Sylvester Stallone was the first to admit there was nothing new about Rocky Balboa, whose most famous monosyllable—“Yo!”—is likely as old as Cro-Magnon man. The Roman numerals appended to four Rocky sequels date to Caesar’s time, while the main storyline of the film franchise—as a television announcer shrieks in Rocky IV, just before Balboa squares off with Ivan Drago—is “a true case of David and Goliath!”
Whatever its origin, the Rocky franchise taps into something eternal, possibly even preverbal, though Stallone dates the protagonist that he created only to the dawn of cinema. “I didn’t invent this formula of the little guy who beats the system,” said the star, writer, and sometime director, himself a metaphorical little guy who beat the system. “Frank Capra did very well with it, and so did Charlie Chaplin. If Rocky proves anything, it’s that old formulas never die.” By the time Stallone wrote Rocky, Hollywood had already made roughly 100 boxing movies.
“Rocky revives something old that has always worked,” is how Burgess Meredith put it on the eve of the 1977 Oscars, when he was up for Best Supporting Actor for the role of boxing trainer Mickey Goldmill. “It allows the audience to participate. They feel that’s them up there on the screen. They have an emotional investment in the film.”
If old formulas never die, neither do old boxers. Rocky Balboa, who burst into the American consciousness 45 years ago, in 1976, has lived on through eight movies and counting. The character earned a Best Actor nomination for Stallone at the start of the Jimmy Carter administration (for Rocky) and a Best Supporting Actor nod at the end of the Barack Obama presidency (for Creed). That 39-year gap between nominations is the longest for any actor playing the same character.
In those four decades, “Yo, Adrian” has joined the very short list of very short quotes that are instantly identifiable with a classic character from a classic film. Tourists to this day run up the 72 stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—now called the Rocky Steps—as the title character did in Rocky, and venerate the statue of Rocky that Stallone commissioned, as a prop, for Rocky III. The statue has done almost as much running through Philadelphia as the character it represents. It once stood at the top of the museum steps, was moved to Philadelphia’s Spectrum arena—site of Balboa’s first fight with Apollo Creed—and now stands at the bottom of the museum’s steps, bronze arms forever raised in triumph, holding the pose for tourists with selfie sticks.
When the robe that Rocky wore into the ring to fight Apollo Creed for the first time made its way into the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, sharing a roof with Lincoln’s top hat and Edison’s light bulb, that museum’s then-director, Brent D. Glass, said: “The story of Rocky Balboa, an underdog from the urban working class, is a quintessential depiction of the American dream.” Can the same be said of Stallone, and the making of Rocky?
As Rock would say: “Abzalootly.”
“In one year, my life exploded for the better,” Stallone said in the 2020 documentary 40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic. “So I tell people, ‘you never know.’ You just never, never know if you’re gonna hit the lottery. You just gotta keep buying tickets.”
When we hear the term “witch”, many images pop into our head. The image that may come to mind now is more contemporary, unrestricted by any gendered roles. But, how did we come to such a modern image of the witch within Western media? This acceptance is in part due to depictions from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Images of the witch featured in films and television series, to photo essays here in LIFE, reflected a surprisingly positive image of witches during these eras.
A witch studying in a museum, March 1964
(Photo by Terence Spencer/Popperfoto via Getty Images)
A 1960s Coven
A feature article from the November 13th, 1964 issue titled, “Real Witches At Work: English Pagans Keep an Old Cult Alive”, depicts a coven of both men and women. The below photograph from March of 1964 shows the coven dressed in everyday Sixties attire walking around a small fire with hands interlocked in the evergreen and stoney woods of Oxfordshire, England. The writer then goes into the history of the ritual and explains that rituals are an act of grounding for them to be fully immersed with nature, as stated in the quote below:
“In a thousand-year-old rite, the witches dance around a bonfire within the prehistoric Rollright stone circle that still stands in Oxfordshire. At the climax of the dance they leap over fire to stimulate the sun as the source of life.”
