Word: gangsterisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Miller's Crossing is about friendship, character and ethics. GoodFellas is about friends who are colorful characters but left their ethics at the baptismal font. Even as a kid, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) was crazy about the gangster life. He connives in murder one, runs a cocaine cartel, robs decent folks blind -- and, when he is caught, shrugs off all remorse. His patron is a stately Mafioso (Paul Sorvino) who warns him to stay out of the drug business; Henry jumps right in. His best friend is a wacko hoodlum (Joe Pesci) who gets whacked by his own family; Henry...
...rogues' gallery of gangster films this fall, GoodFellas and Miller's Crossing blaze and strut their way out front. -- Clint Eastwood tackles the myth of filmmaker John Huston...
...thinking about restoring the famed tommy gun of the 1930s to active inventory. Memorialized in gangster movies and in TV's The Untouchables, the Thompson submachine gun, it turns out, can still outmatch some of its modern successors: one of its .45-cal. slugs, spewed out at a rate of up to 800 rounds a minute, will knock down even the biggest bad guy. By contrast, the Israeli-made Uzi, the current weapon of choice among many criminals and some lawmen, uses smaller bullets; one hit is often not enough...
...furious with PECO Corp., a window manufacturer. The company, which had ties to the Genovese family, had started to succumb to overtures by the smaller Lucchese clan. This was cutting Savino out of his kickbacks. So with the blessing of family higher-ups, Savino and a fellow gangster stormed the company's storage yard, pulled out their machine guns and blew to bits more than 200 windows that were sitting on an open truck. For PECO's owners, happy to still be breathing, it was a pointed lesson that so many businessmen have come to learn: you don't mess...