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A view from the bridge5/27/2023 This history begins in the 1920s when the United States passed a law that drastically limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States from Italy (and elsewhere). Over the next 15 years, as is clear from many drafts of the story in the Ransom Center collection, Miller, Norman Rosten (who wrote the screenplay), and Lumet, shifted the emphasis to downplay the history of illegal Italian immigration. Miller’s original inspiration for his “Italian tragedy” was the immediate post-WWII context, when he was immersed in the labor conflicts on the Brooklyn waterfront and made a trip to Italy to visit the families of Brooklyn longshoremen. Critics of the film, and of the play by Arthur Miller on which it is based, have generally paid scant attention to the representation of migration in the story and as a result have often found the characters’ motives hard to read. A View from the Bridge is the story of an Italian American longshoreman named Eddie who informs on two of his wife’s relatives, illegal immigrants Marco and Rodolpho, in order to prevent Rodolpho from marrying his niece, Catherine.
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