Mafiosos also made their way into comedies: “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985), “Married to the Mob” (1988), “My Blue Heaven” (1990) and “Analyze This” (1999). A partial list of related films includes dramas like “The Untouchables” (1987), “Donnie Brasco” (1997) and especially Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), which showed the underside of “The Godfather's romantic vision of Mafia life. (“The Godfather, Part III,” released 16 years after “Part II,” failed to impress critics or audiences.) Over the next three decades, Hollywood never lost its fascination with the Mafia. “The Godfather, Part II” (1974) was darker and more violent than the first film, but both were box office smashes and multiple Oscar winners. In this way, “The Godfather” reinvented the gangster movie, just as it would influence all those that came after it. Unlike previous gangster films, “The Godfather” looked at the Mafia from the inside out, instead of taking the perspective of law enforcement or of “regular” society. It also painted an undeniably romantic portrait of the mafioso as a man of contradiction, who was ruthless toward his enemy but devoted to his family and friends above all else. (Coppola also co-wrote the screenplay, with Puzo.) With Marlon Brando (Don Corleone) and Al Pacino (Michael) leading a stellar cast, “The Godfather” gave a fuller, more authentic and more sympathetic glimpse into the Italian-American experience than had been seen on screen before, even as it framed that glimpse through the lens of organized crime. Puzo’s novel tells the story of Sicilian immigrant Vito Corleone and the family and “business” he built in New York, including the struggles of his son Michael, who will succeed him as the new “Don.” Paramount Pictures bought the film rights to the novel, and studio head Robert Evans turned to the young Italian-American director Francis Ford Coppola to direct. “The Valachi Papers,” a book by Peter Maas, came out in 1969, the same year as the novel that would do more than any other to establish the mythology of the mafia in popular culture: Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather.” It was Valachi who introduced the now-famous Mafia euphemism “La Cosa Nostra” (Our Thing), and his testimony revealed the evolution of Italian-American organized crime in America, especially in New York. In the early 1960s, Joseph Valachi, a soldier in the Luciano “family” organization, took a starring role in later televised hearings. Thanks to the new medium of television, millions of Americans watched the testimony of real-life mobsters like Frank Costello (or more accurately, they watched Costello’s shaky hands–the only part of him shown by the camera). This began to change after 1950, when a Senate committee set up to investigate organized crime began holding public hearings. After 1942, gangsters largely disappeared from the screen, as Nazis and monsters took the place of mobsters as Hollywood’s preferred villains. Robinson, “The Public Enemy” (1931) with Jimmy Cagney and “Scarface” (1932) with Paul Muni, the main characters–all Italian Americans, some based on real life mobsters such as Capone–suffered the consequences of their law-breaking, but many audiences still identified with their willingness to go outside the bounds of the traditional system to make a living. In movies like “Little Caesar” (1931) with Edward G. As the era of Prohibition gave way to the Great Depression, the first wave of gangster movies mirrored the growing anger and frustration of many Americans at their worsening economic conditions.
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