Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos

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Bloomsbury Academic, 2005 M12 29 - 352 pages
From the silent era and The Black Hand (1906) to HBO's hit series The Sopranos, Hollywood has had a love-hate affair with Italian Americans. Now in paperback, Hollywood Italians is a celebration of nearly a century of images of Italians in American motion pictures and their often under-appreciated, underpraised, and truly remarkable contribution to popular culture.

Hollywood Italians covers the careers of dozens of stars among them Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Marisa Tomei, and James Galdolfini. In addition, the book reviews the work of such Italian American directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese in a fresh light. In all, Hollywood Italians discusses scores of films with a concentration on their literary and European-cinematic roots. The book is capped by a no-holds-barred examination of The Godfather and its two sequels as well as the international television phenomenon The Sopranos.

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About the author (2005)

Peter Bondanella is the author of the groundbreaking Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, Hollywood Italians, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, and The Films of Roberto Rossellini. In 2009, he was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and the Arts for his contributions to the history of the Italian cinema and his translations or editions of Italian literary classics (Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Cellini). He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Film Studies, and Italian at Indiana University and lives in St. George, Utah.

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