"What's Past is Prologue..."
STUDIES IN AMERICAN CINEMA:
Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
The Gangster Ethos: The Cinematic Portrayal of Organized Crime, Violence and Corruption
in American Society, 1930-Present
by Kofi Natambu
[NOTE: The following excerpt is from a reprinted essay and lecture on the films The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) and their intertextual relationship to the social and cultural reality of gangsterism & organized crime in the U.S. from 1945-1975]
The following complete film is divided into 26 separate video segments...
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
In the first two ‘Godfather’ films (a third was produced in 1990) director-writer Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939) provides us with a stunning social critique and cultural analysis of 20th century American life through a visionary use of fictional narrative and cinematic techniques that both depend upon, and deeply question, the received meaning of Hollywood conventions in the gangster film genre. One of the most significant results of this bold reinterpretation of conventional aesthetic representations is a multidimensional analysis of such powerful symbolic and mythical material as the American immigrant experience; the role and impact of the patriarchy on the American family; the disturbing relationship between organized religion and economic materialism in U.S. culture; the reality vs. the mythology of the ‘American Dream'; and the central place of crime, corruption, violence and hatred (racial, gender, sexual and class-based) in contemporary American society.
The highly distinctive manner in which Coppola and his outstanding team of film technicians and artists approach this historic and thematic material is a testament to Coppola’s incisive knowledge and understanding of the social and cultural period that his films investigate (i.e. 1945-1985). It is this profound insight into the implications of these issues for not only the gangsters but also the general population in the United States that audiences readily responded to when these films were first released in the 1970s.
What is most innovative about Coppola’s cinematic portrayal of actual social and political history is his frank and penetrating discussion of how the Mafia emerged and evolved in the United States in this century. In fact, the ‘Godfather’ series of films can be read as a trenchant commentary on how the cultural traditions of gangsterism have influenced our contemporary ideas about politics, economic power, and masculinity (male identity). What these films also make clear is exactly how and why these distorted yet respected values have created a major crisis in a society and culture addicted to various forms of self-destruction. What Coppola reveals is that the drug of capitalist exploitation and America’s self image are mutually dependent on each other. As Michael Corleone puts it in The Godfather, Part II (in response to the ethnic and ‘moral’ put-downs of a corrupt WASP politician named Senator Geary): “We are all part of the same hypocrisy.”
However, what even Michael fails to grasp or honestly admit (denial and willful self-delusion also being typical American responses to painful truths) is that this hypocrisy and lethal dishonesty not only applies to his ‘business’ (which is the corporate business of merciless and ruthless capitalist profiteering), but also to his personal family. This neurotic inability or refusal to see that the “personal is the political” or that one cannot separate one’s individual ethics and morality from that of the entire society because one supports and reinforces the other is at the center of the dilemmas expressed and examined in the films. Not surprisingly this contradiction and delusion haunt the attitudes, values and behavior of many other Americans besides gangsters.
In both ‘Godfather’ films we get almost a chronological examination of how the major criminal syndicates in this country began to consolidate their collective power in 1946 when crime boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano was pardoned from a New York State prison and given his conditional release by the federal government. The condition the government stipulated was that Luciano be deported back to Italy. However by this time Luciano (with his top lieutenant Meyer Lansky acting as emissary) had already done an important series of ‘favors’ for the feds during World War II (1939-1945), including working with U.S. Naval Intelligence in 1942-43 in providing much needed security for merchant vessels and troopships departing for England and other ports beyond the Atlantic ocean. Since New York was the single busiest port in America, the government and U.S. military were greatly concerned that thousands of men and millions of tons of war materials would be sabotaged and sunk off the east Coast by German Nazi U-Boats (they had already suffered major losses of both men and material in the previous year when spies who had learned the secret sailing schedules along with other crucial data helped the Nazis destroy the vessels).