Witches dancing in circles around a fire, March 1964
(Photo by Terence Spencer/Popperfoto via Getty Images)
High priestess of the coven, Ray Bone, wrote a supporting article to follow the above photo-essay. Her piece, We Witches are Simple People, goes into detail about the history and misrepresentation of witches. She also expresses how her modern-day coven does magic to help people. For example, LIFE explained the photograph below as “Mrs. Bone shapes a wax effigy of a sick woman she hopes to help through curative ‘white magic’.” When she is not busy leading a coven, she is a housewife. In addition to having a successful career of her own being a manager of an elderly home. In the article, Mrs. Bone describes herself and her coven as “…just ordinary people going about our own particular jobs.”
Mrs. Ray Bone performing a healing ritual in her home.
(Photo by Terence Spencer/Popperfoto via Getty Images)
LIFE covered witches during this time in a non-menacing way. It showed them as everyday people who want to do good for themselves and others by using magic. Both these texts do this by placing the witch archetype into an image readers from the time could accept: as an everyday housewife who balanced her work and career to have a fully rounded life. The magazine also reflected the changing societal expectations for women during the era. A later article from the “The Feminine Eye” section in the February 17th, 1967 edition of LIFEshows how the image of the witch had transformed through mid-century media. The article quotes a LaVey Satanist stating that she does not want to be called a witch since the term has “…sort of the connotation of a cookie-lady now”.
By the 1960s, second-wave feminism gained popularity in the United States. Knowing that, it should be unsurprising that LIFE magazine would cover witches. From a twenty-first century perspective though, it seems like a radical act considering the many inherited biases surrounding witchcraft at the time. The articles also helped LIFE’s mass audience gain a better understanding of the religion and its practice. Throughout history the witch archetype went from something to be frightened of to being represented in a popular magazine by the likes of Ray Bone, who said: “Twentieth-century witches [are] happy in our knowledge; we are simple people with simple beliefs.”
The photos that Frank Dandridge shot for LIFE magazine paint a vivid portrait of violence and race in 1960s America. He reported on riots in Harlem, in Watts, and in Newark,. He was in Selma, Alabama when Martin Luther King marched in the days immediately after Bloody Sunday. Dandridge’s most famous photo is of Sarah Collins, a 12-year-old girl whose eyes were in bandages after the bombing of a Sunday school class at the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bombing killed four girls, including Collins’ sister, while wounding many others and leaving Collins blind in one eye. The image of Collins in her hospital bed made vivid for America the cruelty of this horrific bombing by four men who were members of a splinter group of the Klu Klux Klan.
Dandridge, who was fairly new to LIFE when he took that historic shot, is now 83 and lives in Los Angeles, where he settled after his second career as a television writer.
In a phone interview, the jocular Dandridge recalled the unlikely beginning to his photography career. He was a teenager in the U.S. Marines, playing in a barracks poker game at Camp Lejeune, when one of his opponents threw his Kodak Pony camera into the pot. Dandridge’s hand was a winning one indeed, especially after the soldier who had lost the camera taught Dandridge how to use it.
When Dandridge left the Marines at age 19, he returned to his home to New York City and began taking pictures, shooting model portfolios and birthday parties, and roaming the streets to add to his portfolio. As a young man who was “full of beans,” as Dandridge puts it, he wasn’t shy about asking for work, and it paid off: He wrote a letter to Jimmy Hoffa asking for access for a photo story, and ending up spending two-and-a-half weeks with him in Miami for Pageant magazine, being in the room when the labor leader was on the phone cursing out John Kennedy.
Dandridge persistently called LIFE magazine to pitch ideas, usually about a celebrity or politician coming to New York, and he was always turned down. But then one day the LIFE editor called Dandridge to see if he was available to shoot a story on racial conflict in Cambridge, Maryland in 1963; the protesters had agreed to give LIFE inside access, but only if they sent a Black photographer. Dandridge told the editor he would check to see if he was free—which he very much was. “I ran around the apartment for fifteen minutes yelling and screaming like an idiot, then called them back and told them I cleared the schedule,” he recalled, laughing.
The Cambridge assignment proved to be life-changing in two ways. One was that Dandridge did well enough that LIFE continued to give him more assignments. The other was that he developed a relationship with the protest leader, Gloria Richardson. She and Dandridge would eventually marry. “I was down there two or three times, and the center of action was Gloria’s house,’ he says. “She was a bright and courageous lady. It just happened that way.”
