Those who love Italian cinema know the name Guido from Federico Fellini’s famous 1963 film, 8½. Played by Marcello Mastroianni, Guido was the lead character, a famous film director suffering from a mental block, a condition exacerbated by sycophants, hangers-on, and phony friends. Guido’s “look”  ̶ that is, Mastroianni’s persona (sunglasses and a perpetually bemused expression)  ̶  became the essence of cool for the so-called Film Generation.

(Interestingly, another actor of Italic stock, the late Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was Sicilian/French, had also set the tone for “cool” a few years earlier as the charismatic young tough guy in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. His repetitive gesture of moving his thumb over his full lips became copied by all.)

In America, the name Guido is now used as a pejorative for Italians, often directed at young men obsessed with tanning and muscle-building.  And the turning point came in 1983 with the release of Risky Business, the teen sex-comedy which turned a then 19-year old Tom Cruise into a movie star. I was reminded of this when I recently saw the film on cable TV  ̶  a bit of a shock, as I can’t recall the film ever being shown that much at all. The programmers on cable must be tiring of their endless screenings of The Godfather. Yet this film shows not only the insidious power of cable TV  ̶  basically, a new form of unending propaganda  ̶  but how Hollywood’s denigration of the Italian American male image extends beyond simple “mob” stereotypes.

In Risky Business, Guido is a sleazy, slick-talking Chicago pimp, played by New Jersey-born actor Joe “Joey Pants” Pantoliano (from Hoboken, Sinatra’s hometown). He comes into contact with a naive suburban teen (Cruise) who hooks up with one of his prostitutes, played by Rebecca De Mornay (whose hooded, sly performance is still the best element in the movie). What put this image of the Italian male on the map was a famous car-chase scene in which Cruise, De Mornay and one of Cruise’s friends flee from an enraged, pursuing Pantoliano.

Cruise’s friend provided the punch-line which joined the pantheon of memorable movie quotes along with Vito Corleone’s “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” to wit: “I have a trig exam tomorrow and I’m being chased by Guido the Killer Pimp.”

On a recent (2017) interview clip on YouTube, the film’s director, Paul Brickman, shared that the film’s producer, record exec David Geffen, wanted Pantoliano fired. His reason? The character “wasn’t threatening enough.” In other words, Geffen wanted to make him even sleazier! Considering the gay Geffen’s own reputation in Hollywood (hearsay accounts note his own exploitation of young male actors in L.A.), this is the height of hypocrisy.

Guido the Killer Pimp was simply a codification of what Italian actors, male and female, still face in La La Land  ̶  an institutionalized bias that, so far, continues to elude any scrutiny by critics, historians, or reporters. It is no less than a modernized version of “Jim Crow” in the arts, though at least African Americans were still afforded work in the old South. In the new Hollywood, Italian surnamed actors are still allowed to work, but with a caveat: when they play Italian surnamed characters, those characters almost always have to be the epitome of scuminess. No heroism, please!

(Side-note: One wonders if this institutionalized media bias against Italians would have taken root if, for example, Louis Zamperini’s heroic WWII story (Unbroken) had been made when it was originally intended, that is, in the early 1950s. Yet it took another 50 years before it was finally turned into a film, and only then because of Lauren Hillenbrand’s own heroic work in promoting his story again via her 2010 book. And, of course, if Puzo had never written The Godfather in 1969, the Italian thug stereotypes of the 1930s and 1940s would have faded away  ̶  which, indeed, they were doing. His awful book  ̶  a book he himself admitted was terrible  ̶  was the literary equivalent of a heart defibrillator: He jolted those stereotypes back to life  ̶  and promptly killed Italian culture.

I found a WIKI bio of Joe Pantoliano (below). You can clearly see the prejudicial pattern mentioned above:

• He first grew to fame as “Guido the Killer Pimp” in Risky Business and continued to rise in 1985 when he appeared as the villainous Francis Fratelli in teen classic The Goonies. He gained fame among a new generation as Cypher in the 1999 landmark sci-fi film The Matrix and also won a Primetime Emmy Award as Ralph Cifaretto in HBO’s The Sopranos.
• Pantoliano is also known for his role as Eddie Moscone, the foul-mouthed, double-crossing bail bondsman, in the Robert De Niro comedy Midnight Run, and as the double-crossed mafioso Caesar in Bound, He also played Deputy U.S. Marshal Cosmo Renfro in The Fugitive along with Tommy Lee Jones and reprised the role in the sequel U.S. Marshals
• In 2003 Pantoliano replaced Stanley Tucci in the Broadway play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. That same year he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for The Sopranos.

The same pattern held true for the late Ray Liotta of Goodfellas fame who, as his obits noted, wasn’t Italian at all, mostly Scottish. He was adopted by loving Italian parents. What a way to pay them back by constantly playing violent Italian thugs or corrupt Italian cops!

But back to Pantoliano: that Emmy he won for The Sopranos was earned by playing one of the most violent characters in TV history: Ralphie Cifaretto, whose claim to fame was murdering his 20-year-old pregnant stripper-girlfriend by bashing her head against a metal garbage bin. Although that scene did bring some heat to the show via complaints of misogyny from Gloria Steinem and NOW, you can see that ultimately Hollywood didn’t care; they rewarded both the character and actor with an award. And Cifaretto’s exit from the show was just as grisly as his girlfriend’s: he was decapitated and had his head stuffed into a bowling bag.  (Chase probably got the idea from a terrible Joe Pesci film from 1997: Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag  ̶  just as he also probably stole the show’s mobster-in-therapy idea from a 1976 Saturday Night Live sketch with John Belushi as Don Vito Corleone . You can see the sketch on YouTube.)

As of late, Pantoliano is now choosing more “positive” Italian roles. In 2019, he appeared in From the Vine, it’s about a corporate executive who chucks it all to reclaim his grandfather’s vineyard in Italy. Significantly, this is a made-in-Canada film. If made in the U.S., his nonno would have been turned into a mafioso.

Actor and comedian Ray Romano, after playing a mob lawyer in The Irishman (also 2019), just announced a biopic of basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, whose legendary “Never give up!” speech a few months before dying of cancer continues to resonate in American sports culture.

Although I cheer both of these projects, are these possible examples of “too little, too late”,” just like Zamperini’s biopic, which came and went? The Italian American male image (as well as our women: think of the endless bimbos) has been so bruised and battered over the decades that any attempts at nobility ring false.

Speaking of bruised and battered, one of our few “positive” movie role models, Rocky Balboa, will be punched again: Actor Sylvester Stallone, who created the iconic boxer, has decided to cap his career (he turned 75 this year) with Tulsa King, about a mafia boss who is released from prison and decides to revive his old crime family  ̶  in Oklahoma, of all places. You can’t take these Italians anywhere.

When asked why a mob boss, Stallone said he’d never played one before. (Untrue: what about 1996’s spoofy Oscar?). He also said it was finally time to do so.

Stop and think about that last comment. Basically, Stallone is saying, “I’m an Italian male actor, so I have to play a gangster.” Really? I can’t ever recall Denzel Washington saying, “I’m a Black actor, so I have to play a pimp.”  I don’t recall Dustin Hoffman saying, “I’m a Jewish American, so I have to play a shyster.”

You can go down the entire ethnic/racial/religious and now, even sexual, line (do gay male actors feel compelled to play bathhouse managers?).

Perhaps, like the true Guido in 8½, Italian American actors need to remove their shades and clearly view the ugly chaos around them. -BDC