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Italian-Americans in Film:
From Immigrants to Icons
Carlos E. Cortes
Universityof California,Riverside
During the first two decades of the silent era, Italian-Americans and
other European immigrants became a favorite motion picture topic. In
general, films portrayed European immigrants in jocular terms, as people
with odd, quaint, humorous customs, but customs that could be "cured"
with the proper dose of Americanization. In fact, learning to be Ameri-
can became a common subtext of these early immigrant films.1
At times, as in EleventhHouse, The Organ Grinder (1909), Tony America
(1918), and the early minor classic, TheItalian(1914), laughter gave way
to seriousness. In the latter, for example, an Italian immigrant couple
struggles to build a new life on New York City's Lower East Side.
However, their efforts end in tragedy when their baby becomes sick and
dies during a heat wave, as poverty prevents them from obtaining the
hygenic food needed to pull him through the crisis.
Movies like TheItalianprovided a more solemn look at the underside of
the immigrant experience, in which slums, poverty, low-paying jobs, and
societal prejudice impeded the progress and sometimes even threatened
the survival of Italian-Americans and other immigrants. However, so
some movies proclaimed, these obstacles could be overcome by a com-
mitment to becoming American, a strong tug at one's own bootstraps,
and the appropriate helping hand from concerned mainstream Ameri-
cans. In fact, film Italian-Americans occasionally achieved the American
Dream, like dressmaker Tito Lombardi in Lombardi, Ltd.(1919). In the
1918 comedy, My Cousin(1918), the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso,
plays the dual roles of two upwardly-mobile Italian immigrant cousins,
one an operatic tenor, the other a struggling (and ultimately successful)
sculptor.
These gently humorous, occasionally serious portrayals of Italian-
Americans and other European immigrants stood in sharp contrast to
the film depictions of "colored"Americans - blacks, Mexican-Ameri-
ITALIAN-AMERICANS IN FILM 109
The coming of sound to motion pictures in the late 1920s and the
arrivalof the Great Depression combined to create a veritable revolution
in Hollywood filmmaking. Sound gave Hollywood the capacity to
heighten impact through spoken dialogue, fully-orchestrated recorded
music, and often-jarring sound effects. At the same time, the depression
forced Hollywood to contend with the dramatically changing social
conditions. Many filmmakers responded by grinding out escapist enter-
tainment to draw diversion-seeking Americans into the theatre. Others
attempted to engage the depression seriously, including the societal
problems that both contributed to and resulted from the catastrophic
economic collapse. Italian-Americans played a key role in many such
films, especially in social dramas.
Hollywood had long been fascinated with crime.3 After all, crime
meant conflict, and conflict attracted audiences. But with the depression,
this fascination with crime became focused on the special problem of
gangsterism, particularly ethnic gangsterism as a barometer of the
nation's social ills. In the forefront of Hollywood's inspection of gangster-
ism stood three ethnic groups: Chinese-Americans, in such films as
Chinatown Nights (1930) and The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1935); Irish-
Americans, in movies like Public Enemy (1931) and The Roaring Twenties
(1939); and, most extensively and totemically, Italian-Amerians.4
In fact, Italian-American gangsters became a major film personifica-
tion of America's social failures, including the crisis of the increasingly
elusive American Dream. Frustrated in their efforts to grasp The
ITALIAN-AMERICANS IN FILM 111
Hollywood's wartime crusading zeal did not end with the conclusion
of military hostilities. After all, this had not simply been a military
ITALIAN-AMERICANS IN FILM 113
struggle. It had been a war against evil, including the evil of ethnic
oppression. With the war over, Hollywood turned its attention from the
external evils of nazism and fascism to such internal evils as ethnic
discrimination and inequitable social conditions. Hollywood focused
most of its anti-prejudice attention on racism against blacks (Pinky
1949), Hispanic-Americans (A Medal for Benny - 1945), Indians (Broken
Arrow - 1950), and Asian-Americans (Bad Day at BlackRock- 1954). But
filmmakers also expressed concern about bigotry against white ethnics,
such as Jewish-Americans (Crossfire- 1947) and Polish-Amerians (Satur-
day'sHero - 1951). Italian-Americans also received attention.