In response to this crisis the government and the military both assumed that the Mafia controlled the International Longshoreman’s Association of the Port of New York, one of the most powerful unions in the country. Thus the commanding officer of the Third Naval District concluded that the best way to improve security was to win the cooperation of the ILA. Thus in the spring of 1942 the head of Naval Intelligence operations called on the New York District Attorney for help with the gangsters running the union. The D.A. got in touch with Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a small time hoodlum and boss of the Fulton Fish Market on the East River. Lanza was a minor figure in the criminal syndicate however and could not do much so he referred the government officials to Luciano. It was Meyer Lansky who conveyed the government’s message to Luciano and secured Luciano’s agreement to do whatever he could on behalf of the war effort. Lansky in turn worked diligently as Luciano’s emissary to the ILA union leadership. Luciano also granted the U.S. government one other major favor: He saw to it that his Sicilian Mafia paisanos (who were chieftains of notorious village gangs in Sicily, Italy) gave the American and Allied military forces quite valuable paramilitary assistance and support when their troops landed there in September, 1943.
Officially, all the government and military people involved in these deals with Luciano--the D.A. , Governor Dewey, the Navy--denied making any promises or consenting to any “arrangements” with Luciano though they naturally told him his contributions to the war effort would be “taken into account” when he appealed for clemency or parole for his thirty year sentence (Luciano was tried and convicted in 1936). In 1945 Governor Dewey (who as former New York State D.A. had been responsible for putting Luciano in jail in the first place) handed Luciano’s petition for release to the State Parole Board. The Board in turn recommended that he be rewarded(!) for his tremendous help in “defeating the Axis Powers (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan), and for his exemplary behavior in prison.” Since the government was full of gratitude to those who helped win the war no one in political or legal authority objected when Gov. Dewey accepted the Parole Board’s recommendation and had the notorious Luciano pardoned. It was only then the feds stepped in to declare that Luciano’s pardon was conditional: Luciano had to return to his native Italy for the rest of his life.
However it became immediately clear when Luciano left prison in January, 1946 and was taken to a Brooklyn pier where a ship was waiting to take him back to Italy, that his power as a major gang syndicate leader was still virtually intact. In fact Luciano was given an elaborate and festive party at dockside with only his most intimate and loyal criminal assocaiates present (including the ever present criminal mastermind, friend, and partner Meyer Lansky). Everyone assumed (correctly) that even if Luciano was not allowed back into the United States that he could control his now international criminal empire from Cuba. A year later in February, 1947 Luciano did enter the tiny island nation of Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, where he and his criminal partners were given carte blanche by the corrupt Cuban government (under the auspices and control of the Cuban president, the dictator Fulgencio Batista) to openly build massive illegal enterprises like gambling casinos, prostitution rings, loan sharking, political bribes, extortion and racketeering. In return for allowing this rampant criminal activity to flourish the gang syndicate gave the government a healthy slice of the profits.
It is in this complicated historical context that The Godfather, Parts I & II are to be properly understood and examined. What happens after Luciano and his gang syndicate colleagues set up shop in Cuba is key to following the general narrative structure of both films. What Coppola and co-screenwriter (and novelist of the Godfather series) Mario Puzo did is establish a series of composite characters who symbolize in mythical and metaphorical fictional terms the major real-life gangsters who dominated organized criminal activity in the United States after 1945. Thus the Corleone family, led by the first ‘Godfather’ Don Vito (Don being a Sicilian term for Chief) and played magnificently by the legendary actor Marlon Brando (then only 47 years old under all that makeup) represents figures like the notorious Frank Costello, Carlos Gambino, Lucky Luciano, and others who formed the ‘Family’ network of criminal gangs that were based loosely on the village cell-like structures that had ruled with an iron and bloody fist for hundreds of years in Sicily, Italy. It was the ‘Five Families’ (each with their own geopolitical and economic ‘territories’ throughout the East Coast--in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Boston, etc.) that controlled the national gang syndicate by dividing power, capital and influence over a very broad range of criminal activities among various other geographical regions of the country.
