What Is The Mob Movie Donald Trump Saw With A Gangster Named “Alan Jones” In It?

The model of Donald Trump currently on display is fussy and sour, poached to glossy and unappetizing gumminess in his own luxurious bathwater; he is also, to all appearances, miserable. It is hard to say whether the adoration of his admirers or the revulsion of a large and growing portion of the American populace has been worse for him in that regard, but neither seems to have done him much good.

The Trump currently maundering and free-associating through 110-minute performances at various swing state event spaces is manic or wan but mostly just dull—a mean old dunce listing his gripes, telling weird lies, and talking about dumb stuff he saw on TV. People suffer and die as a direct result of how much he sucks, every day, and he is still somehow the most boring old rich guy imaginable. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is humiliating in the extreme to live in a society that produced someone like this at all, let alone put him in charge of everything. Trump remains very well-insulated from the consequences of his actions, moment by moment thanks to a team of chittering courtiers and Renfield types and more generally because protecting him from those consequences is the only thing that a number of hugely important political institutions really do anymore. But also you can tell that he knows, at some level, that everyone can see that he is failing.

There's another version of Donald Trump that only comes out when he feels safe, and while that version also sucks ass and is stupid as hell, it is notable as the last vestige of the character who once charmed America's most credulous and least exacting voters. The other version of him, the one that speaks in front of smaller, more carefully curated crowds, does not seem to know that everyone can see that he is failing. That Trump is making innumerable lives around the world harder, crueler, and worse is not something that would bother him, really, because his own life remains pretty much the same. The trouble comes when he is perceived, correctly, as a preening and delusional failure, and in front of a crowd of people who believe he can do no wrong, all of whom are visibly, clammily yearning to give him more of their money, Trump is untroubled. He knows he can get up there and just say whatever, and so he does.

You can see this in the remarks that Trump made in front of Italian-American boosters last week. The purpose of the event was to celebrate the "return" of Christopher Columbus Day, and Trump did celebrate that. He doesn't really care about that, either, though, and so while Trump was able to link this ostensible achievement to the success of his broader program of Making Everything Like It Was Before (1988) he was mostly just up there vibing and talking about things that Seemed Italian to him. Right off the bat, this meant celebrating Luciano Pavarotti. "He was a great diva, the greatest diva of them all," Trump said of the heroic tenor, who died in 2007. "He was a male—a male diva like no woman could be." As it invariably would, this became one of his little stories about how a notable person he'd maybe met or just wanted to meet actually really liked him, was a fan of Trump, once called him "sir" and so on.

But before Trump got into his speech, he encountered a problem. This happens to him sometimes. A system error in the jelly-encrusted hard drive of his mind creates a cognitive loop that he cannot escape, and leaves him bonking around in a corner like a fritzing Roomba. Trump started thinking about Italian names, and how if you really look at it, they're not the same as regular-style names. It was while bantering with the tenor Christopher Macchio, whose presence elicited the Pavarotti stuff, Trump first steered into this rut. "This is serious," the President of the United States said. "I think the other thing about—you almost have to be Italian. If his name were Paul Jones, if his name were—right, instead of Macchio. If his name were, let's say, Smith. 'And ladies and gentlemen, Jim Smith.' I don't care how good he—just wouldn't work."

This is a powerful point, and one that Trump would deservedly return to before long. He went on to read some of his prepared remarks about Columbus, interrupted with asides about the beautiful new ballroom and everyone saying we're the hottest country in the world and how safe his decision to have National Guard guys stand around Washington D.C. has made things whereas before "kids would come in from Iowa to watch—look at the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, and they'd be killed. They'd die." The cities, the monuments, the crime, you wouldn't believe it, and then a little bit more Columbus stuff, and then abruptly he was back on the name thing. The Roomba is stuck. The Roomba is making a whirring, distressed noise. Uh oh.