At times the struggle of Italian-Americans to overcome social inequi-
ties fell gently and paradigmatically into this post-war social message
genre. Take, for example, the touching Give Us This Day (1949), based on
Christ in Concrete,Pietro di Donato's compelling autobiographical novel
about the struggle of one determined Italian-American family against
heavy societal odds. One of the most sensitive screen portraits ever
etched concerning Italian-American life, the film also provides one of the
landmark portrayals of a strong, intelligent Italian-American woman.
Beginning in the 1920s, Geremio, an industrious bricklayer, and his
newly-immigrated wife, Anunciata, struggle to escape the congested
tenements of New York City's Little Italy and fulfill their dream of
buying a home in Brooklyn. After they make a 25-dollar downpayment,
Anunciata scrimps and saves in a valiant effort to amass the 500 dollars
they need in order to move into the house. The arrival of three children
slows their quest, but through great frugality she manages to accumu-
late 495 dollars, when the Great Depression deals them a devastating
blow, as Geremio cannot find work.
Their savings decline rapidly, until Geremio is offered a foreman's
position. But there is a catch. To get the contract, the contractor has had
to cut corners on safety. Distraught and torn between desperation for
his family and the reality of jeopardizing the workers' lives, Geremio
reluctantly accepts the job and convinces his friends to join him. Tragedy
strikes. One worker becomes crippled, and soon afterward Geremio dies
in a cave-in, impaled on a steel rod and buried alive in wet concrete while
shouting, "Anunciata, forgive me! I tried!" A government investigation
awards Anunciata compensation of 1,000 dollars and monthly payments
for her three children. Overcome with grief, she tells a friend, "At last
Geremio has bought us a house."
In contrast to Give Us This Day, at other times Hollywood combined
social exploration with that prototypical Italian-American domain, crim-
inality. In Knockon Any Door (1949), pretty boy Nick Romano falls into the
established film tradition of Italian-American killers. However, the film
also reveals that Romano took this criminal path partially as a result of
114 CARLOS E. CORTES
other things, this meant the end of Code restrictions on sexual explicit-
ness, gratuitous violence, and the old Hollywood adage that crime could
not pay. Filmmakers vied to top each other in graphic depictions of sex
and violence, while films increasingly ended with criminals going unpun-
ished for their deeds, if not always living happily ever after. The film
intersection of ethnic revivalism and post-Hays exhibitionism led to a
movie flood of explicit ethnic sex and violence.
Italian-Americans, along with black Americans and Jewish-Ameri-
cans, headed the ethnic screen parade. Films about these three groups,
often made by group members, issued forth from Hollywood. Sparked
by the presence of a new coterie of gifted young Italian-American
filmmakers, the screen soon became filled with screaming, cursing,
battering, gun-toting, sexually-indulgent Italian-Americans.
Francis Ford Coppola's monumental The Godfather (1972), based on a
novel by another Italian-American, Mario Puzo, became the prototype
and most important legitimator of the new wave of Italian-American
sex-and-violence odysseys. TheGodfather focuses on one New York Mafia
family, headed by Don Vito Corleone (although the film avoids using the
word Mafia). Beginning in the last years of Vito's life, the film continues
through his death and the passing of the mantle to his revenge-bent son,
Michael. Moreover, the passing of the mantle also reflects a cultural
transformation. Where the movie tempers Vito's awesome power and
willingness to employ violence with Italian traditionalism - like love of
family and loyalty to friends - the thoroughly modern, semi-Anglicized
Michael emerges as icily cerebral.
Following up the enormous critical and commercial success of The
Godfather, Coppola created TheGodfather, Part11(1974). The latter served
both as a prequel, by tracing Vito's early years from his escape from Sicily
through the establishment of his ethnic crime empire in New York's
Little Italy, and as a sequel, by documenting Michael'srise, as he develops
his new crime headquarters in Nevada. Beyond its treatment of crime,
the two films delve into many other aspects of Italian-American life:
values and codes of honor; the extended family; male-female relation-
ships; cultural maintenance (epitomized by the deeply Italian Corleone
New York wedding at the beginning of TheGodfather); and acculturation
(embodied in the contrasting Anglicized Corleone Lake Tahoe wedding
of Godfather II).
While the films focus on men, Coppola's treatment of Italian-
American women continues the two basic depictions that had become
standard film fare. The older generation, the traditional earth mothers,
provide passive and stoic support for their men. The younger genera-
tion, the modern nags, become Italian-Americanspoiled brats, as person-
ified by Don Vito's daughter, Costanza.
