Like a Mob Hit: The Passing of a Generation of Movie Gangsters – NPR

at the beginning of The GodfatherIn a shadowy room, an injured Sicilian undertaker whose daughter has been abused kisses the hand of Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, calling for justice the way the Don has instructed him to do.

In the background of the shot, not yet in focus as either a character or an actor, but listening intently to Brando, is James Caan playing Sonny, the heir apparent to the Corleone family.

“Someday,” Brando’s gift tells the undertaker. “And maybe that day will never come, I’ll call you to do me a favor.”

Many months later, Sonny, who has long since come into the spotlight as hot-headed, impulsive and violent, lies shattered by bullets on a grave slab, and “someday” has arrived.

“I want you to use all your powers and all your abilities,” the Don tells the undertaker, seeking one last consolation for his son. “I don’t want his mother to see it this way.”

Then his voice breaks. “Look how they slaughtered my boy.”

In gangster movies of an earlier age, almost always told from the moralistic point of view of the authorities, this scene would not exist. In 1972, The Godfather changed the formula. He asked us to identify ourselves not with the law, but with the mobsters.

A new template: realistic mobsters

Actually, he went further: he asked us to feel for gangsters. And we did. When the mobsters died in The Godfather, the public wept.

And the actors who played those mobsters identified with them in ways that previous actors, say, Jimmy Cagney, who played tough guys in the Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, White Heat, Angels with Dirty Faces and a dozen other movies, never did.

Of course, given the artificiality of gangster movies in the 1930s and 1940s, it made sense that no one would mistake Cagney for the tough guys he played, any more than they mistake him for Broadway showman George M. Cohan when he played him in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

but soon after The Godfather made him a bankable star, James Caan was rejected when he tried to join a country club because its members believed in his performance so much that they thought he, like Sonny, was a “made man”.

“I’m not even Italian,” he told them, “I’m Jewish.” It did not matter. And with The Godfather Introducing a new realism to mob movies, Caan was not alone.

Ray Liotta, who rose to stardom when he played the young lead in Martin Scorsese’s film. Good boysalso fought to avoid typecasting, even going as far as decline a major role in The sopranos (although he relented many years later, taking part in the last year Soprano movie prequel The Many Newark Saints).

Paul Sorvinowho played Paulie, Liotta’s low-key thug mentor in Good boysfaced a similar struggle. Although he was an opera singer, a poet, and a skilled comic actor, he was caught in the public mind as a tough guy. He ended up playing mob bosses repeatedly over the next three decades, including last year on television shows. godfather of harlem.

And the once gangster always gangster problem didn’t just apply to featured players. Enough of Sorvino Good boys henchmen found steady employment with suburban mobster Tony Soprano a decade later, including Paul Herman who played Beansie Gaeta, and Tony Sirico, who played Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri.

As the mob backs down, so must their interpreters

Still, this wave of modern mob epics was just that: a wave. And culminated with the six stations of The sopranos nearly two decades ago. Occasional stories of mobsters with Italian faces still occur. But in recent years, a more egalitarian Hollywood has turned its attention to African-American antiheroes, Asian cybercriminals and Latin American drug cartels. And as the mob backs down, eventually so will their interpreters.

All five actors (Caan, Liotta, Sorvino, Herman and Sirico) were still robust and working earlier this year. Now, in the space of a few months, they’re gone, which is perhaps not surprising in actuarial terms, but it’s still a shock. We tend to freeze actors in the roles we remember best. Caan, for example, was in his early 30s—young and vital—when he made The Godfather.

But now it’s half a century later. Liotta was 30 years old, Sorvino, Sirico and Herman were 40 and 50 years old when Good boys It premiered and that was 32 years ago. We remember them all in their heyday, making their loss feel like the passing of a generation.

It happens to every genre: the great silent comedians, the tap music stars of the 1930s and 1940s, the cowboys and the lawmen who staged a Cinemascope arcade in the 1950s. There will come a time, one hopes, decades from now, that audiences will mourn the death of a generation of superheroes.

But this crowd is the one we’re losing now: the mobsters who unexpectedly, and against all our best instincts, come to care.