Later that year Dandridge took his famous photo of Sarah Collins—a shot he would never have gotten without a little bravado. Dandridge, in the company of Collins’ family, entered the Atlanta hospital where she was being treated, and on the way to her room he bluffed his way past hospital worker telling him to leave by explaining that he had the hospital administrator’s permission to take pictures (which he did not). That tactic worked until he reached Collins’ floor and a man answered Dandridge’s explanation by saying, “I’m the administrator!” Still, Dandridge got into Collins’ room. “I knocked or six or eight or ten pictures,” he says. “Then I got out before something bad happened.” He kept charging ahead that day despite resistance because, “What was I going to do, walk away from the picture?”
Another of Dandridge’s more memorable shots was a photo from the Harlem riots that ran as a spread over two pages in the July 31, 1941 issue of LIFE. The photo showed a young man who had been hit by a stray police bullet being taken to an ambulance by his friends. Dandridge recalls that he and a writer had been up in Harlem chasing the action all night when one of his legs went out. The writer propped him up against a telephone pole, and from the position he got the shot. After the photo ran, Dandridge was particularly pleased when he was at the office and legendary LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt asked him how he got the shot—which depended on Dandridge having his flash unit with him.
Dandridge is a jocular and engaging storyteller, and his eye for telling detail comes through in not just his pictures from his words. Talking about growing up poor in Harlem, he related how he and his mother for a time lived a single room, and could only use one shelf in a shared refrigerator in a common area. After his mother, who survived major bouts of tuberculosis, found steady work at the city’s Board of Health, the first thing she would do with each paycheck was to buy subway tokens to make sure she would be able to get to work. When Dandridge’s career took off, and she refused to believe that he could earn $2,500 for a week’s work when her annual salary was $5,000, he brought her a copy of his paycheck, and she kept that document until the day she died. “The thing I was happiest about with my career was how much it meant to mom,” Dandridge says.
In addition to shooting for LIFE, Dandridge worked for many other magazines, including Look, the Saturday Evening Post, and Playboy. His Playboy assignments included photographing an interview between Alex Haley and James Baldwin. That was a highlight for Dandridge, because he had worked as an assistant to James Baldwin in the days before his photography career took off (that job enabled him to upgrade to a new camera from the one he was as a Marine).
Dandridge’s photography helped pave the transition to his second career as a television writer. Dandridge had served as set photographer on a number of movies, including Jules Dassin’s Uptight and Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement. With LIFE ending its original run in 1972, and other magazine clients such as Look and The Saturday Evening Post going under, Dandridge became a fellow at the American Film Institute. His sold his first script in 1974 to the TV series Kung Fu—an episode titled Night of the Owls, Day of the Doves, about three prostitutes who inherit a hotel and try to go legit.
His television credits include episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk, St. Elsewhere, and he was on the writing staff of Generations, the first soap opera to feature an African-American family among its original characters.
As a man who documented so much racial struggle in the 1960s, Dandridge has found the events of recent times, with the police killings of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor and so many others, to be particularly heartbreaking. During the 1960s he had a real sense that he was witnessing the beginning of societal change in regard to race .
“It’s been sixty years and the same bullshit is still going on,” he says . “…In spite of the Obamas and the Thurgood Marshalls and the Ralph Bunches, even Malcolm X, all those people who spoke up—all of that, what has it added up to? It adds up to black people are still scared to be living in America. Sometimes I just want to cry.”
The one “pebble” of hope, he says, is the Derrick Chauvin verdict in the officer who killed George Floyd was found guilty, and the promise that cell phone cameras can help hold those who abuse their power accountable. It’s an interesting perspective from a man whose most famous photo, of Sarah Jean Collins in her hospital bed all those years ago, helped begin the accounting.
