In March, Warner Brothers will release “Alto Knights,” a gangster drama based on the seething feud between mid-century mob bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Written by the great Nicholas Pileggi, dean of Mafia chroniclers, and starring Robert DeNiro, “Alto Knights” arrives as the latest in a line of splashy Mafia productions dating back fifty-two years to the debut of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. More like ninety-three years if you postdate the genre to “Little Caesar,” the Prohibition-era classic starring Edward G. Robinson as an up-by-his-fists Chicago mobster who, like many movie gangsters of the time, took his cues from Al Capone. (G. Robert Blakey, the lawyer who drafted the RICO Act in 1970, chose the acronym in honor of Rico Bandello, Robinson’s “Little Caesar” character.)
By this calculation, the Mafia movie has held our gaze for almost a century. The wise guys appropriated the mantle of gruff American antihero from the John Wayne cowboy crowd and never gave it up. Not yet, anyway.
The underworld fable of violence and hard-won advancement is so fundamentally American, so central to our national culture, that it seems to bear repeating every decade or so, like an incantation. Each post-war generation remade the classic Mafia tale of brotherhood and betrayal on its own terms. The iterations followed one upon another — “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas,” “Casino,” “The Sopranos,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Irishman” and now “Alto Knights.” To name a few. These productions inevitably carried the pulp essentials of sex and sensation, but a surprising number graced the screens, big and little, with an improbable dignity and a wide, heroic account of immigrant struggle. Viewers could see how conflicting impulses might entwine in a single anguished character. If we squint we can see these stories of aspiration and assimilation as a dark distortion of the American melting pot.
“‘The Godfather’ often moves with the slowness of an Antonioni movie, and ‘The Sopranos,’ with its dream sequences and off-the-wall irony, seems more like David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ than a shooting match,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a literature professor at Duke University, wrote in his book “The Mafia: A Cultural History.” “What was it then? What made me love the Mafia in fiction, while loathing the one in real life….What sort of dreams does the Mafia revive for us?”
What dreams indeed? What dreams propelled the Sopranos for six seasons? The show may have exceeded expectations (eighty-six episodes!) by addressing unsettling contemporary concerns — opioid addiction, teenage depression, suburban malaise and adult panic attacks, among other issues. Edward G. Robinson could not have imagined Tony Soprano, the moody capo who made time for therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi amid a day job bustling with extortion, gambling and murder.
Tony may not be admirable, but he draws us in with dark charisma. He follows a code, of sorts. He has a likeable swagger.
Will some updated version of Tony Soprano or Don Corleone come to life following “Alto Knights?” Will Mafia movies keep coming? Or will organized crime’s long Hollywood run wind down now that the real-life Cosa Nostra rarely menace New York Streets, at least not as it once did. During a recent cruise around the famously mobbed-up Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, a former Colombo crime family soldier assured me that loan sharks and racketeers persist, but they are no longer a threatening presence in the Italian cafés and pork shops.
Nobody fears the mafiosi as they once did. Not after a wave of early-Eighties RICO convictions dismantled much of the upper hierarchy. The leaders of the five crime families went to Supermax or receded into the Witness Protection program after brokering cooperation deals. Organized crime grew disorganized.
When I asked a retired detective how he accounted for the Mafia’s diminishment, he said, “security cameras.” The ubiquitous cameras, installed in both private and public spaces, deter drive-by shootings and other acts of open violence, the Mafia’s stock in trade. It may be that simple: electronic surveillance crippled the Mafia.
It should also be noted that the old mob streetscape is disappearing along with the wise guys who haunted it. The traditional Mafia neighborhoods strung along the rounded southern shoreline of Brooklyn — Bay Ridge, Mill Basin, Canarsie and the rest — are ceding their Scorsese grit to chain stores and immigrants. Bensonhurt now has more noodle houses than salumerias. The specialty pasta stores, with their homemade cavatelli and wheels of Parmigiano as big as tractor tires, are giving way to taquerias and Verizon stores. Can the mafiosi still claim their legendary toughness if their community no longer resides on the margins?
Westerns lost their relatability and relevance, failed at the box office and faded into obscurity. The question on the table is this: will mob movies suffer the same fate once the great underworld auteurs like Martin Scorsese pass from the scene? Will superheroes and battling robots replace the capos and captains altogther?
My guess, for what it’s worth, is that mobsters will maintain their place in our national culture, albeit transformed. Coming to a silver screen near you: Russian immigrants with with crypto rackets and Albanian money launderers.
In season six of “The Sopranos” a soldier inherits $2 million and asks Tony for permission to retire to Florida with his family. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony says. “You took an oath. There’s no retiring from this.” The same might be said of celluloid mobsters: there’s no retiring from this.
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