Little Italy in gangster movies

New york's "Little Italy" is Queens, adjacent to China City. Unlike today's scene, around 1930s, this was what martin scorsese called a "mean street". Because of the two world wars and the collapse of the global economic system, immigrants who could not find a way to live in the "old continent" Europe came to the United States by boat. The story of Alice Island in The Godfather is obviously a portrayal of historical reality, which is the second "immigration tide" in the United States.

Among them, Italian immigrants live in Queens today, forming a unique Italian landscape. The streets are untidy, but full of vitality. In summer, the restaurant will move the table to the edge of the street (we have seen this scene in Ferini's Romanesque paintings). Due to the habit of Italian immigrants living in large families, the residents in this area were crowded and the living conditions were very poor at that time. Although time and space are far apart, we can still imagine the scene at that time, especially the eating habits of Italians. It's time for dinner, and the streets smell of cheese and garlic (hehe).

Italian immigrants coming to the new world for the first time have many obstacles in their lives because of language, habits, and inability to find a job. Many teenagers started their criminal career from petty theft. Italians have always had the custom of not cooperating with the authorities. From the Carbonburning Party in the late Middle Ages to the Sicilian Mafia, a set of organizational methods and rules of member behavior have been developed. Its most famous rule is the so-called "glorious silence" or "honorary silence". In other words, an insider may not disclose what he knows to the authorities in any way. The word "honor" here is Italian. According to my limited understanding, it should be used as a noun rather than an adjective. In fact, there is no corresponding word in Chinese, which means between "honor" and "rule". In the film Pritz's Honor, the couple met not because of cheating and money, but because they violated "honor", at least on the surface.

This tradition is dangerous. In modern legal society, not cooperating with the authorities means that all problems must be solved by another power structure, which forms the underground power system of the American mafia against the authorities. Of course, from a legal point of view, this is the so-called "organized crime".

Due to the release of francis ford coppola's film The Godfather based on mario puzo's novel, the first classic gangster movie was born, which is an insurmountable peak in the history of gangster movies. After that, every gangster film was under its observation, or one of its rich themes was selected for research, or it was deliberately the opposite, only to be proved to be influenced by it.

The profound feature of The Godfather lies in its classical flavor, rich ambiguity and unity. Its contemplation of "fate" has a strong color of ancient Greek tragedy, its solid description of details is the realistic tradition of19th century, and Don Cleoni's challenge to social rules is very romantic. Godfather never wants to deal with the material with a realistic attitude. What it provides us is not the true history and present situation of the mafia family in new york, but the inevitable "possible world" with all accurate details. What Vokpola describes for us is actually a fable about the emergence and disappearance of all power systems in human history.

Martin scorsese Scorsese was born in an Italian immigrant family in Little Italy, and his films have a deep regional imprint. He even asked his family to play some roles in the film. De Niro, the protagonist of his empire, is also an Italian immigrant born here. These backgrounds enable his lens to penetrate into the essential world of the underground society of Italian immigrants. Under Scorsese's lens, the violence no longer has the fatalism of Coppola's ancient tragedy, but-in his own words: very ugly. Under Scorsese's lens, those friendships are no longer reliable and often end in betrayal. Looking at the intrigue of the characters in The Godfather, it seems that thousands of years have passed, and it seems that we are reading the history or historical records of Herodotus, and we feel the historic wisdom. Look at the competition of the characters in Boy, because the camera is too close, the audience just feels ugly. Coppola dissects the power structure in The Godfather, and Scorsese observes the existence of gangs in the film. When Scorsese is getting older and wants to talk more about "history" and "macro", his "Gangster in New York" seems to be inadequate. The complicated ambiguity plunged the director into mixed water. He pushed his Italian immigrant gang forward for nearly 100 years. This movement is not close to history, but let him out of the true ecology of the Italian underworld on which he relied for success.

Representative shadow:

1 godfather ii iii

Mean street "mean street" or translated as "cruel street"

3 thieves also have a way "thieves also have a way."

4 New York Gangster "New York Gangster"

5 Warach's document "The Great Times" (directed by Terence Young, 1972)

Second, strictly define other nationalities, the bottle of gangs and anti-gangs. Godfather 1972 was born without a "gang". Because the accurate legal definition of "gangster" is "organized crime". Although Hollywood has made many movies featuring robbers and killers before, the director's eyes did not stop at "organization". The criminal activities of "Kabang" (1) and "Bonnie" (2) are still "do what you want" and remain in a state of "no organization and no discipline". To put it bluntly, the silent film "Underground World" (1927) with the Chicago Massacre as the background is a film about underground criminal gangs. But at most, it can only be regarded as a movie about "gang crime". This is not for the organized crime bureau to decide. Melville, a famous French director, does not aim at gangs, but inherits the "loneliness" of the French new wave theme, which we can classify as "hero movies". John Woo's film style in Hong Kong has his genetic factors.

Only from the godfather, "gangster" has become the premise of a certain type of film. Become a concept of "stop first": crime is "professional", member organizations are in a "pyramid" system, the financial affairs of the organization are "enterprises", and members have a common goal, although no one knows what this goal is, probably only Tang himself is thinking about this problem. The organization and silence rules of the Italian mafia provide the godfather with a lot of details to construct the concept of mafia "ontology". At that time, the media's report on the American mafia "Our Cause" brought mystery to this real criminal organization, which produced romance, which is an indispensable element of the film. Since then, the "gangster" has become a self-sufficient closed world, gradually divorced from the real criminal organization, and gradually became the narrative environment and background of a type of film. The audience no longer cares whether the gangsters in the real world will really shoot at the hotel lobby with machine guns. People believe that in movies, this is a world with all "possibilities". In this sense, the godfather is really the source of the gangster world. Because it was Coppola himself who tirelessly constructed this "possible" world in The Godfather.

