Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Muscling. That melodramatic end to the short, brutal life of Joey Gallo surprised no one in New York's increasingly fratricidal underworld. There had been a contract out on his life ever since Mafia Boss Joe Colombo had been shot at an Italian Day rally in New York last June (TIME cover, July 12). Police do not believe that Gallo plotted that murder attempt, but friends of Colombo, who remains unable to talk or walk, thought he had. Gallo had been counted among the walking dead ever since he also aroused the anger of the biggest boss of them...
...Godfather. Marlon Brando in the film that doesn't mention "Mafia" once. Savoy...
After the first hurrahs for The Godfather, critical reaction to the movie has snagged on a few key questions. Does it revel in Hollywood gangster melodrama? Does it sentimentalize the Mafia? Does it present the Mob as a metaphor for all business or politics? One of TIME's cinema critics gives his assessment...
...fact that Coppola scrupulously humanizes his characters does not mean that he sentimentalizes the Mafia. The men are racists and hypocrites. They form a so ciety closed to women, who are indulged, protected, finally depersonalized. One may admire the Godfather for his refusal to traffic in dope, but his reasons are practical, not moral: he stands to lose all his political contacts, because they - not he - consider narcotics "a dirty business...
Coppola extends this moral masquerade even further, using the Mafia as a metaphor not only for cor ruption in business, but for corruption in all centers of power, emphatically including government. "My father is no different from any other powerful man," Michael tells his WASPish girl friend Kay. She says, "You're being naive. Senators and Congressmen don't have people killed." Replies Michael: "Who's being naive now, Kay?" When the Don expresses regret that Michael could not have been "a Senator, a Governor," the son promises him, "We'll get there...