“You Can Observe a Lot by Just Watching.”

A new old-joke: What’s rarer than Haley’s Comet? Punchline: an unbashedly positive movie about Italian Americans. 

The last one was in 2014 with the film version (finally!) of WWII hero Louie Zamperini’s amazing life in Unbroken. It did so-so at the box-office and received a few Oscar nominations in the technical categories. But did it effectively end Hollywood’s war against Italian American culture the way that 1990s Dances With Wolves finally did via Native Americans? Nope. 

Hello, Zootopia, The Accountant, The Irishman, Tulsa King (cable TV), the endless Godfather anniversary, etc.  And still to come: New father (at 79 years old) Robert De Niro’s Wise Guys, where he plays not one but two Italian American gangsters. Thank God De Niro isn’t really that talented. If he were at Alec Guinness’s level, we’d get an Italian American version of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), where Guinness played nine different characters. Yikes! 

To those of us starved for some positivity, the new 90-minute documentary on sports icon Yogi Berra, It Ain’t Over, more than fits the baseball glove. A labor of love initiated by friends of Berra’s family as well as his loving granddaughter, It Ain’t Over uses archival footage and talking head interviews to review Berra’s (yes) wonderful life –  not only as an underappreciated major baseball league player but as a father, husband, wit, and great American. 

From an Italian American perspective, one can’t help but express amazement at the unending string of Italian Americans either interviewed or seen in the movie. Berra’s family, for sure, but also people like Joe Torre, Joe Madden, Joe Girardi, Joe Garagiola (Berra’s childhood friend in St. Louis’s famous “Hill” neighborhood), Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Billy Martin, the recently deceased Joe Pepitone, etc. 

The other source of amazement – though not to observers like us – is that the continuous role which Italian Americans have played in baseball from the very beginning is never once acknowledged. Yet one only has to read Lawrence Baldassaro’s book, Beyond Di Maggio: Italian Americans in Baseball, to see how much our immigrant ancestors contributed to this “all-American” sport. Even Florida governor Ron DeSantis excelled in baseball while at Yale. 

Likewise, though Berra’s granddaughter eloquently points out the verbal abuse which Italian immigrants experienced upon arrival, neither she nor other talking heads connects that to how the media relentlessly caricatured Yogi over the decades. He was seen as a clown, a buffoon, an ape, and even a dimwitted cartoon character (Yogi the Bear). This disdain, of course, still continues in today’s media regarding Italian Americans. An opportunity was missed to note it. 

That said, Yogi ultimately had the last laugh, both as a baseball player (the most World Series wins) and as a beloved public figure (his witty aphorisms have become standard American truths). “You can observe a lot by just watching,” he once said. And audiences can also learn a lot by just listening. Berra’s one-liners represent Roman pragmatism at its best. Italians have been getting to the point much longer than Americans have – 2,500 years longer, to be exact. -BDC