The representation of women throughout the Gangster genre varies as much as the methods Mafiosi chose to terminate their victims. From good old-fashioned car bombs and poison, to strangling and shootings, we see women take on a variety of roles in Gangster films. Contrary to popular notion, women do not merely take on the traditional role of a quiet house wife in these typically violent films. Instead, directors have given audiences complex characters to analyze at their own discretion, and whom for one reason or another are overshadowed by their male counterparts. For example, the characters of Kay and Connie in The Godfather trilogy are often over looked by the audience in favor of “more interesting” characters like Michael Corleone. Yes, Michael is the main protagonist of the film, but by the end of the trilogy the women not only prove pivotal to Michael’s character growth and mental stability, but each woman ensures the continuation of the family line in her own way; Kay by encouraging Michael to redeem himself, therefor letting their only son choose a life far away from the mafia in the opera, and Connie by becoming Michaels confidant, nurturing Michael’s successor Vincent, and killing her own godfather for the “good of the family.” Purposefully, these women were not introduced to Coppola’s audience in this manner, instead when we first meet these two ladies they are portrayed as being weak (and quite frankly annoying), too emotional and mostly ignorant of their surroundings.
In other films such as Angela and Galantiumoni, audiences can dive deeper into the development of female characters as these films are told mainly through a woman’s perspective. In Angela, we see the protagonist Angela, a local mob boss, use her wit to not only participate in, but naturally expand her husband’s narcotics business. In one scene while she is set to deliver drugs to a client, Angela suddenly stops and hides the narcotics she had been caring into a crevice in a nearby brick wall. Unbeknownst to the audience, Angela was being followed by two police officers, who eventually stop her on the streets. However, they are forced to release her once they find her bag lacks the presence of any narcotics or incriminating evidence. Instead of the confrontation frightening her, Angela, calm and collected, returns to retrieve her hidden packages, and promptly delivers them to her client. This composed demeanor demonstrated by Angela is world’s away from the emotionally distraught Connie or the emotionally dependent Kay we first see in the original Godfather movie. Yet, Luccia Rizzo in Winspeare’s Galantiumoni takes on a slightly different role, one in which a woman is not only depicted as a drug dealer, but a murderer as well.
Ironically, all these women were also depicted as mothers, and as women who had men above them in their retrospective social hierarchies. Kay and Connie were under Michael, Angela reported to her husband, and Luccia worked alongside her uncle. Although their children were not always notable figures in the movie, and their parenting styles diverge, each of these women represent the range and depth of the roles female characters can find in gangster movies.
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