Saints or Sinners? Italian-American Representations from Early Hollywood to the Many Saints

Dennis Barone sums it up well when he states, “The Italian as criminal, Mafioso and sexual predator is a well-established character in American film genres” Baroone makes an excellent argument that the depictions of Italian Americans as gangsters long preceded The Godlfather his article, “Translating identities: the Italian as other in two early American films, ”which appeared in Metro Magazine in June 2007. The idea of stereotyping Italian Americans as mobsters is certainly something we still see in films and television today, perhaps an extension of the success of the Godfather. The release of The Many Saints of Newark released in 2021 exemplifies this stereotype as an extension of The Sopranos, an Italian American family in the “business,” much like The Godfather represented the Corleone family fifty years prior. What is interesting, however, and what Barone points out so eloquently, is this was well established before Hollywood developed as a major player in popular culture thanks to representations in later 1800’s novels as well as early film of the 1910s. We have to delve much more into the past in order to understand how well established this particular stereotype is and why it was created in the first place.

The idea of the Italian mobster is certainly evident in films after the success of The Godfather in 1972. In fact there is a long list of Italian-American gangster films released since 1972 including Capone (1975), Wise Guys (1986), Married to the Mob (1988), Goodfellas (1990), A Bronx Tale (1993), Casino (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), and of course The Godfather Trilogy (1972, 1974, and 1990, respectively). But the idea of the Italian mobster was well established in early Hollywood, even before the stereotypical “gangster films” of the Depression era when James Cagney made organized crime “cool,” and certainly decades before the Corleone family graced the screen. According to Barone, “the image of the Italian as barbarian was established during the Gilded Age, the years of film's birth, as well as by nineteenth-century literature such as Henry James's Daisy Miller (1878). If the Italian as sexual barbarian has a long history in American culture, so, too, does the Mafia image…..Christian McLeod's 1908 The Heart of the Stranger: A Story of Little Italy and Louis Forgione's Men of Silence of 1928 are novels that capitalized on the scandal of Italian and Italian-American crime--the cultural groundwork, in other words, for the stereotypical image of Italian-Americans in popular culture had been well established before the 'talkies' gave us the harsh sounds of gunfire.” Thus, it is clear that the image of the Italian mobster was well established long before Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone appeared on screen.

Why, then, were Italian immigrants and, later, Italian-Americans, depicted as “mobsters?” Usually we can see a correlation between massive immigration and the perpetuation of stereotypes, typically derived from fear and competition particularly in economics. If there is a massive influx of immigrants, they are competing with lower class Americans for jobs and social and political status. 

We have seen it with Irish immigrants, who were depicted as the “Northern Negro” when there was a mass influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the Irish Potato Famine.

It wasn’t much different for Italians, who fled in droves during the violence of Resurgimiento, or Italian unification under Giuseppe Garibaldi. According to Charles Willis in his piece published on PBS.org entitled Destination America:“By 1870, there were about 25,000 Italian immigrants in America, many of them Northern Italian refugees from the wars that accompanied the Risorgimento—the struggle for Italian unification and independence from foreign rule. Between around 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians immigrated to the United States, half of them between 1900 and 1910 alone—the majority fleeing grinding rural poverty in Southern Italy and Sicily.” A massive influx of Italian immigrants then coincides with the Gilded Age, typically designated as between 1870 and 1900, and with the rise of Hollywood in the later 1910s and early 1920s. Vilifying “the other” is a byproduct of this mass influx of Italian immigrants. This is certainly something to remember when viewing The Sopranos or The Godfather, or any other film that stereotypes Italian-Americans, as it stems from the idea that these “others” are a threat to America, when in reality, America should be a melting pot, accepting of all ethnicities considering that America was founded on this concept of acceptance of all. In fact, it would be pertinent to remember Lady Liberty’s statement:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

After all, America is a country built from immigrants.

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Barone, Dennis. "Translating identities: the Italian as other in two early American films." Metro Magazine, no. 153, June 2007, pp. 173+. Gale OneFile: Pop Culture Studies, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A174282262/PPOP?u=edis78478&sid=bookmark-PPOP&xid=cc47e116. Accessed 10 June 2022.


Image 1: (Political cartoons sometimes played on Americans' fears of immigrants. This one, which appeared in a 1896 edition of the Ram's Horn, depicts an immigrant carrying his baggage of poverty, disease, anarchy and sabbath desecration, approaching Uncle Sam.https://www.ushistory.org/us/38c.asp)



Image 2: Engraving of political cartoon drawn by Thomas Nast From Harper's Weekly, 9 December 1876, p. 985.)