“...Really not much pay when you get down to it....”
Maybe better wording would have been that Hollywood glamorizes it a bit more nowadays.
Same with Public Enemies about Dillinger. They made him out to be some sort of gentleman bandit. Reality is, he was a bit of a mad dog. But yet, he’s portrayed as a hero of sorts.
I don’t know...maybe to some Depression era folks way of thinking, he WAS a hero of sorts.
I just seems that with the older “gangster” movies - the ones that made Edward G. Robinson, Cagney, and Bogart famous - the message was clear; you follow this life and you’re going to wind up dead.
Sopranos, to me, was “You follow this life, you may wind up dead, but you’ll have one helluva ride in the process, so who gives a sh*t...?
Just my 2cents
Remember the old gangster movies had to put up with the Hayes Code which demanded, among other things, that criminals be punished, sometimes with laughable results (original Scarface).
A lot of the “revolution” in gangster stuff comes from the first Godfather movie, by starting off with a wedding it humanizes the Corleone family, makes them sympathetic, puts you in a position to root for them and forgive the things they do for the rest of the movie. One thing that’s interesting in Sopranos is that in season 6 Tony is given a chance to reform a little, not to walk away completely, but to not be so brutal, but he rejects it. And by rejecting it does the things that doom him and his crew. If Tony takes the lesson from his coma dream crime actually does wind up paying.
My impression of the Sopranos is that it showed that all these guys were untrustworthy and ready to betray each other with the slightest hint of more money being made. Despite the big deal they made of honor and loyalty all the time.
It was a really good show, I think that a lot of folks just chose to see all the glamour and ignore all the crap situations they were constantly putting themselves into. My favorite parts of the show were the funny parts and all the north jersey references.
Freegards