These beasts of prey wear thousand-dollar suits. In their choice of women and home furnishings, they elevate bad taste to high style. They still kill the old way, out of discipline or distemper. At their best they have a sense of honor and a fear of their bosses that would do credit to the medieval church. At their worst they play their sick whims on the weak, and when the sport grows tiresome, they rat on their friends or slit a few throats. They are gangsters, hit men, wise guys -- good fellas, in the parlance of dapper don John Gotti and wizard filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
GoodFellas, the homicidally funny fresco of a Mafia family that Scorsese has made from the Nicholas Pileggi book Wiseguy, is the centerpiece in a new rogues' gallery. Mob movies are gathering, like capos at the Appalachia conference, from all over America. You want Italian-American hoods of the New York City stripe? We got 'em by the hundreds in GoodFellas. In My Blue Heaven, written by Pileggi's wife Nora Ephron as a kind of comic coda to the Scorsese picture, Steve Martin plays a Mafia rat in a Witness Protection Program out West. At Christmas, Paramount has The Godfather Part III, a climax to the gangland Nibelungen Ring, starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton and a cast of many Coppolas.
In the American melting pot, gangsters were the indigestible pieces of ethnic gristle; country of origin was as crucial as turf. So we need some Irish gangsters. In Phil Joanou's State of Grace, they are based on the Westies gang, who ran the rackets in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. Other Irishmen run a big-city crime factory, about 1929, in Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing, where, in the grand tradition, they fight the Italians and the Jews.
What's going on here? Why is Hollywood once again married to the Mob? It's not that the genre is especially popular these days. (The Untouchables was the only gangster blockbuster of the '80s.) Nor is it that the Italian underworld taps a nerve in today's body politic. Drug lords, often black or Hispanic, are the civic scourge of the moment, and they get their movie due only in Abel Ferrara's rancid, megaviolent King of New York, in which a white man (Christopher Walken) leads a rainbow coalition of pushers. Whatever charm the Mafia boss still possesses is not contemporary but nostalgic. He is remembered or imagined as the dark padrone, courtly and caring, a big tipper to the little people.
The real reason for the spate of Mob movies is that a few powerful artists want to make them. Directors love the form because its speed and anarchy spoke to them as young moviegoers. More important, it allows them to confront, in code, the awful ethnic schisms of American life; Italian vs. Wasp stands in for black vs. white. Actors love Mob movies because, now that the western is dead, the genre gives them one last chance to strut their maleness in a traditional setting. They can act like cowboys without having to ride a horse. And, as avatars of the Method, they get to rant in words James Dean never spoke onscreen. Mandatory Mob-movie dialogue: "Shut the f up!" "No, you shut the f up!"