Moonstruck Me

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

I am not an Italian, nor an opera fan, nor a New Yorker. As a result, one could wonder why in the world I fell head over heels in love 35 years ago with the lovely 1987 Norman Jewison film Moonstruck.

Maybe it was the wonderful ethnic names? The movie tells the story of young widow Loretta Castorini, a bookkeeper who lives in Brooklyn with her parents Cosmo and Rose, and is involved in a loveless engagement to longtime bachelor Johnny Cammareri. While Johnny is off to visit his “dying” mother in Sicily, Loretta meets and falls in love with his eccentric brother Ronny Cammareri, a baker. The triangle is resolved in a climactic breakfast table scene featuring the Castorinis, the Cammereris, Rose’s brother Raymond Cappomaggi and his wife Ruth, and Cosmo’s old Italian-born Castorini father.

Perhaps I fell in love with the wonderful music? Although Puccini’s infectious “Musetta’s Waltz” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP3lV-YvCYM) provides the connecting theme throughout the film, the soundtrack also features Dean Martin’s 1953 “That’s Amore” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnFlx2Lnr9Q), Vikki Carr’s 1967 “It Must Be Him” (listen here), and some wonderful selections from La Bohème including the epic opening moments from Act Two’s “Gioventù mia, tu non sei morta” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B8VWwcrdXU).

It could have been the spectacular cast: Cher as Loretta (1988 Oscar for best actress), Olympia Dukakis as Rose (1988 best supporting actress), Vincent Gardenia as Cosmo (1988 nominee for best supporting actor but lost to Sean Connery), Danny Aiello (Johnny), Nicholas Cage (Ronny), Louis Guss (Raymond Cappomaggi), Julie Bovasso (Ruth Cappomaggi), and John Mahoney (a burned out professor Rose encounters at a classic Italian restaurant). The exquisite Russian actor Feodor Chaliapin, Jr., a movie star in Italy, steals the show as the old immigrant Italian grandfather.

It also could have been the wonderful spoken lines, many which still make me green with writer’s envy. For example, early in the movie, a strange and scary old woman tells Loretta, in vivid bilingual detail, the reasons for a horrible curse she just put on a plane carrying her treacherous sister back to Sicily, “I cursed her that the green Atlantic water should swallow her up!” Loretta calmly says, “I don’t believe in curses.” The old woman shrugs and responds, “Eh, neither do I.”

At dinner one night, Rose Castorini stops Cosmo’s father from feeding table food to his dogs with this line: “Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I’m gonna kick you ‘til you’re dead!” Although a hopeless romantic herself, during one breakfast scene Rose warns Loretta about love by saying, “When you love ‘em, they drive you crazy. ‘Cause they know they can.”

Loretta has a quick wit too. She takes down the self-righteous Johnny by saying, “In time, you’ll drop dead and I’ll come to your funeral in a red dress.” After hearing that her future mother-in-law in Sicily had miraculously recovered from her death bed and started cooking for everyone, a stunned Loretta tells Rose: “A miracle? This is modern times, there ain’t supposed to be miracles no more.” Rose explains, “Well I guess it ain’t modern times in Sicily!”

And Cosmo, a plumber, provides perhaps the best and most elegant description of domestic water economics ever to grace the silver screen: “There are three kinds of pipe. There’s aluminum, which is garbage. There’s bronze, which is pretty good, unless something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. Then, there’s copper, which is the only pipe I use. It costs money. It costs money because it saves money.”

Despite all these compelling arguments for my cinematic infatuation, I think the real reason I fell in love with the movie may be the way I first heard about it. I was young, and early in my law career now four decades long. On the moonlighting side, for fun, I wrote movie reviews for a local weekly newspaper. Because of this hobby, I paid close attention to the styles of other movie reviewers.

Early one weekday my clock radio went off, trying to wake me for work. It was a cold and dark winter morning, so rather than getting right up, I lingered in the warm bed. My still-sleepy eyes could detect hints of moonlight through my bedroom window. Rather than hit the snooze alarm, I listened—in a semi-dreamlike state—to an NPR story about a new movie called Moonstruck.

The wonder of radio is how it plants images in our heads using sound alone, and the NPR Moonstruck movie reviewer performed this task extraordinarily well. He described the ensemble cast, summarized the plot, and provided audio clips, with threads of that spectacular instrumental Puccini music playing in the background.

The radio report concluded with an excerpt from what probably is my favorite scene in the movie. A grizzled and unshaven grandfather Castorini (actor Feodor Chaliapin) takes a late night stroll with his pets, in the moonlight, with a backdrop of the New York City skyline, including the soon-to-be-doomed twin World Trade Towers. In Italian, the old man urges his five dogs to howl at “La bella luna!”

The radio reporter then howled his full-throated concurrence, almost an aria itself, proclaiming “La bella movie!” It was a masterful review. I was smitten, an attachment that only deepened when I actually watched the movie a few weeks later. Again, why?

Perhaps it was the ending, a Puccini-soaked, champagne toast with the entire cast raising glasses to “La familia!” Or maybe I was hooked from the very beginning when listening—during the opening credits—to Dean Martin frolic and croon, “When the world seems to shine, like you’ve had too much wine, that’s amore.”

Or perhaps it was because the movie is about love. Love lost. Loved desired. Love dwindling. Love misdirected. Love unexpected. Love maintained. Love resurrected. Love transforming.

Like love, good art takes us beyond and outside ourselves, transfiguring us, if but for a moment. Thus it was that 35 years ago, this proud Irish Catholic man was transformed too, and yearned to be a New York Italian in love, just for one moonstruck night.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.