In this structure each large ‘Family’ unit had their own ‘soldiers’ (called capo) who took care of the dirty work of the mob (i.e. murders, beatings, physical threats, etc.), carried out extortion and racketeering activities in the unions, race-track betting establishments, and hotel, trucking, and restaurant industries etc.); maintained control over the extremely lucrative numbers racket and served as ‘enforcers’ and protection for prostitution and police payoff rings. As the Godfather films point out this structure is strictly hierarchial and authoritarian, with the upper echelon leadership, consigliare or attorney/advisors, and family ‘team captains’, like the film characters Tessio and Clemenza, giving orders to paramilitary underlings, etc. while the various ‘Dons’ rule the general family units by determining, in consultations with their lieutenants, all necessary strategy, goals and policy within the hierarchy.
In the postwar period 1946-1960 that the two films focus upon (with elaborate flashback references to the ‘immigrant era’ captured in Part II being from 1900-1930) we also get to see parallel fictional accounts of the real wars between family groups in New York that occured with some regularity in the late 1940s and early 1950s before Congress, under the tenacious leadership of Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee (who chaired the “special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce” began to hold open public and televised hearings from 1950-1952 to expose how these national gang syndicates were operating, as well as where and under whose specific leadership.
These films also take us into the fascinating stotry of the ‘Cuban Connection’ and the subsequent revolution led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that successfully overthrew the American-backed corrupt dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959 (an extraordinary event that is brilliantly depicted in Godfather, Part II). The film also takes us into the real historical backstory of the rise of Las Vegas in the early 1950s and the crucial role of Meyer Lansky (who is depicted as the composite character Hyman Roth, in another outstanding performance by the Actor’s Studio co-founder, the legendary Lee Strasberg). The meaning of this latter history will be chronicled and examined in next week’s lecture...
Lecture excerpt by Kofi Natambu
Film Course, Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
The Godfather Part 2 (1974):
The following complete film is divided into 26 separate video segments...
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
STUDIES IN AMERICAN CINEMA:
Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
The Gangster Ethos: The Cinematic Portrayal of Organized Crime, Violence and Corruption
in American Society, 1930-Present
by Kofi Natambu
[NOTE: The following excerpt is from a reprinted essay and lecture on the films The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) and their intertextual relationship to the social and cultural reality of gangsterism & organized crime in the U.S. from 1945-1975]
The following complete film is divided into 26 separate video segments...
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
In the first two ‘Godfather’ films (a third was produced in 1990) director-writer Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939) provides us with a stunning social critique and cultural analysis of 20th century American life through a visionary use of fictional narrative and cinematic techniques that both depend upon, and deeply question, the received meaning of Hollywood conventions in the gangster film genre. One of the most significant results of this bold reinterpretation of conventional aesthetic representations is a multidimensional analysis of such powerful symbolic and mythical material as the American immigrant experience; the role and impact of the patriarchy on the American family; the disturbing relationship between organized religion and economic materialism in U.S. culture; the reality vs. the mythology of the ‘American Dream'; and the central place of crime, corruption, violence and hatred (racial, gender, sexual and class-based) in contemporary American society.
The highly distinctive manner in which Coppola and his outstanding team of film technicians and artists approach this historic and thematic material is a testament to Coppola’s incisive knowledge and understanding of the social and cultural period that his films investigate (i.e. 1945-1985). It is this profound insight into the implications of these issues for not only the gangsters but also the general population in the United States that audiences readily responded to when these films were first released in the 1970s.
What is most innovative about Coppola’s cinematic portrayal of actual social and political history is his frank and penetrating discussion of how the Mafia emerged and evolved in the United States in this century. In fact, the ‘Godfather’ series of films can be read as a trenchant commentary on how the cultural traditions of gangsterism have influenced our contemporary ideas about politics, economic power, and masculinity (male identity). What these films also make clear is exactly how and why these distorted yet respected values have created a major crisis in a society and culture addicted to various forms of self-destruction. What Coppola reveals is that the drug of capitalist exploitation and America’s self image are mutually dependent on each other. As Michael Corleone puts it in The Godfather, Part II (in response to the ethnic and ‘moral’ put-downs of a corrupt WASP politician named Senator Geary): “We are all part of the same hypocrisy.”
