Like many Americans I was addicted to the 1959 series The Untouchables, aka “cops & wops” which ran to 1963. And like a tag team bout, that series spawned a nationally televised reality show in 1964 with mobster Joe Valachi testifying before a Senate committee on the newly named La Cosa Nostra. Then came Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the book and then a film in 1972, The nation now had a decade of “proof” that organized crime was invented and propagated by Italian Americans.
An older generation of our leaders and celebrities were aghast at this scarlet letter: Judge Michael Musmanno, who had debunked the Viking Vinland map, John LaCorte, who fought to name the Verrazzano Bridge, Peter Sammartino, who founded Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ), Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and others. But the younger generations embraced the infamy as entertaining and a welcome relief from Italian images as organ grinders and Chico Marx.
They became infatuated with cinematic Italian American criminals, now fully drenched in our subculture. These were now Italian American actors assembled by an Italian American director with a musical score by Italian composer Nino Rota. The real stuff!
Movie reviewers were agog. They were amazed that a new movie genre was born in which there were no “good guys” only sadistic thugs who set their own moral values. These thugs were family men with a code of honor; men you could consider “good guys” in a relative sense. But some movie critics saw that The Godfather locked in a stereotype of all Italian Americans as thieves, murderers, or connected to an underworld by the proverbial 6-degrees of separation. What to do?
The last refuge of a defamer is to call his work “art.” Art can do no wrong. Art has its own license. Godfather director Francis Coppola came up with one better. His movie was actually about the “evils of uncontrolled capitalism,” not Italians, they are just colorful bystanders.
This is the cover story that propelled the Mafia Movie Industry lo these past 66 years. To those yet in denial that we have been made fools of for six decades there was the refrain that people will get tired of mafia movies and they will fade away. In the case of The Godfather, it has become a wildly profitable “franchise.” Not just a series of movies it is a comprehensive brand that extends to other products like novels, video games, and merchandise, creating value across multiple businesses. Adjusted for inflation, its theatrical run is worth more than $2 billion and hundreds of millions more in profits through video sales, television rights, and other ancillary markets over the decades.
Recently, Apple+ released a 5-part documentary on Martin Scorsese, mafia-monger of Goodfellas and Casino, which make the fictitious Italian American gangsters of The Godfather franchise look like Nobel Peace Prize candidates. The subject of the documentary is being hailed as God’s gift to humanity. Critics are continuing to play us for fools by not even hinting at gross stereotyping or ethnic defamation by Scorsese.
Newsday’s Robert Levin, probably Jewish, wants us to believe that Scorsese’s deprived Italo characters represent “all of us,” and their “capacity for violence lies within us all.” What Italian stereotypes?
For those who have seen Goodfellas, you know that DeNiro plays the real Irish American Jimmy Burke and Ray Liotta plays the real Henry Hill an Irish-Italian crook. Lorraine Bracco plays Henry Hill’s Jewish wife Karen Friedman. Karen is portrayed as a nice Jewish girl drawn into an all-Italian nightmare world. At first, she is seduced by the glamour and easy money but later tries to escape. In truth, as her own children reported, Karen “…started using large amounts of the cocaine that Henry was both using and selling…[she] would have people over to their house for wild, cocaine-fueled parties during which partiers would have sex in plain sight…and sometimes even offer the kids a snort” (AllThatsInteresting.com). Funny how that didn’t make it to Goodfellas.
Nor did the monstrous deeds of DeNiro’s Irishman. Henry Hill claimed that Jimmy Burke was directly responsible for at least 60–70 murders. But in Goodfellas Burke was “Jimmy the Gent,” never down and dirty.
For too many mafia-movie fans in our community, being taken for fools is great with popcorn. ‒JLM
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