Nowadays, it is difficult for people living in the clear sky to tell whether the mysterious underground "gangster" concept in their minds comes from more movies or from more empirical materials of criminal sociology. In this way, the ontological world "gangster" in the film can confidently walk out of the life circle of little Italy and come to other ethnic immigrant communities in the United States. Of course, it even goes to the whole world (which we will talk about later in the review unit).

Gangster was not confident from the beginning when it came out of Italy, which may be the subconscious motivation for Scarface, another classic of gangster film, to let Don Al Pacino play the leading role. Scarface was released on 1983, written by Oliver Si Tong and directed by Brian Palma. This film has a great influence on Hong Kong gangster films, which has already been talked about. Tony montana played by pacino is a Cuban immigrant. He started as a kitchen worker and made his mark in the gangster world step by step. His success is due to his unwillingness, and his strong desire to "climb up" makes him a gangster. The outcome was a failure. As we said before, the film censorship system has a far-reaching impact on the gangster film narrative. But the audience was not discouraged by his final failure, because the film lasted for nearly three hours and the audience watched him rise in the gangster world with extraordinary energy. His failure was due to betrayal. Being betrayed is how heroes die, as we have long known in the stories of Agamemnon in ancient Greece and otero in Shakespeare. Scarface has made great contributions to "our gangster film career". It can almost be said that it sets an industry standard for future gangster films.

"Once upon a time in New York" 65438-0984 The gangster story happened to American Jewish immigrants. Italian director Sergio Leoni saw something in Scarface that could deeply capture the audience's soft meat. Al Pacino has always shown a sense of emptiness and loss in his successful criminal activities, and the Italian director with a slightly sentimental temperament immediately captured this feeling sensitively. Once upon a time in America tells a story about the disillusionment of dreams, dreams of youth, dreams of art, dreams of money and success, and most importantly, dreams of love. The past in the United States can best capture an audience as sentimental as the director. China writer Wang Shuo and film artist Jiang Wen were arrested once, and their cooperative film Sunny Days benefited a lot from Once upon a time in the United States. We put forward this film in this unit, not only because it is a good-looking film, but also because of the second theme of this chapter: the gangster's bottle began to be filled with different kinds of wine. In Once upon a time in America, the narrative shell is a gangster story during prohibition in America. They are engaged in the activities of killing people and stealing goods, but their temperament is more like artists, sensitive, frustrated and affectionate. Previously, at the level of elite art, some people already knew how to describe and smuggle their own things with genres of public interest. For example, Bhutto, a French new novel writer, used the narrative shell of detective novels to smuggle her philosophical thinking about time in his Once upon a time. Nowadays, as a mass entertainment industry, this technique has begun to appear in gangster movies.

It is also a nation of robbers bottled new wine and so on, as well as black rain. We are familiar with the director of this film, ridley scott ridley scott, because of his blade runner and Gladiator. 1989' s Black Rain tells the story that new york policeman Ricky was involved in a fight between Japanese gangsters when he escorted a Japanese gangster back to Osaka, Japan (1988' s Black Rain directed by Japanese Shohei Imamura has nothing to do with it). Most of the scenes of this film are in Osaka, Japan, but this is an out-and-out film made by Hollywood directors, purely from the standpoint of American audiences. Let's put it in this chapter. The gangster in this film is very authentic. We think that in Gangster Bottle, the film tells the story of an American who encounters the conflict between eastern and western cultural concepts in Japan. It is worth mentioning that the purpose of playing Natsuo Yamaguchi, the second generation of Japanese gangster, in the film is Yusaku Matsuda, and Yusaku Matsuda is well known to the older generation of fans in China because he plays the police officer Dong Ju in Witness. He was already suffering from cancer when filming Black Rain, and he endured the pain. The young Japanese gangster he played was haunted. In one film, he was punished by the mob boss according to the rules of the Japanese underworld because he committed a crime, and his finger was cut off. It is said that Yusaku Matsuda really cut off a finger, because he felt that he was dying and wanted to leave a meaningful scene for film history. Thankfully, Yusaku Matsuda's son, Song Tian RYU HAYABUSA Ping, has always been a very successful film actor, and his performance in The Trial is as ghostly as his father's.

The old bottle of new wine in gangster movies has reached a new level in quentin tarantino's hands. His "Pulp Fiction" not only contains a new wine about "contingency", but also completely subverts the gangster film as a genre due to the director's deconstruction technique. In "Pulp Fiction", the gangster is no longer like the boss, and all his packages as a gangster are sodomized at one time. Everything is out of place: the killer is the nanny of the boss's girlfriend, the glamorous woman has an empty life, and the black killer chants the adapted version of Ezekiel 25 before killing, 17. Everything is empty, gangs are empty, and life is empty. Uma thurman blinked in the movie and said innocently, "What can we do without farting?"

Note (1): Chicago gangster Al Kabon has made more than a dozen films based on his life story since Little Caesar.

Note (2): Bonnie the thief, since Bonnie and Clyde, there have been more than five movies featuring her.

Representative shadow:

Scarface

Once Upon a Time in America

Black Rain

Popular function of popular novels