… the Italian Campaign of World War II
"In a scene from Steven Spielberg's Hollywood blockbuster war movie, Saving Private Ryan (1998), a few soldiers in the platoon led by John Miller (played by Oscar winner Tom Hanks) search through a bag containing dozens of dog tags for the name James Francis Ryan, a G.I. missing in action in Normandy, France. While pronouncing the Italian surnames of many soldiers killed in action, one of Miller's servicemen calls them "guineas," a derogatory term traditionally applied to Italian Americans. This cynical and inopportune expression indirectly refers to Hollywood's long tradition of negatively depicting Italian immigrants living in the United States, going all the way back to the beginning of silent cinema in the 1910s. Indeed, early American movies showed Italians as tending towards violence, being highly impulsive and emotional, gesticulating excessively, and wearing traditional folk costumes. All of these onscreen features were further reminders of the supposed "inferiority" of the Italians relative to Anglo-Saxon values and standards.1
In Spielberg's movie, the sizeable number of dog tags with Italian surnames suggests just how many young Italian Americans served in the American forces during World War II.2 Americans with Italian backgrounds were drafted and deployed to battlefields across the world. Some of them fought to fully liberate their ancestral homeland from Nazi and Fascist control during the Allied Italian Campaign of 1943 to 1945; many Italian surnames appear among the graves of the American cemeteries in Florence and Nettuno, the final resting places in Italy for those US service members whose remains were not repatriated.
The goal of this essay is to investigate the presence and the function of Italian American servicemen in Hollywood's World War II movies set in Italy, to understand the value ethnicity had in films depicting American soldiers of Italian descent against the backdrop of their ancestral country. The first section will look at the Italian battlefield as a cross-cultural site, given the composite character of the US forces, which included African American and Japanese American soldiers. Italian Americans played a major role as culture brokers in establishing contact and developing rapport with the Italian population. This role was widely depicted in war films set in Italy, with American servicemen of Italian descent facilitating reconciliation between the Allied occupiers and the Italian population. The second part of the article will investigate the way Hollywood promoted the value of patriotism, and how this was done through on-screen representations of Italian American servicemen…"
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