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Profs and Pints: Ethnic Gangster Cinema

Profs and Pints is making you an offer you can't refuse.

Listen up and listen up good as Kris Mecholsky, a scholar of crime fiction and films, explores the untold stories of ethnic American gangster cinema. He'll discuss how gangster movies have ironically served to give legitimacy to marginalized ethnic communities, and how our shifting ideas of race and ethnicity color how we define a "good" gangster film.

His talk will stretch well beyond films that depict gangsters in the Italian and Irish American communities, such as The Godfather and The Departed. He'll also look at films such as Chinatown Nights (Tong War) (1927), Black Caesar (1973), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Edward James Olmos's American Me (1992), and American Yakuza (1993), discussing how they explore the ongoing conflicts created by the merging of immigrant ethnicities into American culture. You'll leave the Bier Baron knowing about, and eager to watch, some of the best Chinese American, Jewish American, Hispanic American, black American, Japanese American, and Slavic American gangster films. Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Capiche?