And yet, there s another side, another layer of logic that runs through the Sicilian communities and that relates to who really runs the community. They have a tremendous disrespect for authority. This you understand from learning a little history about the place. For centuries they ve been invaded over and over again so that the only people they trust are members of their immediate family. Ultimately, everyone else is a foreigner.
Suspicion runs high.
And although they are very cordial to you as a tourist, you are still aware of this. For Coppola, his version of the immigrant experience also drew on a long history of cinematic representations of Little Italy, where Vito uses the pistol, the garotte, and the shotgun to exchange peasantry for the manor. PAY OR DIE, from 1960, based on the real life story of the assault on the Black Hand by an Italian-American detective, had featured the same street festival as that which frames Vito s great clash with the reptilian Don Fanucci. But Coppola had in mind something visually richer, and culturally far more dense, than anything which had been seen on American screens. He sought a sense of place that would, along with the Sicilian scenes, help to explain the way that Vito chooses.