Tag Archives: Francis Ford Coppola

‘Scorsese’ at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

King of ComedySorsese, currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, is not exactly the exhibition that is advertised, and that is a very good thing. Martin Scorsese’s career has stretched over half a century and involves nearly sixty films. Yet anyone who has seen advance press and publicity forScorsese could be forgiven for thinking the focus is mainly on the early and more masculine examples of his oeuvre, Mean Streets(1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980).

These movies are certainly compelling, both as individual examples of film craft and for the way they play into the myths and realities of 1970s American cinema, when Scorsese, along with fellow directors and friends Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg, and Brian De Palma, tilted against the ailing Hollywood studio system and then become some of its leading lights. But these films in no way tell Scorsese’s whole story.

You can read my full review of ACMI’s Scorsese exhibition at the Australian Book Review Arts Update site here.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films

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Pulp Friday: Mafia pulp fiction

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The Mafia, Cosa Nostra, the Mob, the Family, the Outfit, the Syndicate, call them whatever you like, it’s hard to overstate the influence organised crime had over pulp fiction.

My post on the Andrew Dominik movie Killing Them Softly earlier this week, got me thinking about how the Mafia have been portrayed in popular fiction and film.

One of the aspects of Killing Me Softly I found so interesting was its depiction of organised crime in the traditional sense as being just a shadow of its former glory. For the most part, the gangsters were a bunch of clapped out old men and cautious time servers, clinging desperately to the last trappings of their power base.

It wasn’t always so. Stretching right back to the late forties, organised crime was one of the central pre-occupations of pulp writers. The phenomenal success of Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather, published in 1969 and the subsequent movie version by Francis Ford Coppola in 1972, saw pulp’s fascination with the Mafia stretch well into the seventies.

In addition to novels examining every aspect of the Mafia’s rituals and existence, so all pervasive and powerful was the Mafia’s reach, pulp writers invented a series of characters that existed just to fight it.

Robert Briganti or ‘the Assassin’ as he is known, “lives only to destroy the Mafia.”… Read more

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Posted in Belmont Tower Books, Crime fiction, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Mafia, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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