118 CARLOSE. CORTES
But a funny thing happened on the way to the movie theatre. While
continuing with their obsession for gangs and violence, some Italian-
American and even Italian filmmakers have expanded their spectrum to
include other ethnic groups. It may be coincidental, but between 1983
and 1985 Italian-descent directors made three major movies about non-
Italian gangs.
First off the mark came Brian De Palma with his 1983 remake of
Scarface.Depression-era Chicago's Italian-American gangster, Antonio
Camonte, became contemporary Miami's Cuban-American drug dealer,
Antonio Montana (with Italian-American Al Pacino doing the acting
honors). The post-Hays-Code Cuban-American version was even more
scurrilous, with its non-stop gutter language and self-indulgent violence
- who needs to watch an arm being cut off by a chain saw? Predictably
and justifiably, Cuban-Americans protested, but with little effect ...
except, of course, a cloned Godfather-style
film-ending disclaimerthat "the
characters do not represent the Cuban American community and it
would be erroneous and unfair to suggest that they do." Flushed with
crime-based "success," De Palma returned to Italian-Americans in 1987
with TheUntouchables, giving Al Capone the opportunity to demonstrate
his major league prowess by crushing an associate's skull with a baseball
bat during a formal dinner party.
Not to be outdone, director Michael Cimino (with help from screen-
writer Oliver Stone, who also penned Scarface), turned his ethnic angst on
New York's Chinatown with the 1985 YearoftheDragon.Chinese-Amer-
icans became Cimino's avenue for indulging in filmed ethnic violence (as
well as his usual movie-making excesses), while avoiding criticism from
Italian-Americans. Of course, he did catch it from Chinese-Americans,
who rightfully responded in angry protest, as had Cuban-Americans and
Italian-Americans before them. And, as was now becoming a cliche of its
own, YearoftheDragoncarried an on-film protestation of non-stereotyp-
ing innocence. LikeScarface, Dragonproclaimed that it was about "agroup
of ruthless criminals"who should not be perceived as being typicalof any
particular ethnic group.
Even Italian director Sergio Leone participated in this ethnic switch
with his masterful OnceUpona Timein America(1983). The film portrays
the rise of Jewish-American gangs on New York's Lower East Side
during the early twentieth century (with yet another Italian-American
actor, Robert DeNiro, as the central Jewish figure). However, despite its
ITALIAN-AMERICANS IN FILM 123
Notes
1. Much of the evidence for this article is drawn from my Ethnicity and Foreign-
ness in Film Computer Data Bank in the University of California, Riverside's
Laboratory for Historical Research. My book-in-progress on the U.S. feature
film treatment of ethnic groups places Italian-Americans in the comparative
context of the movie depiction of other ethnic groups, while my book on the
movie treatment of foreign nations will examine the screen image of Italy as part
of the broader theme of Hollywood's changing portrayal of the world.
2. For a bibliography of books and articles dealing with Italian-Americans in film
and television see Allen L. Woll and RandallM. Miller, eds., EthnicandRacialImages
in AmericanFilmandTelevision: EssaysandBibliography
Historical (New York: Garland,
1987), 301-307.
3. Among the studies of Hollywood crime movies see: Carlos Clarens, CrimeMovies:
FromGriffithtotheGodfather andBeyond(New York: Norton, 1980); Eugene Rosow,
Bornto Lose:TheGangsterFilmin America(New York: Oxford UP, 1978); and Jack
124 CARLOS E. CORTES
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1980.
Dessner, Lawrence J. "TheGodfather, the Executive, and Art." Journalof PopularCulture6
(1972): 211-214.
Farber, Stephen. "Coppola and TheGodfather." SightandSound41 (1972): 217-223.
Golden, Daniel S. "The Fate of La Famiglia: Italian Images in American Film." The
KaleidoscopicLens:HowHollywoodViewsEthnicGroups.Ed. Randall M. Miller. Engle-
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. "Pasta or Paradigm: The Place of Italian-American Women in Popular Film."
Explorationsin EthnicStudies2 (1979): 3-10.
Johnson, Robert K. FrancisFordCoppola. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Kaminsky, Stuart M. "The Individual Film: LittleCaesarand the Gangster Film."American
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Thomson, David. "The Discreet Charm of the Godfather." Sight and Sound 47 (1978):
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