“He had some nerve using that”: the movie that left Martin Scorsese cringing
Many words, terms, phrases, and superlatives have been thrown in the direction of Martin Scorsese over an extended number of years, but “cringe” is nowhere near the first that comes to mind.
Realistically, it should be in one respect, considering he’s an 80-something guy who makes regular appearances on TikTok. And yet, because he’s Scorsese, it’s only served to make him even more endearing while giving him an unexpected new lease on life as an octogenarian social media superstar.
He’s made dozens of features covering countless genres over the course of more than half a century. Still, if 100 people were asked to name the type of cinema that immediately comes to mind when they think of the living legend, then 99 of them are almost certain to say the gangster flick.
Crime sagas and Scorsese go hand-in-hand, and they always have, ranging from the street-level chutzpah of Mean Streets to the decades-spanning Goodfellas, not to mention the dusty backdrops of Casino and the sprawling stylings of The Irishman. He’s more than familiar with the Italian-American experience being depicted on-screen, but he’s not quite as keen when somebody else is using it for comedy.
A notable case in point is Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob, which saw Michelle Pfeiffer head off to New York City to start a new life with her son after Alec Baldwin’s mafioso husband is killed. Unfortunately, Dean Stockwell’s crime boss and Matthew Modine’s undercover FBI agent place her directly in the crosshairs for their opposing agendas.
Satirising and gently mocking the mob lifestyle, Scorsese admitted to Gavin Smith that he was conflicted about how close to home it ended up hitting. “Well, it’s a satire. It’s just too many plastic seat-covers,” he said. “And yet, if you go to my mother’s apartment, you’ll see not only the plastic seat covers on the couch but on the coffee table as well. So, where’s the line of the truth? I don’t know.”
Still, the line had to be drawn somewhere. “But as far as an Italian-American thing, it’s really like a cartoon,” Scorsese suggested. “When he starts with ‘Mambo Italiano’, Rosemary Clooney, I’m already cringing because I’m Italian-American and certain songs we’d like to forget! So I told Jonathan he had some nerve using that. I said only Italians could use ‘Mambo Italiano’ and get away with it.”
Having recovered from his full-body cringe, Scorsese presumably hasn’t watched Married to the Mob again. It’s ironic that he would call out a film that parodies many of the tropes he’d helped popularise in cinema in the first place, even if his depictions of Italian-American life were always rooted in reality and drawn from personal experience.
These days, anyone who wants to make a gangster film always has the shadow of Scorsese looming overhead, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not.
