The Godfather
The Godfather not only romanticized the Mafia lifestyle in a way that had never been done before, it did more just than that. Before the movie most portrayals of Italians were shallow, inaccurate and gave little thought about the culture or its people. Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the film, and Mario Puzo wanted to present a more accurate image of Italians even if it happened to be behind a gangster movie backdrop. In the documentary piece The Making of Godfather Trilogy, Coppola even admitted that he didn’t particularly like violence and was often pushed by the studios to make it more violent than he intended. His vision was more of an Italian family drama piece, that just so happened to star the head of a mafia family. He wanted it to be authentic, or least have an air of authenticity so he provided the film with more diversity opting out of the usual whitewashing. This sort of representation had never been done for the community up to this point, and after the movie became wildly successful, most Italians were more than happy to support this film about the mafia as it made their race out as intelligent and capable like no film had done before. Thomas Ferraro author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America described this reaction by saying that “Italian Americans saw their histories, their hopes, their foibles, their worries, their strengths, their beauty, and their ugliness reflected on the national screen.”