Sarah Jean Collins, 12, was blinded by dynamite explosion set off in basement of Birmingham church that killed her sister and three other girls as her Sunday school class was ending, 1963.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Sarah Jean Collins, 12, in an Atlanta hospital after being blinded by dynamite explosion set off in basement of Birmingham church that killed her sister and three other girls as her Sunday school class was ending, 1963.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
A young man who was hit by a stray bullet fired by police to disperse crowds during the Harlem riots was carried to an ambulance by friends, 1964.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Civil Rights marchers reached a police road block outside Selma, Alabama in March 1965, during a march coming two days after “Bloody Sunday.”
Frank Dandridge/]/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama in 1965, two days after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march there.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Martin Luther King and other civil rights activist began to pray as police blocked the street during a second attempt at a march in Selma, 1965.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders watched President Lyndon B. Johnson speak on television, 1965.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
The Watts riots, 1965.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Soldiers subdued a rioter in Watts, 1965.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Police searched a man they saw running away from a clothing store during the 1967 riots in Newark before letting him go.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
A scene from the Newark riots, 1965.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
A sniper in position during the Newark riots, 1967.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
A police officer took cover on Springfield Avenue in Newark while looking for a sniper, 1967.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
Police hunted for a sniper on Springfield Avenue during the Newark riots, 1967.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
A man who had been shot in the side during the 1967 Newark riots died moments after this picture was taken; twenty-six people were killed during the riots.
Photo by Frank Dandridge/The LIFE Images Collection via Shutterstock
The portfolio of Terry Ashe is a walk down memory lane for political junkies. There’s Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall from the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. There’s Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There’s Hillary Clinton from the days when husband Bill put her in charge of health care reform. There’s newsman Matt Drudge, goofy hat and all, from when Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewisky scandal exploded.
Ashe, now 74, was an unlikely figure to chronicle the world of Washington D.C. He grew up in Holyoke, Mass., the son of a hotel clerk and a school teacher. His mother, the schoolteacher, died from bone cancer when he was 14 years old. She knew she had been sick for years, and was eager to cram in lessons with her son. She insisted, for one, that he learn to draw. “That’s how I got interested in art,” Ashe says. At the age of 13 he was given his first car, a 1950 Ford coupe in robin’s egg blue, with the idea that he would learn how cars worked, in addition to taking short rides up and down the driveway.
After high school Ashe went to trade school to study electronics. He only began with photography after a friend who was serving in Vietnam sent him a camera. A turning point came when Ashe was working at the local country club and a fellow bartender saw one of Ashe’s pictures and recommended that he apply to the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., where his son had gone to study photography.
At Brooks, Ashe found his groove, and began getting work as a photographer and an assistant. On the way up he served as an assistant for Dirck Halstead on shoots for Time magazine of future president Ronald Reagan and former president Gerald Ford. On the Reagan shoot, at his California ranch, Ashe accidentally dropped a light on the head of the former California governor, which Reagan took with good humor and for which Ashe couldn’t apologize enough. Then it was on to Ford, which really blew Ashe’s mind. “I left there thinking, I had just met an American president,” Ashe says. “Wow.”
Ashe would go on to shoot for LIFE, Time and others, following the work to Washington D.C. early in the Reagan administration. His unique background served him well as a photographer. His mother’s emphasis on drawing had given him an artistic sensibility. And his time studying electronics helped him gain a proficiency with the technical aspects. He cared greatly about his equipment, and he understood it. “The lenses I had were beautiful,” he says. He came to master exposures and lighting, and when his saw some Beltway colleagues struggling with those aspects, he says, “I knew I had an edge.”
It shows. His portrait of former U.S. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick could be a Renaissance painting. Or compare this story’s photo of actress Elizabeth Taylor testifying before Congress on behalf of AIDS research to this image from another photographer covering the event.
When listing his favorite photos, Ashe makes sure to mention his portrait of Senators Phil Gramm (R-Texas), Warren Rudman (R-New Hampshire) and Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina) who came together to pass the 1985 balanced budget law that bears their name. “That’s when Congress was actually cooperating,” says Ashe, who still lives in a D.C. suburb.
It was a different time, one captured so expertly by a man suited to the moment.
