The Mafia

How do you think the Mafia is portrayed in these three different films Goodfellas, The Sopranos and Mickey Blue Eyes?

P.S Please answer got an exam in a week need some good feedback Thanks.

Well, have you seen them? I'd assume not, seeing as how you list The Sopranos as being a film (it's a TV series). If you watch them, I think it will become apparent that this is a really broad question that can't be answered in depth without more information. All I can offer offhand is:

Goodfellas
The Mob is portrayed as a ruthless, corrupting influence with a very selective, fickle moral code.

The Sopranos
The Mob is portrayed as a ruthless, corrupting influence with a very selective, fickle moral code. Also, it's really stressful.

Mickey Blue Eyes
The Mob is portrayed as aggressive, but, uh, lovable. It may or may not have a selective, fickle moral code.

I can't really fathom why someone would group Mickey Blue Eyes with the other two -- it doesn't depict "The Mob" in any meaningful sense any more than Shark Tale or Analyze This do. It's just a spoof -- no social or legal commentary to be found.

But really, if you want us to do your homework for you you'll have to give everyone a lot more to go on.

What did you mean by really?

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I was editing my post and accidently deleted the word "stressful."

That makes sense now.

Yeah, the forgetable Mickey Blue Eyes is on a par with films like Analyze This, Analyze That, Married to the Mob and not up to The Freshman, a much better Mafia spoof in every way.

The Sopranos started off well, but I tired of it well before it reached an end. Too many characters and too few new ways to kill them. Besides, I'm more involved with my own disfunctional family.

The Sopranos

I watch Goodfellas minimum once a year. Reason being is that the movie is based off of a true story.

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The Freshman is a great movie, haven't seen that one for years.

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I wrote a response yesterday (see below) but accidently hit the wrong key and posted it before I was ready. So I called it up and did some extensive editing including discussions of many other movies that did better or worse jobs of depicting organized crimes. But when I tried to save the corrections, I got a message saying I wasn't authorized to be in the system. Found I was no longer signed in. Tried unsuccessfully the alloted 5 times to sign back in. Had no problem today. So far.

Same thing happened to me yesterday

So is Casino. So was The Untouchables, although the story is full of historic falsehoods. In the real Goodfellas, of course, none of the real hoods were as good looking--or as likeable or even interesting--as the actors who played them.

Great, just now tried to recreate what I tried to post yesterday mentioning a dozen other gangster films, and the system signed me off and dumped what I had written when I hit the submit button. What's the point of even trying to participate when the damn system kicks me off????

I'm sorry you're having trouble with the login system -- a lot of things may be contributing to it. Being logged out sometimes is inevitable, as cookies will expire. I don't know if you hit "Save" when you first log in, but if not, that may have something to do with it.

Personally, if I have a long post written up I always make sure to copy it to my clipboard before submitting, just in case. If you don't want to do that, there's another method you can use:

If you submit a post, and get the login screen, simply open the site in a new window, log in there, then come back to the first login screen and refresh. Your browser should ask you if you want to resubmit your form data -- choose yes, and it should go through. I've saved many a lengthy post with this process.

That also happened to me after the upgrade, and this is what I've noticed. Before the upgrade, if you signed out, once you came back, the "Remember me" box was already checked. The only thing you had to do was sign in. You didn't have to remember to check that box. After the upgrade, I was signed out, so I signed in as normal. For a few goes, I would get logged out. I finally remembered to look at that box, and it wasn't checked. I've logged out a few times since then, and it's never checked when I come back. That's not a big deal, or anything. I'm just saying what might be happening to you, rufnek, and others.

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I appreciate your help, Yoda, and will try to follow your instructions. But I still don't understand how I can log on the same way I always have and then be kicked off the system before I even complete a posting. First time it happened, the system even turned down my password when I tried to get back on the system.

If you've been able to login since, then I have to imagine the password thing was just a mistyping (or CAPS LOCK) issue. The passwords are encrypted in the database and there's no way to accidently temporarily change them.

