Moms and dads of pre-teens, teens, and young people heading for college make a bowl of popcorn, watch this one with your kids (there is profanity and violence, but please, please, please watch it anyway), and then sit down with them at the kitchen table and talk about it.
Quotes
“Lorenzo: The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.””
Calogero: It was great to be Catholic and go to confession. You could start over every week.”
“(‘C” as the narrator at the funeral) Calogero ‘C’ Anello: Sonny and my father always said that when I get older I would understand. Well, I finally did. I learned something from these two men. I learned to give love and get love unconditionally. You just have to accept people for what they are, and I learned the greatest gift of all. The saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and the choices that you make will shape your life forever.”
Plot Summary
This movies takes place the Bronx section of New York in the 1960s. Lorenzo Anello’s (Robert De Niro) elementary school age son, Calogero (Francis Capra) witnesses a murder in the street in front of his parent’s apartment stoop by the local mob lord Sonny (Chazz Palminteri). (Sonny is defending a friend of his who is being attacked by a man with a baseball bat.) The New York City police department is called to the scene and someone says the Anello boy witnessed the whole thing. The police officers come to the Anello’s apartment and want Calogero to ID the perpetrator in a line-up outside of the neighborhood bar next door. Sonny is in the line-up, but the boy refuses to point him out to the police so Sonny and the rest of his boys go free.
From that day forward, Sonny takes a liking to the boy, calling him "C." Sonny's men offer Lorenzo a job to make more money, but Lorenzo, a bus driver by profession, prefers honest work, and turns down the offer. Sonny, however, befriends Calogero, introduces him to his posse, and takes the boy under his wing – almost like a surrogate father.
Without his parents permission C slips over to the bar from time to time and earns tips amounting to “more than his dad makes in a week” doing odd jobs at the mob bar. Lorenzo finds out what his son had been doing behind his back and gives C a lecture on “honest work vs. easy money” and won’t let him keep the “dirty” money. Still fuming Lorenzo walks over the bar to speak to Sonny, returns the money, and warns him to keep away from Calogero.
Eight years later, Calogero (Lillo Brancato) has grown into a young man of about 17 and has secretly continued visiting Sonny regularly without his dad’s permission. Calogero is still connected to his childhood friends who are now part of a gang of racist Italian boys at the local high school. The catch is, he isn’t racist, but he does not share that fact with the others. In fact, Calogero meets an African-American girl, Jane, (Taral Hicks) and it is “love at first sight. " Jane and C make arrangements for a date, despite the tension between the Italians and Blacks, particularly at the neighborhood borders.
C, new to dating, asks advice from both Lorenzo and Sonny about the new girl he is interested in. His dad’s “head” advice is funny, but smart. Wanting to help C make a good impression, Sonny loans him his car and gives him some wonderful “door” advice as it pertains to women. Around the same time, Calogero's friends beat up a group of black cyclists passing through their neighborhood, and Calogero is powerless to stop them but does his best to defend one young man, who turns out to be Jane's brother, Willie. Willie, however, mistakes C for one of the Italian gang members and accuses him of beating him when Calogero and Jane meet for their date. In the ensuing argument, Calogero loses his temper at what he considers Willie's lack of gratitude and calls him a "horrible racial slur" which he instantly regrets. Heartbroken, Jane leaves Calogero and gets into the car with her brother.
At home, Calogero is confronted by Lorenzo, who saw him driving Sonny's car from the apartment window. An argument ensues, and Calogero storms out. Suddenly, he is confronted by a furious Sonny and his possee, who found a bomb in Sonny's car and suspect C of planning to assassinate him. C swears his innocence and is allowed to leave, but his feelings are really hurt that Sonny would accuse him of such a thing.
Sonny tries many times throughout this movie to persuade Calogero to keep away from the Italian HS gang, to think for himself and focus more on his schoolwork and look ahead to college. In the most amazing sequences of scenes which left me on the edge of my seat, we see the Italian HS gang in a car headed for a “revenge visit” to the black neighborhood where Jane lives. Calogero is “peer pressured” into going with them. I’m going to stop here, but I remember seeing the above series of scenes and the one in the funeral parlor and I thought about fate and how each of us come to a fork in the road where we can turn left or right and the decision we make can change our lives forever.
Life Lessons
If you grew up in a city, large or small, during the years prior to the 1970s you didn’t just have one set of parents you were accountable to – you had a dozen because everyone in the neighborhood watched out for all the kids on the block. You did not dare tell one of these “surrogate parents,” “you’re not the boss of me” because not only would they swat your bottom for sassing, when you got home you learned they had called your parents and you got your bottom swatted again for good measure.
It was called the old neighborhood system and when the multitude of moms entered the work force in the 1970s, it went the way of pop in a bottle, drive-in movies, popcorn on Sunday night while you watched The Wonderful World of Disney and Bonanza, card clubs, and cowboy tv shows. It’s too bad – it was a good system. We, as children, could run the neighborhood from dawn to dusk without parents worrying. Even with the occasional plastic spoon to the behind for running through someone's flower garden, it was comforting because we knew there were people in the universe, besides our parents, who would fix us a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to tide us over ‘til lunch and loved us enough to make us responsible for our actions.
A Bronx Tale Movie Cast List
· Chazz Palminteri as Sonny
· Lillo Brancato as Calogero Anello as a Teenager
· Francis Capra as Calogero Anello as a Young Boy
· Taral Hicks as Jane
· Katherine Narducci as Rosina Anello
· Clem Caserta as Jimmy Whispers
· Alfred Sauchelli as Bobby Bars
· Frank Pietrangolare as Danny K O
· Joe Pesci as Carmine
· Robert D’Andrea as Tony Toupee
· Eddie Montanaro as Eddie Mush
· Fred Fischer as JoJo the Whale
· Dave Salerno as Frankie Coffee Cake
· And Others
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