This book groups one Irish- and three Italian-American filmmakers together with D. W. Griffith in order to trace the gradual uphill path of two ethnic cultures in American film. The path was built in three stages.

In the 191Os, D. W. Griffith used Irish and Italian characters to touch the fears and address the needs of Anglo-American moviegoers: He probed nativist fears in scenes of ethnic violence, and he responded to Anglo needs with subtly distinctive Irish and Italian values. In the 1920s, a second stage commenced with the release of several hundred mainstream films featuring stereotypical ethnics and supposedly...

In the early 1900s when the American film industry was just getting on its feet, several million Irish and Italians immigrated to America looking for prosperity. They had fled the grinding poverty of Kilkenny and Catania, endured terrible hardships at sea, and then signed up for twelve-hour shifts in American factories. But at least they could feed a large family and gradually build up some savings. Nothing in their ethnic values or their religion prevented them from subscribing to the country’s Anglo-Protestant ethic of hard work, private ownership, and success.

Of course, the Irish and Italians also brought with them...

In the 1920s, Griffith’s experiments with Catholic priests and nuns were quickly forgotten. Filmmakers mostly believed that Irish and Italian ethnics on screen had to suit mainstream melodrama. From the kindly Irish cop to the scolding Irish widow, from the Italian criminal to the Neapolitan hurdy-gurdy man, ethnic filmic stereotypes reflected not so much immigrant neighborhoods as the fears and desires of WASP audiences.

Still, the closer movies got to Irish and Italian cultures, the more likely they were to capture brief moments of ethnic reality; the realistic tendency in American cinema was never entirely absent. The filmic Irish son,...

InA Short History of the Movies,Gerald Mast begins his discussion of John Ford’s work with a shrewd cultural observation.

[Ford] is the spiritual descendant of D. W. Griffith. Like Griffith, Ford’s values are traditional and sentimental: the pure woman, the home, the family, law, decency, democracy. Like Griffith—and like the two other important Roman Catholic directors of the studio era, Frank Capra and Leo McCarey—Ford was a populist who praised the little people and the institutions that protected the little people while he damned those who selfishly twisted the system to grab money and power. (1981,...

Frank Capra Frank Capra hails from the same social tradition in American film as D. W. Griffith and John Ford. Like them, he explored issues of family, law, decency, and democracy. Yet, Capra’s distinctive ethnic background also made a difference. Though as much a social moralist as Griffith, Capra brought to his characters an Italian sense of gentle compassion; his familial concern for others was an ethnic world apart from Griffith’s Anglo view of greedy human nature. As for a resemblance to Ford’s work, Capra’s films often relied on communal values and family scenes. But whereas Ford wrestled with age-old...

As a child, Francis Coppola often changed schools to keep pace with his father’s musical career. Growing up in various suburbs, he experienced ethnicity not as a way of life on the streets but as a way of relating within a middle-class family. Coppola the filmmaker constantly mirrors both this close-up familial vision of the self and anger towards the symbolic absent father. Although this conflicted familial vision might seem to negate the social values of John Ford and Frank Capra, Coppola does assert similar themes of family and home, law and decency and democracy in seemingly self-contradictory narratives: In...

Martin Scorsese spent much of his childhood in bed with pleurisy, wishing he could play in the streets. When he did get outside, he immersed himself in Little Italy—in an insular, often self-destructive world. Years later, as a young filmmaker, Scorsese translated this world into film with religious-like devotion. Typically, he pictured an intelligent and morally sensitive young man who, in one violent moment, purges his Italian familial community. After thoroughly mining his ethnic boyhood, Scorsese turned to greater Manhattan where he envisioned non-Italian men either confronting or satirizing a WASP society based, not on the family, but on...