Liotta was in his 30s, Sorvino, Sirico and Herman were in their 40s and 50s when GoodFellas premiered and that's 32 years ago. Caan, for instance, was in his early 30s - young and vital - when he made The Godfather.īut it's now a half-century later. We tend to freeze actors in the roles we best remember. Now, in the space of just a few months, they're gone - which is perhaps unsurprising in actuarial terms, but still comes as a shock. And as the Mafia recedes, so, eventually, must its interpreters.Īll five of these actors – Caan, Liotta, Sorvino, Herman, and Sirico - were still robust and working at the start of this year. But in recent years, a more egalitarian Hollywood has turned its attention to African-American anti-heroes, Asian cyber-criminals and drug cartels from Latin America. There are still occasional mob stories with Italian faces being produced. And it crested with the six seasons of The Sopranos almost two decades ago. Still, this wave of modern mafia epics was just that - a wave.
#SECOND LIFE OF A GANGSTER MOVIE#
Ray Liotta, who exploded to stardom when he played the young lead in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas, also struggled to avoid typecasting, going so far as to refuse a major role in The Sopranos (though he relented many years later, taking a part in last year's Sopranos movie prequel The Many Saints of Newark).Īctor Tony Sirico relaxing in his trailer circa 2000 on the set of The Sopranos. And with The Godfather ushering in a new realism in mob movies, Caan wasn't alone. "I'm not even Italian," he told them, "I'm Jewish." Didn't matter. Cohan when he played him in Yankee Doodle Dandy.īut shortly after The Godfather made him a bankable star, James Caan got turned down when he tried to join a country club because its members so believed his performance, they thought that like Sonny, he was a "made man." Of course, given the artificiality of gangster flicks in the 1930s and '40s, it made sense that no one would confuse Cagney with the tough guys he played, any more than he'd be confused with Broadway showman George M. When mobsters died in The Godfather, audiences wept.Īnd the actors who played those mobsters became identified with them in ways that earlier 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 films - never did. A new template: realistic gangstersĪctually, it went further: It asked us to feel for the Mafiosi.
It asked us to identify not with the law, but with the Mafiosi. In 1972, The Godfather changed the formula. In the gangster flicks of an earlier era, nearly always told from the moralistic viewpoint of the authorities, this scene wouldn't exist. "I don't want his mother to see him this way." "I want you to use all your powers and all your skills," the Don tells the undertaker, seeking one last comfort for his son.
0 kommentar(er)
