Word: gangsters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bonanno is better known as "Joe Bananas," the gangster overlord of a New York Cosa Nostra "family." A Sicilian-born Mafioso who entered the U.S. illegally in 1924, Bonanno rose to a seat on the twelve-man "Grand Council" of organized crime. Though he has been semiretired as an active hoodlum since 1964, he is now embroiled in what has come to be known as "the Bananas war" -a death struggle between rival gangs that reaches from Joe's Brooklyn turf to Tucson's tree-lined pleasances. Open hostilities in the battle to succeed Joe as head...
...cheap legend, you understand; the prevalent romanticism of American narrative cinema provides a most captivating, not always inaccurate, cultural history of the U.S.A., sometimes useful as a frame of reference, always in our minds. Our grasp of the twenties and thirties cannot be divorced from icons remembered from countless gangster films and screwball comedies--anymore than we know the old west apart from the one given us by John Ford. These films are our memories of American life styles and geographies instinctively accessible although they existed before we were born...
...flowed into great cities, but still they remained in thrall to the mystique of the gun, that ultimate symbol of both the land's lost innocence and the hardy pioneers who tamed it. They were intrigued by a new species of hero, very different yet somehow similar?the romanticized gangster...
...sound historical perspective, it is still obvious that the U.S. must have gun legislation. Though states and localities have a bewildering crazy quilt of 20,000 weapon laws, only two are on the federal books. One is the National Firearms Act of 1934, taxing interstate shipments of such gangster-style weapons as machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The other is the pallid Federal Firearms Act of 1938, prohibiting interstate gun shipments to felons. In 30 years, Congress has failed to enact a single new gun bill, thus allowing, as the President declared, "the demented, the deranged, the hardened criminal...
...duke's chateau? Or the exquisitely painful encounter with a fat, sadistic Japanese who tries to pay for her services with a Geisha Club credit card? Does her uncommonly cuckolded husband really spend the rest of his life blind, mute and paralyzed after an attack by her gangster lover? Or is that merely another of Severine's interior arrangements...