The other day on the Laura Ingram Show (FOXNews), Ingram and comedian Jimmy Failla (Fail-la) mocked cable network AMC for putting what is called a ‘trigger warning’ on the Mob movie Goodfellas as it contains “language and/or cultural stereotypes” that may be offensive to some viewers.” Clearly an expansion of the new cultural sensitivities, Failla nevertheless condemned the warning, speaking “as an Italian American.” I thought this third-rate clown was Portuguese, but the AMC warning was too much for him to hide his ethnicity. His outrage is shared by many on the internet.
AMC isn’t banning Goodfellas from its rotation. Will the warning ‘ruin’ the movie for devotees? Isn’t Goodfellas a damaging stereotype? So, why all the whining?
For those of us who have been calling out Mafia movies for what they are—relentless fictional defamation of an entire ethnic group for over seven decades—our arguments have been either suppressed or ridiculed. “Get a life!” or “You gotta admit…” are the putdown lines from every film critic and Mafia movie-lover. Interviewers of Coppola, Scorsese, DeNiro, and the rest of the Mafia industry stars are forbidden to ask these purveyors of defamation any questions about the damage to Italian American image. But a trigger warning is now sending them into hissy fits. AMC is undermining democracy!
If you haven’t seen Goodfellas, you can catch it just about any day of the week on cable where it runs in an unending loop with the Godfather series and Casino. It is a brutal and bloody story of your average goombahs of Queens, NY. A few Irish wise guys (Conway, Hill, and Burke) are thrown in for the sake of truth, but they obligingly tap into their inner dago for motivation. Inspired by the Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport in 1978, the movie conveniently leaves out actual co-conspirators like Martin Krugman, Robert McMahon, Louis Werner, Peter Gruenwald, and even a Black guy (Parnell Edwards) and Hispanic (Tony Rodriguez). The movie is fully enveloped within Italian America culture, music, and ‘guidettes.’ Scorsese even threw in his own mother to cook for the gang and lend them a shovel to bury a victim. She may be the only innocent Italian in the movie. Apparently, a trigger warning on such a gross film is an insult to Scorsese’s late mother. [Our Bill Dal Cerro wrote a very revealing critique on Goodfellas in The Italic Way, Issue XLI, in our online Research Library.]
Unlike Goodfellas, The Godfather on AMC only received the standard “viewer discretion” about nudity, strong language, and violence rather than an ethnic warning. But on this Memorial Day weekend, let us point out the less noticed sin of The Godfather, Michael Corleone’s “military service.”
Author Mario Puzo, who wrote the book and co-wrote the screenplay, created Michael Corleone as an American patriot who enlisted in the Marines after Pearl Harbor, against the wishes of the Don. Not only did Puzo have Michael drop out of college to join the Marines, but he made him a war hero.
Puzo and Coppola wanted us to believe that this bigtime gangster family produced an all-American boy. So, off Michael goes to the Pacific, is wounded, decorated with the Navy Cross (just under a Medal of Honor) and promoted to Captain. At war’s end, he is dragged against his honest and patriotic nature into the family’s criminal enterprises. The Corleones are flexible.
Puzo no doubt knew of real Italian American war heroes like Marine John Basilone, awarded both the Navy Cross and the Medal of Honor, who returned to combat only to be killed at Iwo Jima. He was the only enlisted Marine to receive both of these decorations in World War II. Sounds like Puzo borrowed the Basilone story. (Search the internet and you will find alternate stories of Michael’s heroism. One has him fighting in the Italian campaign—at Monte Cassino, no less—where no Marines were ever deployed.)
What Puzo should have made Michael Corleone is a Black Market draft dodger during the war, that’s what gangsters were. Forging and stealing ration cards, hijacking trucks, raiding warehouses, controlling the docks, and arranging 4-F exemptions. That sort of background would have better prepared young Michael to replace the Don in real life.
Captain Corleone, pure fiction. -JLM
Brilliant piece, and so apropos for Memorial Day. Bravo!
Instead of Goodfellas, let’s start promoting “Greatfellas,”: Sgt. John Basilone, ace fighter pilot Don Gentile, Col. Henry Mucci (rescued Bataan Death March prisoners) and, of course, the late, great Louis Zamperini, whose long-delayed biopic finally became a reality in 2014 with Angelina Jolie’s film version of Unbroken.
Conversely, I think I’ve figured a way to deflate “gobba-ghoul”: We should start calling miseducated Italian Americans (of which there are millions) “gabba-goofs.”
The ribbon on Mike Corleone’s “fruit salad” is not the Navy Cross… it is the Silver Star, which is right below the Navy Cross…. Nonetheless, your point is well taken. I know my Dad was not too happy they made him a hero and a Marine. Dad could claim both and the Silver Star a few year later in Korea….