Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese (Toronto Italian Studies) (Paperback)

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Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects – Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino – as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive.

Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various facets of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists. Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian American films offer what Casillo views as a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Italian America and Southern Italy, the conflicts between the ethnic generations, and the formation and development of Italian American ethnicity (and thus identity) on American soil through the generations. Raised as a Catholic and deeply imbued with Catholic values, Scorsese also deals with certain forms of Southern Italian vernacular religion, which have left their imprint not only on Scorsese himself but also on the spiritually tormented characters of his Italian American films. Casillo also shows how Scorsese interrogates the Southern Italian code of masculine honour in his exploration of the Italian American underworld or Mafia, and through his implicitly Catholic optic, discloses its thoroughgoing and longstanding opposition to Christianity.

Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.

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About the Author

~Robert Casillo is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. ~

Product Details

• Paperback: 590 pages
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press; 1 edition (February 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802094031
• ISBN-13: 978-0802094032
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #264,389 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive Readings of Scorsese's Italian-American Films, June 9, 2008

By	Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

In Gangster Priest, Casillo argues that southern Italian culture including Catholicism informs Scorsese's world view as well as the world view of his fictional characters. While previous critics have certainly noted the infuence of southern Italian culture on Scorsese's films, no previous critic has acquired the requisite knowledge of southern Italian culture and applied it in such a comprehensive way to Scorsese's works. The results are surprising and provide a thoroughly researched corrective to the many misreadings of Scorsese's "gangster" films. Though ethnicity is the focus of this study, Casillo brings such a wealth of cultural & critical knowledge to his subject that few will be able to view Scorsese's films in the same way after reading this impressive tome. Scorsese's films have oft been viewed but rarely understood, and this study will prove an invaluable codex for cracking the behaviorial codes & communal rituals of Scorsese's characters as well as the formal structure of his films.

Character is complicated, as is community, and Casillo takes his time first exploring ethnicity and Catholicism as dominant though not determinant themes in Scorsese's own life (artists are always freer to invent and reinvent themselves than are their characters) and then examining how Scorsese critiques these themes in five of his most celebrated films (Who's That Knocking At My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, & Casino). Casillo & Scorsese share an obvious ambivalence toward ethnicity. On the one hand, ethnicity provides artists, scholars, and film characters with a readymade way of living & reading their lives, but, on the other hand, the insular codes followed by an ethnic group often prove restrictive and thwart connection to the larger community. Casillo's book follows the trajectory of Scorsese's Italian-American films which, Casillo argues, can be read as critiques of ethnicity and its waning influence on third generation Italian-Americans. Perhaps most interesting of all is Casillo's discussion of what may prove to be the final installment in Scorsese's Italian-American cycle: a Dean Martin biopic. Scorsese has been working on this project for years, and, Casillo argues, Dean Martin's story would be the perfect coda for Scorsese's Italian cycle as Martin is an Italian-American who comes not from the world of crime but from the world of entertainment and would be representative of Scorsese himself and those Italian-Americans who rejected the readymade codes of their ethnic group and opted instead for good old fashioned self-crafting.

This is an intensely erudite book, the result of years of research (Casillo's interest in Scorsese began when he first saw Mean Streets in a Boston theatre "amid a neighborhood as rough as that in the film"), and displays a commitment to its topic that is rarely encountered in literary or cultural studies let alone film studies. And the reading of it demands a level of commitment that perhaps requires more than the armchair film buff may care to give. For the intrepid academic who shares Casillo's and Scorsese's interest in ethnicity & Catholicism, however, this will prove immensely rewarding.

Note: Gangster Priest is the first volume in a two volume project. This first volume deals with the Italian-American films. A second volume (still in progress) will deal with the remainder of Scorsese's work.