Ronald Reagan in the House chambers for his 1986 State of the Union address.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Biden, then a U.S. Senator, spoke with fellow members of the Judiciary Committee, including Paul Laxalt (white hair, standing) and Chairman Strom Thurmond (seated, right) during hearings on Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee William H. Rehnquist. 1986.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her chambers in 1984, nine years before she joined the U.S. Supreme Court.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
House speaker Tip O’Neill, 1986.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Oliver North refused to testify before a House committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, 1986.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Terry’s Ashe photo of Oliver North made the cover of Time’s July 20, 1987 issue.
Lady Diana outside a J.C.Penney store in Washington, DC, 1985.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. Ambassador to United Nations, testified before the U.S. Senate about doings in Afghanistan, 1985.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
George Bush, then Vice President, swore in new Senator and future Vice President Al Gore, with Gore’s family, including wife Tipper, standing by, 1985.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Senators Phil Gramm, Warren Rudman and Ernest Hollings, 1986.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, spoke with an unidentified man during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, 1991.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, 1991.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham Clinton, then First Lady, during an outdoor town meeting regarding health care reform, 1993.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
White House senior adviser George Stephanopoulos testified before the House Banking Committee, which was conducting an investigation into the Whitewater affair, 1994.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Newt Gingrich, soon to be made Speaker of the House, on Capitol Hill, 1994.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Early internet newsman Matt Drudge spoke to the media during the Monica Lewinsky investigation, 1998.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Elizabeth Taylor advocated for AIDS research before the Senate Appropriations Labor and Health Subcommittee, 1986.
Terry Ashe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Terry Ashe (right) assisted during a shoot at the California ranch of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s with photographer Dirk Halstead (left).
Courtesy Terry Ashe
House speaker Photographer Terry Ashe looked on as Tip O’Neill signed a print of one of Ashe’s photos.
Fourteen years after The Sopranos ended its six-season run with a famously abrupt blackout—and eight years after its indelible star, James Gandolfini, died of an infinitely more tragic heart attack—HBO’s transformational mob family masterpiece lives on. In part, of course, we can thank internet streaming services that guarantee video immortality—but it’s also because creator David Chase injected the series into our cultural bloodstream. As countless critics have noted, the richly textured, complex work—centered as it was on a nuanced antihero—redefined high-quality television. Pushing creative and moral boundaries along with audience expectations, it influenced a raft of prestige TV that followed in its wake—including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, and Game of Thrones (some of which involved writers and directors who worked on The Sopranos). And the series is now ingrained in the lexicon. It has largely supplanted The Godfather as the go-to mafia reference; Donald Trump’s brazenly transactional tenure in the White House earned him plenty of unfavorable comparisons to Tony Soprano. A book by Deborrah Himsel, Leadership Sopranos Style: How to Become a More Effective Boss, holds up the fictional New Jersey mob boss as a model manager, if you overlook a few cold-blooded murders.
Now The Sopranos gained a whole new kind of currency with the release in October 2021 of a prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, starring James’s son, Michael Gandolfini, as a young Tony coming of age in the titular city during the racially charged summer of 1967. Written by Chase and Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, the film explores the social and familial forces that helped shape a sensitive, impressionable youth into the angst-ridden mobster who riveted audiences from 1999 to 2007.
And what was it, exactly, that made The Sopranos can’t-miss TV during those years? For one thing, it was unlike anything that came before. “Pre-Sopranos TV was widely dismissed as a medium for programs that didn’t ask the viewer to think about anything except what was coming on next, and preferred lovable characters who didn’t change and had no inner life,” write critics Matt Zoller Seitz of New York magazine and Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone—both of whom covered the show for the Newark Star-Ledger—in their 2019 book, The Sopranos Sessions. The networks imposed rigid standards and rules when it came to language, story lines, sex, violence, race, and other content—controversial subject matter was anathema, and nobody wanted to rock the boat, or, heaven forbid, alienate the sponsors.
The Sopranos said goodbye to all that. Granted, it wasn’t the first series to push the envelope. There was All in the Family, with its humanized bigot, Archie Bunker; the morally complex Hill Street Blues; and other unconventional fare, such as Twin Peaks and the prison series Oz. But as Seitz and Sepinwall point out, The Sopranos was the first show to break all the rules “and still become a massive, enduring hit”—one widely used as a template. Many of the series’ most innovative features have become routine conventions of the small screen—antiheroic or even downright villainous central characters, serialized narrative arcs instead of discrete episodes, and the recognition that in real life there are moral gray areas and unresolved plots.
