On Friday, October 24th, in an event sponsored by Cinema/Chicago in conjunction with the Chicago International Film Festival, director Spike Lee was interviewed by Dr. Jacqueline Stewart, film professor at the University of Chicago and host of “Silent Cinema Sundays” on TCM (Turner Classic Movies). Alas, a prior event kept me from attending. 

Curiously, as I write this blog, no mention of Lee’s visit managed to make the local papers. This is rather surprising given his love of controversy. To borrow the title of a play by the great African American playwright August Wilson, “Spike Lee’s Come and Gone!” 

(Sidenote: To show how complex American history can be, playwright Wilson was actually the son of a German immigrant father and was christened Frederick August Kittel, Jr. Pappa Kittel abandoned the family, a move which later inspired August to change his surname to Wilson to honor his hard-working Black mother. Also interesting: Wilson grew up in a racially mixed area of Pittsburgh with Jewish American and Italian American families, both of whom are alluded to in his many plays.) 

As a former film study teacher, I applaud Lee’s undeniable role in American film history. He blazed a trail for African American filmmakers, expanding upon earlier, even heroic, work by directors Oscar Micheaux, Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles, Robert Townsend, Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. 

But as an Italian American, I’ve long been both baffled and disappointed by the endless caricatures of my community in Lee’s over-all oeuvre. 

For example, in Do The Right Thing, arguably his best film, a pizzeria owner instigates a race riot. In Jungle Fever, an Italian American father discovers that his daughter is dating a Black man and beats her to a pulp.  In Summer of Sam, Italians are portrayed, to use New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman’s words, as “drug-and-sex-crazed louts and gangsters.” In his 2008 WWII epic, The Miracle of St. Anna, Lee even managed to insult the Italians by suggesting that partisan freedom fighters aided the Nazis. 

In Lee’s defense, Hollywood’s dim view of Italian Americans gave him safe haven via fairness and balance. It certainly didn’t help that a trio of misguided Italian American filmmakers—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and (on HBO) David Chase—vivified such stereotypes, using “art” as a veneer to sterilize them. D.W. Griffith portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroes in his 1915 civil war epic Birth of a Nation and is condemned; Coppola treats mafia killers as heroes in The Godfather films and is revered. Say what? 

The ultimate victim in all of this is history, specifically, the history between African Americans and Italian Americans—which, as author John Gennari notes in his 2017 book Flavor and Soul: Italian America at its African American Edge—is far more complex than anything in Hollywood’s narrow universe. 

If Lee’s films are your guide, you would never know that jazz band leader Joe Marsala (also from Chicago) broke the color barrier in jazz by hiring African American musicians (1936); that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed the first Black female judge in the US (Jane Bolin, 1939); that Congressman Vito Marcantonio and labor leader Emma Bambace fought endlessly for civil rights (1940s); or that Frank Sinatra used his clout to open doors for fellow artists like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Quincy Jones (1950s).

Similarly, you wouldn’t know that after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant in 1958, Dr. Emil Naclerio was part of the surgical team which saved his life; that Tony Bennett (born Anthony Benedetto) marched with Dr. King years later in Selma; that Berry Gordy’s right-hand man at Motown Records was Baldassare Ales (1960s); or that Ella Grasso, first female US governor elected in her own right (Connecticut, 1974), had, decades earlier as a state senator, sponsored anti-discrimination laws.

The 1970s, of course, is when the Godfather movies made their mark. Coppola’s one-two cultural gut-punch solidified a stereotype that rivals the staying power of any vampire, be it courtly Count Dracula or the ashen-faced Edward Cullen in Twilight. Mobster and moron images continue to suck Italian American culture dry, even in 2025. 

To his credit, Lee credits an Italian American director, Martin Scorsese, as being a friend and mentor. He also is fan of filmmaker Vincente Minelli, father of Liza and a recognized master of the Hollywood film musical. (In fact, Minelli directed one of the few early Hollywood movies with an all-Black cast: 1942’s Cabin in the Sky). 

And as someone who grew up as one of the few African Americans in a virtually all-Italian neighborhood in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, Lee admits that, after a few initially unpleasant encounters, neighbors largely accepted him. Even la bell’ italia, despite his previous dis of their history, has embraced him; he does TV commercials for FIAT—no mean fiat! 

Movies are like life: You can’t go back and change them. Sadly, Lee’s caricatures of Italian Americans will live on for future generations. What’s sadder is that Italian American organizations (other than the Italic Institute, of course) never publicly challenged Lee’s view of us, then or now. To use the popular Black expression, “That ain’t right.”  ‒BDC