Cosa Nostra O La Stessa Cosa: The Impact of Italian Ethnicity on the Revival of the Late 20th Century Gangster Genre

Abstract

Despite the vast research on film genre, little is done to explore Italian mobster movies, one of the dominant brands of Cinema for over two decades. Since the 1970s, various Italian-American filmmakers have utilized ethnicity as the fundamental thematic core of mobster films. However, by the beginning of the 70s, two significant auteurs of the subgenre, began to set the tone for the creation of near 300 Italian mafia related films. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese’s depictions of two sides of Italian-American crime culture. Godfather displays the old-fashion mobsters and their traditions, facing new generations of criminals. And Goodfellas illustrates the new generation, trying to redefine the old ways. Both films helped the revival of gangster genre in two separated decades of the 20^th century. The Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990) and Goodfellas (1990), the most exemplary instances of the mob category, illustrate the distinctive perspectives of their authors toward the subject of immigrated Italian crime culture. Although, both directors employ analogous subjects, however, their narrative styles and displays of Mafiosi’s hierarchy are inheritably different. This research uses the work of Robert Casillo and Larissa Ennis to unravel the distinct storytelling skills of Scorsese and Pileggi. And on the other hand, the paper focuses on Kevin Burns and Ronald Wilson’s works to clarify Coppola’s intentions in the depiction of Mafia’s story as an epic. The research traces the unique characteristics of the stories back to the origins of New Hollywood era and analyzes the two different directors’ approaches to a similar social phenomenon.