However, what even Michael fails to grasp or honestly admit (denial and willful self-delusion also being typical American responses to painful truths) is that this hypocrisy and lethal dishonesty not only applies to his ‘business’ (which is the corporate business of merciless and ruthless capitalist profiteering), but also to his personal family. This neurotic inability or refusal to see that the “personal is the political” or that one cannot separate one’s individual ethics and morality from that of the entire society because one supports and reinforces the other is at the center of the dilemmas expressed and examined in the films. Not surprisingly this contradiction and delusion haunt the attitudes, values and behavior of many other Americans besides gangsters.
In both ‘Godfather’ films we get almost a chronological examination of how the major criminal syndicates in this country began to consolidate their collective power in 1946 when crime boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano was pardoned from a New York State prison and given his conditional release by the federal government. The condition the government stipulated was that Luciano be deported back to Italy. However by this time Luciano (with his top lieutenant Meyer Lansky acting as emissary) had already done an important series of ‘favors’ for the feds during World War II (1939-1945), including working with U.S. Naval Intelligence in 1942-43 in providing much needed security for merchant vessels and troopships departing for England and other ports beyond the Atlantic ocean. Since New York was the single busiest port in America, the government and U.S. military were greatly concerned that thousands of men and millions of tons of war materials would be sabotaged and sunk off the east Coast by German Nazi U-Boats (they had already suffered major losses of both men and material in the previous year when spies who had learned the secret sailing schedules along with other crucial data helped the Nazis destroy the vessels).
In response to this crisis the government and the military both assumed that the Mafia controlled the International Longshoreman’s Association of the Port of New York, one of the most powerful unions in the country. Thus the commanding officer of the Third Naval District concluded that the best way to improve security was to win the cooperation of the ILA. Thus in the spring of 1942 the head of Naval Intelligence operations called on the New York District Attorney for help with the gangsters running the union. The D.A. got in touch with Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a small time hoodlum and boss of the Fulton Fish Market on the East River. Lanza was a minor figure in the criminal syndicate however and could not do much so he referred the government officials to Luciano. It was Meyer Lansky who conveyed the government’s message to Luciano and secured Luciano’s agreement to do whatever he could on behalf of the war effort. Lansky in turn worked diligently as Luciano’s emissary to the ILA union leadership. Luciano also granted the U.S. government one other major favor: He saw to it that his Sicilian Mafia paisanos (who were chieftains of notorious village gangs in Sicily, Italy) gave the American and Allied military forces quite valuable paramilitary assistance and support when their troops landed there in September, 1943.
Officially, all the government and military people involved in these deals with Luciano--the D.A. , Governor Dewey, the Navy--denied making any promises or consenting to any “arrangements” with Luciano though they naturally told him his contributions to the war effort would be “taken into account” when he appealed for clemency or parole for his thirty year sentence (Luciano was tried and convicted in 1936). In 1945 Governor Dewey (who as former New York State D.A. had been responsible for putting Luciano in jail in the first place) handed Luciano’s petition for release to the State Parole Board. The Board in turn recommended that he be rewarded(!) for his tremendous help in “defeating the Axis Powers (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan), and for his exemplary behavior in prison.” Since the government was full of gratitude to those who helped win the war no one in political or legal authority objected when Gov. Dewey accepted the Parole Board’s recommendation and had the notorious Luciano pardoned. It was only then the feds stepped in to declare that Luciano’s pardon was conditional: Luciano had to return to his native Italy for the rest of his life.