For the uninitiated—those who aren’t “made” viewers, so to speak—Chase’s saga follows Tony Soprano, the bearish boss of North Jersey’s DiMeo crime family and patriarch of his own upper-middle-class household, and how he balances (or doesn’t) an often-violent “professional” life with the dynamics of his family. That would be Tony’s long-suffering, compartmentalizing wife, Carmela (Oz alum Edie Falco), and two adolescent kids—Ivy League–bound daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and perpetually confused son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler). Also in the mix are Tony’s raging sister Janice (Aida Turturro) and troublesome elders—nightmarish mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) and Corrado “Junior” Soprano (Dominic Chianese), Tony’s shrewd and suspicious mafioso uncle. These characters interweave with Tony’s criminal crew, including his hotheaded “nephew” Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and guys with names like Paulie Walnuts, Big Pussy and Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, as well as enemy mobsters, FBI agents, and Tony’s tag team of high-maintenance mistresses. Under constant stress from all of these and tormented by demons from his childhood, Tony has panic attacks and lands in psychotherapy, under the care of Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco).
That’s the general outline, but The Sopranos is so much more—it contains multitudes. Times of London critic Ben McIntyre told the BBC in 2007 that the series “covered all the great elements of drama like Shakespeare—Tony Soprano really is King Lear. The show’s themes are the great themes of literature.” The Sopranos, McIntyre noted, depicted “fathers fighting sons, kings controlling kingdoms, treachery, loyalty, love, guilt, revenge… everything, really,” adding that it was about “a bad man with good in him, trying to understand how he works.” McIntyre didn’t stop there. He also compared The Sopranos to the works of Charles Dickens, likening the show to a “huge, sprawling novel” with “small cameo parts that pull you along through it.”
Indeed, almost all the show’s characters are fleshed out. Tony as boss is by turns monstrous and murderous, reasonable and pragmatic; off the job, we see him engaged in feverish extramarital sex, then having a tender heart-to-heart with his wife or kids, or baring his childhood pain to his shrink. Almost everyone else also comes off as a multidimensional human, even those who make brief appearances—a psychopathic capo here, a crooked cop there. Though graphically violent on occasion, with many moments of high drama, The Sopranos has also been described—by Gandolfini, among others—as essentially a dark comedy. The scripts are generously leavened with humor high, low, broad, and subtle. The characters bicker and banter, sometimes over Seinfeldian minutiae; there’s irony and incongruity, mangled literary references, and mobster malapropisms. Even some of the more gruesome moments—Christopher crossing himself while disposing of a dismembered mobster’s head, for example—are so over-the-top you may be provoked to laugh.
The years since The Sopranos finale have brought heightened awareness when it comes to issues of race and gender. And the series has drawn understandable criticism. As The Many Saints of Newark explores, Tony and his pals spent their formative years in the racially incendiary crucible of Newark, and their exodus to the suburbs was part of the great “white flight” from the city. The mobsters’ racism is often on display as they fling casual slurs or try to pin their crimes on African Americans.
Meanwhile, Italian American groups have criticized The Sopranos for promoting ethnic stereotypes. “So you hear The Sopranos is a quality show, you turn it on to check it out, and it’s the same old thing again—Italian Americans stealing, hitting, shooting, cheating, killing,” Nicolas Addeo, chairman of a group called Speranza, which advocated for positive ethnic, religious, and racial representations on-screen, told the Star-Ledger in 1999. “This show is not meant to represent the Italian American experience,” Imperioli countered to the same paper. “It’s about a specific group of people, a specific time and place.”
