Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli: Food and Family in the Modern American Mafia Film

When the Little Caesars of the 1920s and 1930s in American film became transformed into the Michael Corleones of the 1970s, the filmic treatment of the Mafia began to involve home and family as much as guns and gambling. This shift signified a more complete treatment of the Mafia and its role in Italian American immigrant culture, including depiction of a wider range of forces that informed the world of Italian-American organized crime. It is perhaps these details of home and family that make the Godfather movies and other Mafia films that came later so fascinating to the American movie world; these films began to reveal subtexts about immigration and assimilation issues that transcend the organized crime underworld.