Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese

GANGSTER PRIEST: THE ITALIAN AMERICAN CINEMA OF MARTIN SCORSESE Robert Casillo Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 600 pp. Reviewed by Marc Raymond Within the critical literature on Martin Scorsese, there exists a large volume of work on his Italian Catholic background. Robert Casillo's new book Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese represents by far the most comprehensive study of this topic, offering a depth missing from previous work on Scorsese's ethnicity and religion. Casillo smartly devotes most of his analysis to those films that deal with Italian culture directly, with a chapter each on six primary films: Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Italianamerican, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino. There are also chapters on Scorsese as a third-generation Italian-American artist and on his pre-filmmaking life in New York's Little Italy. Casillo is clearly very well read in the history and sociology of Italian-American culture, particularly the major role of Catholicism within this cultural group. The book provides an almost overwhelming amount of detail about Italian-American history and culture culled from a large number of secondary texts. A lack of primary research makes the chapter on Scorsese's upbringing mostly a summary of previous writings, and, unfortunately, there is no bibliography to organize the extensive secondary sources Casillo draws upon. The smallest details from certain films are described, explained at great length, and included in the 161 pages of notes accompanying four hundred pages of text. Some of this material is indeed helpful in explaining the historical and sociological meaning behind references that would remain obscure to an audience not familiar with the cultural context. Indeed, Casillo persuasively argues that without this grounding in Scorsese's ethnic and religious background, a full understanding of the meaning of his films is impossible. But this approach also proves to be rather reductive, relegating the films and their multitude of meanings to a single master code. One glaring example occurs when Casillo compares two different interpretations of a sequence from Who's That Knocking At My Door?. One, Casillo claims, misinterprets the scene, the other reads the scene correctly. For Casillo, reading the films correctly means reading them exclusively from the perspective of Italian-American culture. While valid in its own way, this is hardly the only way to view a figure as assimilated as Scorsese. After all, Scorsese has spent almost his entire career as a Hollywood filmmaker. Because of his particular critical bias, Castillo's strongest chapters are on the films made outside of Hollywood: Who's That Knocking At My Door? and, especially, Italianamerican, Scorsese's documentary about his parents. It is with the latter film that Casillo's extensive knowledge of Italian-American culture is most valuable. Re-watching Italianamerican, one achieves a much deeper understanding of the subject matter, thanks to Castillo's chapter on the film. Nevertheless, Casillo's approach is rather monolithic, a weakness that becomes more serious when this reductive grid is placed over the other films. The chapter on Mean Streets shows both the strength and weakness of this approach most vividly because of the transitional nature of the film itself. Mean Streets began as the third part of a trilogy Scorsese planned at New York University in the 1960s. The script's original title was Season of the Witch, which was changed after Scorsese rewrote the script following his move to Hollywood and his first professional directing job, Boxcar Bertha (1972). Casillo explains the significance of this earlier title by detailing the specific meaning of witches and witchcraft within Italian-American culture and how the meaning of these terms differs from that in mainstream America. Casillo believes the original title to be more appropriate to the themes and narrative of the film than its revised title, and deduces that Scorsese made the change because, while witches have a specific significance in southern Italian society and its earlier Italian-American off-shoots, these meanings would have been lost on most American viewers. …

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