I have learned a lot. Thanks to you, H2O Man, for educating and engaging this community. I do believe it is what we need now.
I grew up in mob-infested western New York, and was swapping stories about it with family this past week. Too many stories.
We had watched, based on an NPR critic’s recommendation for happy holiday viewing, Gene Kelly’s unsuccessful and largely forgotten movie “It’s Always Fair Weather”. What an odd suggestion, really. Great dance numbers, but the central theme is of the corruption of the young dreams of returned WW II vets. The one who once planned to be a crusading lawyer becomes a lonely grifter, comes to “own” a boxer and eventually, only because he has to, stands up to the mob that runs the fighting scene; the aspiring artist becomes a sad broken shill for crass advertising, which is vividly portrayed with some really ugly episodes of greed and venality, played for laughs that can’t disguise the underlying horror of it. It’s a curiously grim and sour vision of post-war America, in the 1950s so celebrated as a golden age of optimism and prosperity.
Anyway, now it seems to me that organized crime is viewed by the American public as an artifact of the past, a safe subject suitable for entertainment, something to worry about only in the context of Mexican cartels. It is here and all around us now.
I never could watch The Sopranos.
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