A Bronx Tale: Let Music be the Food of Love

            Going against his father’s wishes, ‘Cee’ (Sonny’s nickname for Calogero) continues to hang out with Sonny and his crew at their bar, Chez Joey. Flashforward eight years and Sonny has become the “Boss of crime bosses” and treats 17-year-old Cee as the son he never had. Meanwhile, Cee’s friends aspire to be gangsters themselves, and regularly make racist attacks on local Black youth, who they perceive as crossing onto their turf. When Cee falls for Jane, a beautiful Black girl in his school, he knows he must hide his feelings from his peers, and even his father Lorenzo, who shows disapproval for mixed-ethnic relationships. Sonny, however, is supportive and lends Cee his car for his first date with Jane. When Jane’s brother accuses Cee of being part of the gang that attacked him, Jane leaves. Feeling rejected and unjustly accused, Cee angrily joins his friends who are planning to bomb the neighboring Black area with Molotov cocktails. Sonny intervenes, pulling Cee from the car and questioning him about a bomb found under the hood of Sonny’s car. Unfairly accused again, Cee is heartbroken.  Jane finds him and tells him her brother has recanted Cee’s involvement. But when Cee walks Jane home, they see his friends’ car burnt out, and find themselves among police, ambulances, and growing racial tension. Hit with the realization that Sonny had just saved his life, he rushes back to the bar to thank him. As Cee enters the bar, Sonny beckons him over, at which point Cee spots a young man approaching from the other side of the bar, lift a gun and shoot Sonny dead. The shooter was the son of the man Cee had witness Sonny kill eight years earlier.

             But the Bronx was not always blighted by racial conflicts. In the early part of the 1900s, the Bronx was a blossoming borough of multi-ethnic communities living and working alongside each other in well-cared for neighborhoods, but by the mid-1950s badly planned city developments, like the Cross Bronx Expressway, had devastated neighborhoods and destroyed the communities, raising racial intolerances. The racial conflict between the Italians and Blacks was seen early in gang turf warfare, and later in the 1970s in the anti-civil rights protests by American Italian nationalists. It was important to Palminteri to highlight the racial tensions building in the 1960s, and the violence perpetrated on black locals: even turning down one offer for his script because the producers wanted to remove the racist storyline and make Jane, Cee’s love interest, a white girl.  Their love affair, more than just a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ moment, signifies that these two groups have more alignment in their history and culture than one might first presume.