As for why it might sign you off -- it depends on how much time is spent composing the post, but Destiny's post above makes a lot of sense, potentially. If you used to have the "Remember me" box checked, but no longer do, then your login won't be as persistent, and is more likely to expire like this.

I'll go make sure that box is checked by default. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Tell your professor he fails at Mafia in Film because Once Upon A Time in America is the pinnacle of Mafia films. That and Godfather part 1 & 2. And The Sopranos is a television series, not a movie.
Also, if he's trying to touch on more modern made Mafia films...why is he picking films that are over a decade apart?

Goodfellas
The mob is portrayed as small cells working independently for the greater good of one major crime boss that is never involved with much of their work. Also they don't discriminate against the Irish, which I find hard to swallow.

The Sopranos
The mob can be run by any two-bit criminal. Tony Soprano starts out as practically a bag boy and becomes this glorified king-pin. It's Hollywood.

Mickey Blue Eyes
James Caan trying to relive his glory days of The Godfather through a comedic interpretation of the Mafia. It's all one big joke. I don't even think it can honestly be considered a good or bad representation of the Mafia. It just was represented in a pseudo fashion so that Hollywood and Hugh Grant could make a quick buck.

To sum up the 2 films and 1 television series in question the one thing they all have in common is that they all glorify the Mafia. Glory sells.

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Yes. It would have been a lot more interesting if you deep-sixed Mickey Blue Eyes and substituted Mad Dog and Glory.

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OK, I’ll make one more try.
As I’ve already said, Mickey Blue Eyes is a comedy that really says nothing about real gangsters. It’s on a very low par with Analyze This, Analyze That, and the very weird comedy Mad Dog Time (1996) in which Richard Dreyfuss plays an unstable crime boss just released from a mental hospital. The Freshman was a much better spoof on crime films.

I liked the semi-realistic yet comic view of gangsters in Things Change and (to a less realistic degree) Bullets Over Broadway. Gangsters got comic treatments in Robin and the 7 Hoods, Some Like It Hot, The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, The Brinks Job, and all the films based on Damon Runyon’s short stories, such as Guys and Dolls, Pocketful of Miracles (which was a remake of the 1933 Lady for a Day), all of the versions of Little Miss Marker, and the 1934 and 1951 editions of The Lemon Drop Kid.

There are several good-to-moderate films about the Jewish mobs (Once Upon a Time in America, Bugsy, Scarface (1932), Billy Bathgate, Portrait of a Mobster (1961), and all other films about Dutch Shultz) and Irish Gangs (Public Enemy, Miller’s Crossing, Road to Perdition, Gangs of New York ) that preceded the Italian Mafia (yes, some of the mentioned films also have Italians in them but the primary emphasis is on other ethnic groups). There are also films featuring Black gangsters (Hoodlum, American Gangster, and to a small extent The Big Easy) and British gangs (Get Carter (1971), The Ladykillers (1947), The Limey (1999), The Long Good Friday (1980).)

I know Goodfellas has a loyal following, but The Godfather and Godfather II were much better presentations of the family relations and interworkings of the mob. Prizzi’s Honor, and the low-key performances by De Niro and Chazz Palminteri in A Bronx Tale also did that better than Goodfellas IMHO. Other films focusing on the interworkings of the mob include Crazy Joe (1974 with Peter Boyle as real life crime lord Joe Gallo), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The Valachi Papers (1972), and Honor Thy Father.

There are films that address the mob’s evil influence over many aspects of our society including entertainment (Casino, Force of Evil, Love Me or Leave Me, The Joker is Wild, Pete Kelly’s Blues), Sports (Boxing: The Harder They Fall, The Set Up; baseball, Eight Men Out; horse racing, The Sting, The Killing, and to a lesser extent, Phar Lap), Government (The Glass Key (1942), The Great McGinty (1940), The Racket (1951), Tight Spot (police corruption, 1955), and Labor (On the Waterfront—without a doubt one of the best gangster films ever made!—Hoffa, F.I.S.T.)

