The Everything Mafia Book (40 page)

The Sopranos
constantly referred to the Mafia epic of all time,
The Godfather
. In a humorous recurring theme, all the members of the Soprano crime family grew up on the
Godfather
movies and regularly quote them. The fictional Corleones are the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus for these less epic, less empathetic, and less inspired hoodlums.

One area where the Sopranos differ from the Corleones is in the desire for legitimacy. While the Corleones suffered great angst over their lifestyle and career choices, and always claimed that they sought to emerge from the shadows and into the light of respectability, Tony Soprano expresses no such beliefs. He likes his job, and probably would not mind seeing his son go into the “family business.” Don Corleone wept when he learned that his son Michael killed two men and thus entered the Mafia life. Tony Soprano did not sweat such things.

Just as
The Untouchables
made many people angry,
The Sopranos
was no stranger to controversy. Italian-American groups have complained that it presented negative stereotypes. One New Jersey congressman wanted to pass legislation to have it banned. There was concern that it would create controversy when it first aired on Italian television, but it was a ratings hit in the birthplace of the Mafia.

But the most controversy was reserved for the shows’ final episode. Fans were bitterly divided over the shows’ quick cut to black. Some felt that show copped out at the end, while other thought it was brilliant, encompassing everything unpredictable about the show.

CHAPTER 20
The Mafia in the Movies

Gangsters have been boffo box office in the movies since the Golden Age of Hollywood. From
Public Enemy
and
Little Caesar
to
The Godfather
films and beyond, the criminal element has been portrayed as misunderstood Robin Hoods, tragedians of Shakespearean scope, lovable goombahs, and as nasty and ruthless killers that continue to fascinate us.

The Early Mob Movie Stars

From the 1930s and 1940s, Warner Brothers produced classic gangster movies starring the likes of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson. These films and their antiheroes differ dramatically from the more realistic cinematic portrayals of gangsters in later years. Rarely were the mobsters overtly identified as being of Italian ancestry. James Cagney had the map of Ireland on his pugnacious puss. Robinson was the product of the Yiddish theater. Bogart was English and Dutch.

Robin in the ’Hood

James Cagney usually played a basically good guy who grew up on the mean streets and inadvertently stumbled into a life of crime. These films were made during the Great Depression and thus it was often the lack of opportunity for the immigrant underclass to break out of their station that led the prototypical Cagney hero to a life of crime.

The gangster was not a total victim, however. Most movies had a character, usually the hero’s friend or brother, who chose the straight and narrow and did not fall into a life of crime. In
Public Enemy
, it is Cagney’s brother who remains crime-free. In
Angels with Dirty Faces
, it’s Cagney’s boyhood friend who becomes a Catholic priest while Cagney’s character becomes a hoodlum.

Despite the repetition by impressionists for decades, James Cagney never actually said “You dirty rat” in a movie. But he did scream “Top of the world ma!” in the movie White Heat.

The Cagney persona was guilty of romanticizing the urban outlaw, making him into a kind of metropolitan Robin Hood. In
White Heat
, Cagney broke his own mold with a powerful and unsympathetic performance as Cody Jarrett, a psychotic killer with an Oedipus complex. Cold-blooded yet perversely pathetic, he is a murderous mama’s boy who blows himself sky-high rather than be taken alive.

Play It Again, Bogie

The other legendary screen gangster of the Golden Age was Humphrey Bogart. He started out playing secondary villains but eventually became an A-list star and often played the good guy, particularly later in his distinguished career.

Bogart achieved stardom with the part of the vicious gangster in
The Petrified Forest.
It has the now-familiar theme of a group of gangsters holding a collection of characters from “central casting” hostage. Almost twenty years later, Bogart played a suspiciously similar role in the movie
Desperate Hours
. In between he played a variety of good and bad guys. His most famous gangster roles were opposite Cagney in
The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces
, and his very moving portrait of an aging and tired gangster on the run in
High Sierra.
He went against the Mafia in the underrated 1951 gangster pic
The Enforcer
.

George Raft, probably best known for his role as Spats Colombo in Some like It Hot, was a big star of the day and of Italian ancestry. He was also a good friend of Bugsy Siegel and Santo Trafficante Jr. Siegel visited Raft on movie sets, and Raft even helped arrange a screen test for the handsome gangster. Trafficante used Raft as a greeter in the Havana casinos in pre-Castro Cuba.

