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At the outset of the film, a powerful marker of ‘Italian-ness’ is evoked as Tony Camonte, a figure more accurately based on Al Capone than Rico Bandello was, sets out to murder his rival ‘Big Louie’ Costillo. In a play of chiaroscuro, a dark silhouette approaches his victim moving from the right to the left of the screen while whistling an aria from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by the famed Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. As the narrative progresses, the character of Tony is further developed through additional markers of his immigrant ethnic background. A coarse, even vulgar man, Tony has a poor command of English, and his sentences are marked by a heavy accent and the occasional Italian phrase, evident when he yells ‘sta’ zitt!’ (‘shut up!’) at his mother. Even as he begins to ascend the ladder of urban criminality, his immigrant background surfaces: he buys dozens of shirts so that he only has to wear them once, and he purchases ostentatious jewellery while settling into a gaudily furnished home. Like Rico Bandello, Tony inhabits a world of urban criminality where Italians are always present, as characters such as Johnny Lovo, Guino Rinaldo, his secretary Angelo, and even the organ-grinder demonstrate. Yet it is perhaps through the representation of Tony’s Italian family that the film binds the gangster most firmly to an ethnic Italian world. Introduced early in the film, Tony’s family is a stereotypical representation of ‘Old World Italian familialism.’8 Tony’s mother, dressed in a southern Italian peasant outfit and expressing herself in broken English, is often shown in a farmhouse
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