Word: mafioso
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...read Kit Troyer's review of "Black Rain," I learned that this tradition continues. It was the height of irony to find that in the same review of a movie denounced for "reinforc[ing] some long-standing racial stereotypes," the author describes one character as a "Japanese mafioso." Does the Editorial Board (which offered no disclaimer) express the belief that criminals worldwide owe their existence to an illicit network originating on Sicily at the turn of this century? Or is your belief that Italians are in general archetypal criminals...
...word "mafioso" to describe a member of a criminal organization displays the very kind of bias your review purports to loathe. It perpetuates the insulting and degrading view of Italian-Americans as godfathers and hit-men. And while I do not deny that a small minority of Italians belonged to violent criminals organizations, I challenge Mr. Troyer to name one ethnic group which has not produced a criminal...
Black Rain stars Michael Douglas (Wall Street) as Nick Conklin, a tough New York policeman who has been assigned to take a captured Japanese mafioso back to Tokyo. But Douglas blunders when he gets to Japan. At the airport he delivers the prisoner not to the Tokyo police, but to mobsters impersonating police...
...movie's title suggests that its makers aspired to more than a good cop movie. The title comes from an exchange between Douglas and Tomisaburo Wakayama, who plays the mobster Sugai. When Douglas criticizes the mafioso's livelihood, Wakayama launches into a monologue on the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings...
...numerous military ribbons, the deceased Soviet leader wore a row of stripes labeled CORRUPTION, EMBEZZLEMENT, GRAFT and MONEYGRUBBING. The lower tiers of the stand, two caricatured gangsters -- one American, the other Italian -- stared up at Brezhnev with apparent surprise. The caption beneath the cartoon said it all: SO, MAFIOSO, YOU FINALLY "DIG" WHO IS THE REAL GODFATHER...