However it became immediately clear when Luciano left prison in January, 1946 and was taken to a Brooklyn pier where a ship was waiting to take him back to Italy, that his power as a major gang syndicate leader was still virtually intact. In fact Luciano was given an elaborate and festive party at dockside with only his most intimate and loyal criminal assocaiates present (including the ever present criminal mastermind, friend, and partner Meyer Lansky). Everyone assumed (correctly) that even if Luciano was not allowed back into the United States that he could control his now international criminal empire from Cuba. A year later in February, 1947 Luciano did enter the tiny island nation of Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, where he and his criminal partners were given carte blanche by the corrupt Cuban government (under the auspices and control of the Cuban president, the dictator Fulgencio Batista) to openly build massive illegal enterprises like gambling casinos, prostitution rings, loan sharking, political bribes, extortion and racketeering. In return for allowing this rampant criminal activity to flourish the gang syndicate gave the government a healthy slice of the profits.
It is in this complicated historical context that The Godfather, Parts I & II are to be properly understood and examined. What happens after Luciano and his gang syndicate colleagues set up shop in Cuba is key to following the general narrative structure of both films. What Coppola and co-screenwriter (and novelist of the Godfather series) Mario Puzo did is establish a series of composite characters who symbolize in mythical and metaphorical fictional terms the major real-life gangsters who dominated organized criminal activity in the United States after 1945. Thus the Corleone family, led by the first ‘Godfather’ Don Vito (Don being a Sicilian term for Chief) and played magnificently by the legendary actor Marlon Brando (then only 47 years old under all that makeup) represents figures like the notorious Frank Costello, Carlos Gambino, Lucky Luciano, and others who formed the ‘Family’ network of criminal gangs that were based loosely on the village cell-like structures that had ruled with an iron and bloody fist for hundreds of years in Sicily, Italy. It was the ‘Five Families’ (each with their own geopolitical and economic ‘territories’ throughout the East Coast--in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Boston, etc.) that controlled the national gang syndicate by dividing power, capital and influence over a very broad range of criminal activities among various other geographical regions of the country.
In this structure each large ‘Family’ unit had their own ‘soldiers’ (called capo) who took care of the dirty work of the mob (i.e. murders, beatings, physical threats, etc.), carried out extortion and racketeering activities in the unions, race-track betting establishments, and hotel, trucking, and restaurant industries etc.); maintained control over the extremely lucrative numbers racket and served as ‘enforcers’ and protection for prostitution and police payoff rings. As the Godfather films point out this structure is strictly hierarchial and authoritarian, with the upper echelon leadership, consigliare or attorney/advisors, and family ‘team captains’, like the film characters Tessio and Clemenza, giving orders to paramilitary underlings, etc. while the various ‘Dons’ rule the general family units by determining, in consultations with their lieutenants, all necessary strategy, goals and policy within the hierarchy.
In the postwar period 1946-1960 that the two films focus upon (with elaborate flashback references to the ‘immigrant era’ captured in Part II being from 1900-1930) we also get to see parallel fictional accounts of the real wars between family groups in New York that occured with some regularity in the late 1940s and early 1950s before Congress, under the tenacious leadership of Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee (who chaired the “special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce” began to hold open public and televised hearings from 1950-1952 to expose how these national gang syndicates were operating, as well as where and under whose specific leadership.
These films also take us into the fascinating stotry of the ‘Cuban Connection’ and the subsequent revolution led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that successfully overthrew the American-backed corrupt dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959 (an extraordinary event that is brilliantly depicted in Godfather, Part II). The film also takes us into the real historical backstory of the rise of Las Vegas in the early 1950s and the crucial role of Meyer Lansky (who is depicted as the composite character Hyman Roth, in another outstanding performance by the Actor’s Studio co-founder, the legendary Lee Strasberg). The meaning of this latter history will be chronicled and examined in next week’s lecture...
Lecture excerpt by Kofi Natambu
Film Course, Studio Art 10C
University of California, Irvine
Fall, 1994
The Godfather Part 2 (1974):
The following complete film is divided into 26 separate video segments...
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