"Just such a horrible, just a horrible, horrible story," Trump said, temporarily concluding a bit in a fashion long favored by aged parents. It was time for the Roomba to flip itself over onto its back. "And, you know, you should be very proud of what's taking place for you, because you were a very discriminated group, but you never complained about it." The president continued:

You know, I remember about 25 years ago, Italian movies, great, you know, mob movies, great, but remember, they didn't want you to call the name of the mobster. They didn't want you to use the name of the, like Alphonse Capone. We don't like using names. You weren't allowed to use—Frank, you weren't allowed to use Italian names. So the mobsters were named—one was Alan Jones. He played the role of an Italian mobster, but he couldn't use the name like Vito—I won't say Genovese.

But they couldn't use Italian names, like your name, Frank. [Trump is referring here to Frank Bisignano, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration] They couldn't use Italian names. They were restricted because they thought it was discriminatory. I said, 'no, no, you have to understand the Italians, they love it. They love it.' They took it away. You know how many movies they made after that? About two, and they both failed. No, they had one with Jim Smith. 'Jim Smith is coming in.' Who the hell is Jim Smith? No, we want Vito something, right? We want something. So, uh, a lot of things have changed. 

It is possible to check this kind of thing, and I did. You may not be surprised to learn that I could not find any films released 25 years ago in which a mobster was named Alan Jones, although I suppose it's possible that Trump had access to a version of Corky Romano unavailable to less eminent viewers in which the characters had all been very nastily and very unfairly given normal-style names instead of the Italian names everyone wanted for them. The same is true for Jim Smith, which is a name that Trump had used before as a placeholder for a guy who sucks, for instance a V.A. employee who could now be fired because Trump was unafraid of civil service union protections.

Perhaps because it is so dull, Alan Jones has not gotten a lot of run as a character name. Jon Tenney played a character by that name in the third season of True Detective, and an actual guy named Alan Jones was a rugby coach and prominent right-wing political commentator in Australia until he was accused of many instances of being a vile sex creep, but I could find few characters of note in any genre by that name. A complicating factor here is that Donald Trump has a very luxurious and abstruse concept of time. In 2019, when Trump made reading the lyrics from the song "The Snake" a part of his speeches, he referred to the song he was referencing, which came out in 1969, as having been popular "in the '90s." Adjust this for inflation and "about 25 years ago" could mean basically any time since 1940 or so.

I was out of my depth, and so I asked the film critic Glenn Kenny, author of Made Men: The Story Of Goodfellas and The World Is Yours: The Story Of Scarface whether he had any insight into where President Donald Trump had gotten the idea that Hollywood had picked up and then abandoned a gambit in which gangsters were named things like Alan Jones and Jim Smith, at any time in the history of American film.

"Hoo boy," Kenny replied. He continued:

As you’re no doubt aware, one thing about Trump is that in the fetid, miasmic sewer trough that bobbles in his brain pan, an occasional nugget of truth will surface. For instance, while there was no mobster character named 'Alan Jones,' the real-life Alan or Allan Jones was a light tenor who costarred in A Night At The Opera and was the father of pop singer Jack Jones. Trump may also have gotten an intimation of 'Mr. Brown,' the mobster character played by Richard Conte in The Big Combo, the great Joseph Lewis crime film of 1955. I’m trying to be nice here.

Kenny went on to explain that for the century or so in which gangster films have been a Hollywood staple, their characters have virtually always had Italian names. The exception was a brief period after the institution of the Hays Code in 1934. "The deracination began in post-code pictures like The Roaring Twenties, with Cagney and Bogart as Bartlett and Hally respectively," Kenny said. "But as the ‘50s dawned it was back to Italian biz as usual." And there, Henry Hill and Jimmy Conway included—those Goodfellas characters were not fully Italian, and so did not have Italian names—it has pretty much remained.

Barring any new evidence about the secret Alan Jones Cut of Corky Romano, it seems safe to consider this investigation closed. It may well be true that Trump once "said, no, no, you have to understand the Italians, they love it." That really does sound like something he'd say. But there is no evidence that "they," whoever that might refer to, ever took "it," meaning the beautiful Italian names of characters in mob movies, away. The president was just saying some stuff.