Live Life Team
Remember when music was music, stories had plots and when things were simpler, Well, things never really were simple sometimes it just felt that way. The 1993 classic, ‘A Bronx Tale’ captures what life was really like growing up in the 1960’s in a small neighbourhood in the Bronx, New York. Calegero Anello is embarrassed by the low social status his hardworking bus driver father, played by Robert De Niro, enjoys, in an area controlled by successful, larger than life, mobsters.
Charismatic mob boss, Sonny, played by Chazz Palimentri, be-friends Anello and as he comes of age, he discovers that the notorious gangster bars and glitzy mob life has a seedy underbelly. As a child, he had romanticised the mob life, believing the gangsters had rules, a code they lived by and that they made sure everyone else in the Bronx lived by as well. As a young adult, he comes to see that code as oppressive, controlling and dangerous. Many of the mobsters are racist, untrustworthy and violent. In one of the film’s best and most memorable scenes, of which there are many, Sonny leans across a table in a seamy bar and tells Anello, “it’s better to be feared and respected than loved”.
In between running from the police, turf wars with motorcycle gangs, fights between the Italian and African American neighbourhoods and Anello finding his first love, (a captivating African American schoolgirl), Anello’s discovery and journey is that Sonny is wrong and his own hard-working father is right, it’s better to be loved than feared.