Gangster films are by their very nature violent, and some are more violent than others. In Murder Inc. (1960) Peter Falk, portraying the real mob killer Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles, brutally stabs nightclub operator Morey Amsterdam in one of the most realistic murder scenes on film. The Enforcer (1951) also is about Murder Inc., which was a group of mainly Jewish killers headed by Albert Anastasia, the mob’s "Lord High Executioner.” In that film, one hit man murders a woman with whom he has fallen in love. Additional vicious murders of unarmed victims are included in Kiss of Death (1947), Key Largo (1958), Suddenly! (1954), Johnny Cool (1963), The Usual Suspects, The Killers (both the 1946 original and the 1964 remake), Violent Saturday (1955), and The Big Heat (1953). What stands out in each of the last three films listed is Lee Marvin’s ability to crank up violence to a believable nasty level. Other films spotlighting mob violence include The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), Thief (1981), and who can forget Bob Steele giving Elijah Cook Jr. that fatal glass of poison in The Big Sleep? What happens to Sinatra as real-life comic Joe E. Lewis in The Joker is Wild is very vicious, too.

That said, my absolute favorite gangster film of all time is Men of Respect, the 1991 adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth to the gangster genre, illustrating that villains remain just as evil as they were back in Elizabethan England.

I once read a statement by a retired federal agent who was a veteran of the wild days of Capone and Ness who said that the law officers he knew back then were all brave, tough, and loyal to their jobs and each other. The gangsters, he said, were also brave and tough, but there was not a bit of loyalty among them. And nearly every gangster film always shows some gangsters betraying and murdering other gangsters.

Both the Godfather trilogy and Goodfellas are great classic mafia films. However they are different in how they portray the mob, only because the mafia had changed with the times. The Italian Mafia from its beginnings to the 1950's, was still centered around the very values and core beliefs that the original Cosa Nostra was built on: family, respect, loyalty, so on and so on. Thus you have the mafia portrayed in the Godfather. The Godfather doesn't necessarily romanticize the mafia, because the mafia from that era was already very romantic. Because everything was still centered around family and respect and class, it was a less ruthless, cut-throat, backstabbing, conniving organization. And this era was accurately portrayed in the Godfather.

In Goodfellas, the mafia portrayed is the mafia during the 1960s through the 1990s. What happened that caused a drastic change in the Italian American mafia was drugs, economy, terrorist organizations, and the shift to modern society. In the 60's was the drug boom, as well as in the 70s. Obviously a potential lucrative market, the mafia opened it's lines for drug trafficking and pulled in plenty of cash. However, the deeper into drug trafficking the mafia became, the more cut-throat the mafia became. South American drug empires were not built around the same values and beliefs the Italian American mafia was built around, and the organization had to adjust to dealing with drug syndicates that lacked respect and loyalty. In addition, the severity and level of illegality of drugs in the U.S. caused the mafia to become much more looked down upon. Before being involved in drugs, the government recognized the mafia as a legitimate business organization and only preyed on their dealings when there was obvious red-handed illegality. When discovered that the mafia was heavily involved in drug trade, the federal government became the number one enemy of the mafia. Markets became hard to find and businesses that were once legitimate were now targets of the CIA and F.B.I. Thus money was cut off from the mafia and every organization was facing tough times. Dabbling in dealings with terrorist organizations even furthered deteriorated the values of the mafia and they became public enemy number 1. Their members were now feeling the squeeze and became more selfish with money and power. Just as heath ledger said in the dark knight, when the chips are down, these people will eat each other alive. So true. Thus, in Goodfellas, you see the accurate portrayal of the ruthless and cruel mafia of that 1960s to 1990s era.

Both films portray a very accurate mafia. And the Sopranos is very accurate as well in its portrayal of today's mafia.

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