ABSTRACT
Six films released between 1972 and 1980—The Godfather; Mean Streets; The Godfather, Part II; Rocky; Rocky II; and Raging Bull—have found critical and/or monetary success by emphasizing a masculinized version of Italian-American identity. 1 All these films represent Italian Americans as a distinct urban group whose ethnicity is created and maintained by working-class men who learn everything they need to survive on the streets of their neighborhood. Ironically, this image of Italian-Americanness calcified at a time when most Italian Americans had already moved into middle-class suburban spaces, and sent their children to learn survival skills at universities rather than through fist-fights and gunplay. 2 Whereas these films depict Italian-American ethnicity as a timeless identity characterized by a seemingly stable form of masculinity, several films from the 1990s such as A Bronx Tale, Mac, Household Saints, and Kiss Me Guido represent both ethnicity and masculinity as part of a complex web of social identities that is constantly changing. In order to understand the ways in which the more recent movies revise canonical representations of Italian Americans, we will first analyze the connection created between urban, working-class men and white ethnicity in the earlier films.
