The television series, The Sopranos, had a rather quixotic relationship to cinema. True to the real-life fascination and love provoked by Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series (even Russian gangsters as far afield as Kazan to the west of Moscow were said to have dressed like Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone and adopted his catchphrases), the Soprano “crew” spitball about their favourite scenes, do goofy impressions and compare their criminality to the types found in the films.
It’s not hard to work out why gangsters loved the series – in Michael and Vito Corleone, the modern mob is painted in the colours of old-time Sicily. The Corleones are not so much ruthless criminals as representatives of an older, dying order when the mafia protected the ordinary labourer against the depredations of feudalism.
