America on Film. Sean Griffin

and John Travolta rose to prominence, while directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Michael Cimino were also highly successful. While such success might possibly signal an erasure of Italian ethnicity into a general sense of whiteness, this was not the case. Recall that during the 1960s, dominant American culture was coming under severe criticism from various sectors of the counterculture. As part of those critiques, whiteness was being taken off its pedestal and racial and ethnic identities were being celebrated as more authentic and meaningful. White suburban lifestyles (on display, for example, in comedies such as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies [1960] or The Thrill Of It All [1963]) were increasingly seen as bland and mind‐numbing. As a consequence, ethnicity was suddenly “in,” and starched symbols of whiteness (such as Doris Day and John Wayne) were supplanted by actors who did not hide their ethnic heritage.

Yet what types of stories and characters did these new Italian American filmmakers create? To a great extent, they replicated old‐style Hollywood formulas in nostalgic Hollywood blockbusters. One of the first and most important of these films was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), a period gangster film about Italian American mobsters. While many Italian American media watchdog groups protested against the revival of the gangster stereotype, it nonetheless became one of the most successful films of all time, spawning two sequels (1974 and 1990) and countless imitators. Many of Martin Scorsese’s films also centered on Italian American gangs and gangsters. Although he has made all sorts of films, including a personal documentary about his parents and their ethnic heritage (Italianamerican [1974]), it is Scorsese’s violent gangster films that most moviegoers recall: Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995). Scorsese has returned repeatedly to the world of ethnic east‐coast gangsters in more recent films like The Departed (2004) and The Irishman (2019). Still other films from the 1970s (reworking another earlier stereotype) focus on Italian American working‐class men who struggle to achieve the American Dream. Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977) both position their Italian American protagonists not just as characters representative of Italian American concerns, but also as larger symbols of American spirit and determination. Similarly, Coppola had envisioned the Corleone family in The Godfather to be a symbol of America – but not in the patriotic style of Rocky. Rather, Coppola used his Godfather films (especially Part II [1974]) to indict and critique white patriarchal capitalism.

Even in the New Hollywood, filmmakers still associated Italian American culture and tradition with the mobster stereotype, particularly in the enormously successful The Godfather (1972).

      The Godfather, copyright © 1972, Paramount.

      Many of these types of images of Italian Americans remain in contemporary Hollywood film. While characters of Irish descent often appear without any mention of their heritage, Italian American characters are still frequently depicted as earthy, working‐class types (as in Moonstruck [1988]), or mobsters (as in The Untouchables [1988] or the cable TV series The Sopranos [1999‐2007]). While across culture‐at‐large Italian Americans have become for the most part regarded as white, many Italian Americans still choose to maintain a pronounced ethnicity, actively celebrating the culture and traditions of their heritage. Consequently, representing Italian Americans as a distinct ethnicity remains a common practice in American film. The recent four‐part PBS documentary The Italian Americans (2015) offers a good introduction to many of the issues faced by Italian immigrants as they became part of the fabric of American culture throughout the twentieth century.

A Special Case: Jews and Hollywood

      Jews in America and in American cinema have faced (and still do face) a different set of circumstances than either Irish Americans or Italian Americans in their negotiation of whiteness. For example, the Jewish religion is not considered a Christian religion, unlike the Catholicism of many Irish and Italian Americans. Also, Jewish immigrants came to America from a wide variety of countries and thus claim a wide range of national heritages. And unlike most Irish and Italian people, who left their native lands for America as a matter of choice, many Jews were forced out of European nations via state‐sanctioned acts of murder and terrorism (such as the pogroms of Tsarist Russia or the Nazi‐induced Holocaust). Furthermore, while most of the US population now regards citizens of European Jewish background to be white, a small but highly vocal group of white supremacist Americans still regard Jews as a “race” that are out to destroy white Aryan purity through intermarriage. (Their use of the term “race,” rather than “ethnicity,” is further meant to exclude Jews from their definition of whiteness.) The roots of such anti‐Semitism, or hatred of Jews, are complex and can be traced back thousands of years. Even in contemporary America, people of Jewish heritage are still regularly targeted by hate crimes and hate speech. Conversely, most European immigrants from Christian belief systems have been more readily assimilated into the ideals of American whiteness.

Anti‐Semitism was an even stronger force in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. One can see this in films made during the earliest days of cinema, before the advent of Hollywood. Short films made by white Protestant men (such as those who worked for Thomas Edison) sometimes featured grotesque stereotypes of Jews as hunchbacked, hook‐nosed, and greedy cheats. Such subhuman depictions, found in films like Levitsky’s Insurance Policy (1903) and Cohen’s Advertising Scheme (1904), presented an image of Jews as money‐grubbing and untrustworthy. Jewish immigrants of the era responded in different manners to anti‐Semitic attitudes and representations. As with other ethnic groups, some Jews drew in closer to each other in urban ghettoes, where they fiercely clung to their traditions. Examples of this philosophy can be found in a number of Yiddish‐language films made during the 1920s and 1930s. These films were small‐budget, independent films made by and for the Jewish community and were rarely shown outside urban neighborhood theaters. On the other hand, many Jewish immigrants struggled to assimilate into the culture of white Christian America. (Interestingly, the term “American melting pot” itself was coined by a Jewish immigrant playwright, Israel Zangwill.) Also, just as Irish American theatrical performers had done, a number of Jewish American performers began donning blackface on stage, an act that emphasized that Jews were indeed white people who had to “black up” in order to play African Americans.

      Intriguingly, many of the most popular Jewish stage entertainers of the period used blackface in complex ways. While attempting to differentiate (white) Jews from (black) African Americans, Jewish entertainers also used blackface to indicate shared oppression and outsider status. For example, under the guise of blackface, Jewish entertainers sometimes felt safe to tell jokes critical of the white power structure. Jewish entertainers also blurred boundaries between racial and ethnic categories – they may have been performing in blackface, but they sprinkled their dialog with Yiddish slang. Such tomfoolery, practiced by major stars such as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, tended to expose the artificiality of racial and ethnic categories by jumbling them all together. When Eddie Cantor made a film version of his hit stage musical Whoopee! (1930), he bounced from one racial/ethnic type to another: Jewish in one scene, then in blackface, and then Native American. The film’s story revolves around Cantor’s friends, who are forbidden to marry because the man is Native American and the woman is white. This conflict is resolved when it is discovered that the male was only raised by Native Americans and is “actually” white. The resolution of the plot, as well as Cantor’s parody of racial stereotypes, demonstrate the highly subjective and constantly fluctuating nature of racial and ethnic identities.

      By the time that Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor moved from stage to film, circumstances for Jews in the American film industry had changed immensely. During the 1920s, Jews came to dominate Hollywood. Initially, a number of Jewish immigrants had opened and run nickelodeons in the urban ghettoes of large Eastern cities. From those beginnings, these same men built film production companies, moved to the West Coast, and wrested control of the industry