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Opera in the United States, has long been suspect. For many Americans, opera, a foreign art form, has been primarily the province of either the snobbish, often Europeanized upper classes or of the Mediterranean, mainly Italian peoples, particularly gangsters. Hollywood movies, especially of the thirties, with their populist attitudes, often employed opera to sneer at the rich. In Frank Capra's 1936 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Gary Cooper's Mr. Deeds, defender of the downtrodden, tells his board he will not subsidize the New York opera, but it must pay its own way with broadcasts to attract contributors. In Sam Wood's 1935 A Night at the Opera, according to the oft-printed blurb in The New Yorker, the Marx Brothers, in putting down the rich, are doing to Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 II Trovatore what should be done to Il Trovatore, which, due to its outlandish plot, is one of the funniest tragedies on record.
In the last decade or so, opera has become more accessible and less suspect for many Americans, as can been seen in the number of films in which opera has been utilized in one fashion or another to enhance their plots, cultural reputations, and box-office receipts. Interestingly enough, though, some of these major movies have continued the earlier trend of associating opera with Italians, gangsters and otherwise, for example Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather III (1990) and Norman Jewison's Moonstruck (1987). The latter depicts Italian families non-gangster style, directed by Norman Jewison. Nicholas Cage (Coppola's nephew) plays an Italian-American baker who takes his equally Italian-American love (Cher) to Giacomo Puccini's 1896 La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. In the famous first-act aria, "Che gelida manina," Rudolpho (Carlo Bergonzi on the sound track) sings the rationale behind the title of the movie and a principal motivation for its lovers: "Ma per fortuna/E la notte di luna,/E qui la luna I'abbiamo vicina," which means "But by fortune, it is the night of the moon, and we have the moon near" (Giancosa and Illica [7]). Although this connection is not made on the screen by the characters, perhaps the opera-loving male lead would grasp the significance and express it at another time to his love. Likewise, quite possibly the film makers were counting on at least some...