User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions
"copyedited" |
"copyedited" |
||
| Line 83: | Line 83: | ||
page break | page break | ||
almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks. | |||
Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later. 12 While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews (Fried xv). While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' (1931) Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' (1932), Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose | |||
Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt. | |||