End of an Era

Bogart teamed with another famous gangster icon, Edward G. Robinson, in John Huston’s classic
Key Largo
. Robinson plays the leader of a group of gangsters who hide out and harass the locals in the Florida Keys as a hurricane looms offshore. Bogart is the hero and shoots it out with Robinson’s evil and froglike hood, Rocco. But by that time, the straight-ahead gangster pics were being overtaken by a darker, more stylish genre.

Gangland Noir

The term
film noir
refers to a particular style of movie featuring spectacular cinematography, dark angular shadows, heroes of questionable morals, femme fatales, private eyes, shifting alliances, and the underworld. The unique thing about noir is that some of the best were low-budget, under-the-radar movies. These movies, filmed mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, feature some of the best portrayals of gangsters ever captured onscreen. And lots of dames.

Private investigators are the staple character in film noir. Often times they are investigating mobsters or trying to rescue femme fatales. They are shot, stabbed, double-crossed, and left for dead. But the PI in the film noir is a staple movie character.

One of the classic film noirs is
Out of the Past
, starring Robert Mitchum as a former private eye who is living as a gas station attendant in a small town. When a gambling boss (Kirk Douglas) sends one of his goons to ask Mitchum to meet with him, the story goes into flashback—a common film noir device. At the end, back in real time, Mitchum finds that the life of a film noir private eye has only one ending, and it’s not a happy one. With his hat and dangling cigarette, Mitchum’s PI became an iconic image forever associated with noir.

One of film noir’s most prolific actors was Sterling Hayden. He appeared in such crime classics as The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, and Naked Alibi. But he may be best known to fans of Mafia movies for his performance as Capt. McCluskey in The Godfather. His memorable death scene is one of the movie’s more gruesome moments.

The one role that transcended the film noir genre and one of the most memorable onscreen gangsters was Tommy Udo. Portrayed by Richard Widmark, Udo is a maniacal, sadistic killer who rampages through
Kiss of Death
, tracking Victor Mature, a gangland snitch who sent Tommy to the clink. Along the way Udo pushes a wheelchair-bound woman, the mother of the snitch, down the stairs, laughing the whole time. For audiences in 1947, it must have been shocking.

Widmark starred in a few more noir gangland thrillers. In
The Street with No Name
, Widmark is an undercover FBI agent who infiltrates a mob crew with a penchant for robbery and murder. In
Night and the City
, Wid-mark plays a low-level con man who lurks among the gangsters of London’s underworld. Looking to break into the wrestling game with a new discovery, a hulking wrestler named Gergorius, Widmark is the poster child for noir losers, a man with big ideas who gets caught up in double-dealings and his own failings as both a businessman and a criminal.

The Godfather
Trilogy

In the 1960s, Mario Puzo’s novel
The Godfather
, one of the most talked about bestsellers of the time, introduced millions of voracious readers to the world of La Cosa Nostra. The film version was inevitable, but no one was prepared for just how successful it would be.
The Godfather I
and
II
became American classics, transcending the screen and becoming not only an essential part of pop culture but part of the American vernacular as well. How many times has someone made you “an offer you can’t refuse”?

Dramatis Personae

The Godfather
may have been an entirely different experience if other actors considered for the roles had been cast. Imagine Frank Sinatra as Don Corleone. Often linked to the mob and the basis for the Johnny Fontaine character, Sinatra physically attacked novelist Puzo in a restaurant after the novel was published. Apparently he got over it, because a few years later he expressed interest in playing the titular don. Laurence Olivier and George C. Scott were also considered. Of course, the coveted role went to Marlon Brando, who mumbled his way to an Academy Award he refused to accept.

The Godfather
also made a relatively unknown Italian from New York, Al Pacino, a star. He went on the play numerous other gangster roles, including non-Italian hoodlums in
Scarface
and
Carlito’s Way
. But can you imagine Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal as Michael Corleone? Strange indeed, but they were the producer’s choices. Fortunately, director Francis Ford Cop-pola insisted on Pacino, and the rest, as they say, is Hollywood history.

The Godfather
films tell the story of the Corleones, an immigrant family that achieves the American Dream through crime. But the movie is much more than just a simple crime drama. It touches on issues of sin, redemption, revenge, forgiveness, and the twisted machinations of a mob boss looking to stay one step ahead of his enemies.