Certainly, women have their travails in The Sopranos, operating in an old-world patriarchal subculture. Over the course of the series, female characters are used, abused, deceived, and savagely murdered. There are some fierce, assertive (and, at times, manipulative) women, though even the most impressive, Dr. Melfi, is brutally raped. But The Sopranos remains popular among women viewers. “The Sopranos was a work of art that understood the messy, unlikable truth of women in this insular world,” writes Vice critic Christina Newland. “That truth is rarely, if ever, empowering. But even at their most self-defeating or amoral, these women are allowed to be many paradoxical things. Their characterizations and the depth of writing allows them to be both maternal and fearsome, bafflingly remote yet empathetic.”
In any event, a whole new crop of viewers has generated Sopranos buzz. According to WarnerMedia, HBO’s parent company, the show’s popularity skyrocketed in 2020 during the pandemic. Noted Sepinwall to GQ at the time: “A lot of people [are] using the quarantine as an opportunity to finally watch or rewatch different shows they’ve had on their list for a while. But this is definitely one of the high ones, just because of its importance in TV and pop cultural history.”
And while millennial and Gen Z audiences may be watching The Sopranos for the first time in 2021, Sepinwall says they’re reacting to the series much as he did as a critic more than two decades ago: “They’re actually saying, ‘This is still one of the greatest—if not the greatest—shows ever made.’”
The early episode in which Tony (James Gandolfini) took daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on a college tour established that The Sopranos was a show about much more than organized crime.
The Season Three episode in which Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli, left) and Paulie “Walnuts” Gaultieri (Tony Sirico) were lost in the Pine Barrens is among the series’ most beloved.
Tony and wife Carmela (Edie Falco) had a joint therapy session in Season Three.
HBO/Hulton/Getty Images
Tony and crew members Bobby Baccalieri (Steven Schirripa) and Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) met with nemesis Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) in Season 6.
in the age of remote working, holiday office parties are not what they used to be. That new reality lends an extra note of nostalgia to a story from 1948 entitled, “LIFE Goes to an Office Party: Employees and Bosses Loosen Up All Over the Place.”
The fashions in the story are pure 1940s, but the social dynamics on display will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office.
“One night or another the lights burn late in many American business houses,” the story began. “The occasion is that great leveler, the office Christmas party, an antidote to the social formality which ranks between a few discreet cocktails and a free-for-all fight. Then all business barriers collapse; executives unbend; the office clown finds a sympathetic audience.”
For this story LIFE photographer Cornell Capa visited the offices of Schiff Terhune, a New York firm of insurance brokers. (The company, well established at the time, carried on until the 1980s, which it was acquired by larger corporation. A nice history of the firm is included in The New York Times obituary of Frank Schiff, the son of William Schiff, who appears in one of Capa’s photos).
Capa’s photos ran over two packed pages in the Dec. 27, 1948 issue, which featured on its cover a more sober seasonal story on Giotto’s paintings of Christ.
The Schiff Terhune office party appears to have been quite the frolic. People danced and wore funny hats. Santa led a conga line. They even had kissing under the mistletoe—a tradition that has all but disappeared as companies have become more aware on the topic of sexual harassment. Indeed, some of these pictures, showing male executives dancing with female underlings, could be used for a human resources slide show on behaviors that are frowned upon.
In general, office parties have been a wellspring of cautionary tales about regrettable behavior—the Seinfeld episode featuring Elaine’s dancing is one sitcom example— which is why around holiday season etiquette guides and advice pieces for how to manage the office parties abound online.
Still, it looks as if the employees of Schiff Terhune found their party a welcome respite. Wrote LIFE, “By the time a conga line and a frolicsome vice president were in action, even the most shrinking violet felt expansively aware of the brotherhood of man.”
Santa, in the form of company vice president Arthur D. Marks, led a conga line through the file cabinets.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Menroe. the “office cut up,” brandished a pair of pink cotton pants he had been given by the office Santa Claus.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Max Sherman’s soda bottle became tangled in the “pink drawers” that Santa gave him at the office Christmas party.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Stenographers posed with assistant department head Al Lyons at an insurance office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Insurance company vice president John Griffin danced with a giggling stenographer at their office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Menroe and biller Jessie Merman met under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Company president William Schiff danced with secretary Theda Berkeley at their office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Stenographer Dorothy Newman took a moment to rest her tired feet at the office Christmas party, 1948.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
George Dixon returned to his desk to get some work done during his office Christmas party, 1948.
