a people that continues to this day.
The Godfather is not the stuff of Shakespeare, Sophocles or Pirandello. As cinematic epics go, Francis Ford Coppola’s abominable opus is no Citizen Kane or Casablanca. Rather, it should be placed alongside The Birth of a Nation and Song of the South as cinematic offal we must refuse.
Indeed, this Mario Puzo potboiler-turned-Hollywood flick institutionalized anti-Italian bigotry in the media. The Godfather Effect — and the reflexive schadenfreude it engendered — reinforced the notion that organized crime is predominantly the province of the scions of Italy. In the ensuing decades, this prejudice became a socially acceptable billion-dollar entertainment industry.
The Russian Solntsevskaya Brotherhood, Colombia’s Cali Cartel, Japan’s Yakuza and the Mexican Mob are among the largest criminal organizations operating in the United States and across the planet. In 2011, James “Whitey” Bulger — the highest-ranking organized crime figure on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List — was captured. As author T.J. English noted, Bulger was “an old-style Irish-American mob boss from around the way.” Nevertheless, since the premiere of The Godfather, there has been a marked increase in films and TV shows featuring Italians as mobsters.
Think Goodfellas, Casino, Donnie Brasco, Married to the Mob, Prizzi’s Honor, Mafia Princess, Honor Thy Father, The Last Mafia Marriage, Wise Guys, Analyze This, The Untouchables, A Bronx Tale, The Sopranos, Mafia!, The Family, Shark Tale, Zootopia, Mob Wives, The Many Saints of Newark, PBS’s Godfathers of the Renaissance and Lilyhammer. A prominent Mafioso in this year’s The Batman is the fictional Carmine Falcone, portrayed by John Turturro.
Lest we forget, Don Vito Corleone was a fictional capo who was somewhat based on Mario Puzo’s mother. El Chapo, a.k.a. Joaquin Guzman Loera — the murderous drug kingpin of the Sinaloa cartel — is a real-life criminal overlord. Arnold Rothstein, who nearly toppled baseball in the Black Sox scandal, reigned as America’s first major drug kingpin. Gabriel Kenigsberger is a real-world drug boss with links to Colombia’s Oficina de Envigado — an organization connected to the Medellin underworld. He masterminded the flow of cocaine to European crime syndicates, the Japanese Yakuza and Israel’s “Jerusalem Mafia.”
Journalist Alexander Cockburn noted that following the upheavals of the 1960s, Americans yearned for “a strong image of the family and thus turned with relief to the Family invented by Mario Puzo in ‘The Godfather.’ ”
What makes all this especially rich is that Coppola admitted he had no knowledge of the Mafia: “We staged it,” he told Cigar Aficionado. “We just said, ‘OK, you sit here and you sit here.’ We used common sense and, as I said, I used things I remembered from my family. But I didn’t know. I’d never been around a Mafia family. I have no idea. I just assume they’re like an Italian family.”
Indeed, Paramount’s Robert Evans underscored why he chose Francis Ford Coppola to helm The Godfather: “He got the nod. … And one thing we did, we smelled the spaghetti.” Coppola has had no qualms about demonizing a people whose ancestors hailed from the land John Milton called “the seat of civilization.”
Like African-Americans and Jews, Italian-Americans have long endured the slings and arrows of outrageous prejudice: From the 1891 mass lynching in New Orleans to the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti to internment in World War II as “enemy aliens.”
Even Middle America considers Italians a breed apart. In 2006, the Sam Rotolo Middle School in Batavia, Ill., staged Fuggedaboudit — a children’s play that billed itself as “a little mobster comedy.” Students calling themselves the “Bada Bing Players” portrayed thuggish characters straight out of The Godfather and The Sopranos.
And talk about strange bedfellows. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump cite The Godfather as a favorite. Commenting on Geraldine Ferraro during her 1984 vice-presidential campaign, Sam Donaldson declared: “Italian-Americans should expect the press to pursue allegations linking them to the Mafia.”
Where are the films, plays and television programs exploring the lives of, say, Filippo Mazzei, who first declared “All men are created equal”; Ferdinand Pecora, whose legal brilliance held Wall Street accountable for the Great Crash of 1929; A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America; physicist Enrico Fermi; International Space Station commander Samantha Cristoforetti; economist Mariana Mazzucato; astronaut Michael Massimino; astronomer Carolyn Porco or Dr. Anthony Fauci?
Isn’t about time for the media to leave the venom and embrace the patrimony? –RAI
[This essay was published as an Op-Ed in the NY Daily News, 19 March 2022]
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