Italians, even if their ethnicity was seldom named, were an obvious presence in Hollywood gangster pictures from at least the 1920s. But how did Italian-American filmmakers respond to questions of ethnic stereotypes and identity in their work? University of Arkansas communications professor Jonathan J. Cavallero surveys the relevant critical, biographical and historical literature in Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers (published by University of Illinois Press), focusing on Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese, Nancy Savoca, Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. Not surprisingly, he finds varied responses from directors whose careers spanned the 1920s through the 2010s.
Cavallero's points are generally well established. Capra made only one film with explicitly Italian-American central characters, a late work, A Hole in the Head (1959). But in the face of strong anti-Italian prejudice in WASP America his films were “allegories of immigration” and advocated the idea that the U.S. was a big table with many seats available to newcomers. Scorsese and Coppola both rose during the white ethnic revival of the 1960s when formerly marginal groups rallied in pride around their heritage. The films of Scorsese and Coppola walk a line between nostalgia for the security and identity of ethnic enclaves and a critique of their narrowness and constraints. Savoca (Household Saints, 24 Hour Woman) complicates the picture of ethnic identity as an Italian-American-Argentinean whose family moved between New York and Latin America. Tarantino's Italian-American father left him with little but a surname and a sense of absence. He was raised by his Irish-Cherokee mother and understood the experience of Italians through the movies he devoured.
At the conclusion of his useful survey, Cavallero makes good points about the value of his work in the context of America's immigrant history and ongoing struggle over who gets to be American.
