ABSTRACT
In the 1970s movies about Italian Americans were part of a wave of both scholarly and popular interest in the cultural roots of the socalled "white ethnics" (Di Leonardo 1998,82). The even broader appeal of The Godfather and Kooky resulted from how they also fit into what Micaela Di Leonardo describes as the larger society's post-counterculture ideas about identity. In contrast to stereotypes of WASPs as "too cold," bloodless, repressed, and selfish, and of blacks as "too hot," wild, primitive, and overly dependent, the Italian Americans in these movies appeared-like baby bear's porridge-"just right": expressive, physical and connected, yet strong and self-determining (Di Leonardo 1994, 176-77). The other four films upset this balance by showing how, through the process of assimilation, whiteness and individualism come to constitute Italian-American identity. Despite such differences, the stories in these six films eventually all return to a longing for "pure" ethnicity, an identity drawn from what Donald Tricarico calls "the world of our fathers" (1989, 26). They wind up therefore depicting those characters who try to move beyond an insular notion of ItalianAmericanness defined within the space of the neighborhood as "sinners," regardless of their social and material success.
