alluring leading man. The most famous Latin Lover of the decade was Rudolph Valentino, an actor who had been born in Italy and who appeared in films such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Sheik (1921). While the ascendancy of Valentino and the Latin Lover type may be seen as a step toward acceptance and assimilation, the appeal of the Latin Lover lies precisely in his Otherness. He is bold, aggressive, and potentially violent in his sexual passions – quite unlike respectable white men. Furthermore, as will be discussed in chapter 7, the Latin Lover type also included men from Hispanic cultures – a fact that again suggests how the dominant culture groups together different racial/ethnic Others as a means of opposing (and therefore defining) whiteness. The Latin Lover image was also used in more forthrightly derogative ways, as when he was represented as a gigolo trying to sleep his way into wealth and white society.
By the early 1930s, the image of the Italian American man looking for success and respect via disreputable means took a more ominous turn on the nation’s movie screens. Italian Americans became the ruthless lead characters of the gangster film. Partly, this linkage of Italian Americans and mobsters was drawn from real life. Stories of Italian American ghettoes being controlled by almost feudal family gangs (the so‐called Mafia, a concept originally derived from Sicilian culture) had begun to proliferate in the American popular press in the earliest years of the century. During the Prohibition era (1919–33), various criminal organizations thrived by distributing illegal alcohol. While people of numerous backgrounds were part of these organized crimes, many people focused on the Italian names being reported in the nation’s newspapers: Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Johnny Torrio, etc. Thus, when Hollywood began its cycle of gangster films in the early 1930s, Italian Americans were prominently featured. Little Caesar (1930), a film that many regard as the first film of this genre, focuses on the rise and fall of Italian American gangster Rico Bandello (played by Jewish actor Edward G. Robinson). Little Caesar was followed by Scarface (1932), which focuses on the corrupt, ultra‐violent, and vaguely incestuous Tony Camonte (played by another Jewish actor, Paul Muni). Throughout the 1930s and continuing for decades, the most conspicuous representation of Italian Americans on Hollywood movie screens would be as mobsters.
Edward G. Robinson played Italian American mobster Rico Bandello in one of the most famous classical Hollywood gangster movies, Little Caesar (1930).
Little Caesar, copyright © 1930, Warner Bros.
Other stereotypical and more fully developed Italian American characters began to emerge during and after World War II. As the United States fought a war against Germany, Italy, and Japan, Italian Americans increasingly promoted their patriotism and loyalty to America. As a consequence, they were often featured in Hollywood’s wartime propaganda movies. In the many war movies made during these years, such as Sahara (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), and The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Italian American characters were included; they fought with courage and dedication alongside American soldiers of a variety of other ethnicities. In the postwar years, Italian American musical performers such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Mario Lanza became increasingly popular, both on radio and in Hollywood films.
Postwar filmmaking in Italy also had an affect on Hollywood images of Italian Americans. The popularity and critical regard of the film movement known as Italian Neorealism spurred greater attempts at cinematic realism in a number of countries; the movement regularly represented Italians as poor and/or working‐class people. Consequently, 1950s American film also saw an increase in down‐to‐earth, working‐class Italian American characters. Part of this “earthiness” expressed itself via sensuality. Italian actresses such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Anna Magnani became internationally famous during these years, partly because of their (relatively) uninhibited sexuality. Like that of the 1920s Latin Lover, the sexual appeal these women exuded for American audiences was partly due to their Otherness. (The fact that many of their films were made overseas – far away from the Hollywood Production Code – also contributed to their reputation as sexually unbridled.) Earthy, working‐class representations of Italian Americans became so popular that they swept the Oscars for 1955, when a film about a lonely Italian American butcher (Marty) won Best Picture and Best Actor (Ernest Borgnine), and Anna Magnani won a Best Actress award for her first American film, The Rose Tattoo. Both properties had their origins in other media: Marty began as a live TV broadcast aired in 1953, while Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo was first produced on Broadway in 1951.
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of Italian American actors and directors became prominent in the Hollywood film industry. Actors such as Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Talia Shire, Sylvester Stallone, and John Travolta rose to prominence, while directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Michael Cimino were also highly successful. While such success might possibly signal an erasure of Italian ethnicity into a general sense of whiteness, this was not the case. Recall that during the 1960s, dominant American culture was coming under severe criticism from various sectors of the counterculture. As part of those critiques, whiteness was being taken off its pedestal and racial and ethnic identities were being celebrated as more authentic and meaningful. White suburban lifestyles (on display, for example, in comedies such as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies [1960] or The Thrill Of It All [1963]) were increasingly seen as bland and mind‐numbing. As a consequence, ethnicity was suddenly “in,” and starched symbols of whiteness (such as Doris Day and John Wayne) were supplanted by actors who did not hide their ethnic heritage.
Yet what types of stories and characters did these new Italian American filmmakers create? To a great extent, they replicated old‐style Hollywood formulas in nostalgic Hollywood blockbusters. One of the first and most important of these films was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), a period gangster film about Italian American mobsters. While many Italian American media watchdog groups protested against the revival of the gangster stereotype, it nonetheless became one of the most successful films of all time, spawning two sequels (1974 and 1990) and countless imitators. Many of Martin Scorsese’s films also centered on Italian American gangs and gangsters. Although he has made all sorts of films, including a personal documentary about his parents and their ethnic heritage (Italianamerican [1974]), it is Scorsese’s violent gangster films that most moviegoers recall: Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995). Scorsese has returned repeatedly to the world of ethnic east‐coast gangsters in more recent films like The Departed (2004) and The Irishman (2019). Still other films from the 1970s (reworking another earlier stereotype) focus on Italian American working‐class men who struggle to achieve the American Dream. Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977) both position their Italian American protagonists not just as characters representative of Italian American concerns, but also as larger symbols of American spirit and determination. Similarly, Coppola had envisioned the Corleone family in The Godfather to be a symbol of America – but not in the patriotic style of Rocky. Rather, Coppola used his Godfather films (especially Part II [1974]) to indict and critique white patriarchal capitalism.
Even in the New Hollywood, filmmakers still associated Italian American culture and tradition with the mobster stereotype, particularly in the enormously successful The Godfather (1972).
The Godfather, copyright © 1972, Paramount.
Many of these types of images of Italian Americans remain in contemporary Hollywood film. While characters of Irish
