Bloody Good Show: The Godfather, Part II

It’s been a long time—easily 50 years, in fact—since I saw the second Godfather film. I know that, snob that I was, I didn’t see the first Godfather when it debuted, because I was too arty back then to be interested in crime dramas. It wasn’t until a friend with impeccable intellectual credentials told me that The Godfather was essential Americana that I discovered for myself the brilliant picture that Francis Ford Coppola had given us of the underside of the American dream. As it turned out, Godfather II would be a feather in the cap of my former boss, Roger Corman. It won six Oscars, including several for Corman alumni. Francis Ford Coppola , who got his start fresh out of film school as Roger’s assistant, took home statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Robert De Niro (who’d been featured in Corman’s Bloody Mama) was honored with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the youthful Vito Corleone. Moreover, Corman graduate Talia Shire became a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her role as the godfather’s sister. 

 I returned to The Godfather Part II in part to savor the work of the late Robert Duvall, who plays it close to the vest as Tom Hagen, the godfather’s indefatigable fixer and adopted son. But I was also curious to see how a film could be both sequel and prequel to what had gone before. Honestly, I don’t think Godfather II (the first sequel ever to win a Best Picture Oscar) is quite as strong as its predecessor; by cutting between two stories set in two very different eras Coppola sometimes weakens the film’s throughline, and the ultimate conclusion doesn’t pack the wallop of the earlier film. Still, there’s much to admire. I was strongly impressed by De Niro’s work in the Sicily scenes, and the Lower East Side sections of the film allowed us to see his evolution from eager immigrant to godfather-in-the-making. And Coppola clearly had a marvelous time filming massive period crowd scenes, letting us in on the local color of New York’s Little Italy in all its tawdry splendor.

 By contrast, there’s the rustic but tony compound of Michael Corleone and family at Nevada’s Lake Tahoe, where they hole up while he’s busy deal-making with Las Vegas honchos. And we also get glimpses of both Miami and pre-Castro Havana. It is striking watching Al Pacino’s Michael becoming, in this film, more and more his father’s imperious son, the master of all he surveys. Pacino never won an Oscar for playing Michael in three Godfather films Though he earned Oscar nominations for the first two, it took him until 1993 (and the semi-interesting Scent of a Woman) to take home the golden statuette. But when I checked out the dates, I was struck by the fact that less than a year after Godfather II hit the screen, Pacino gave another masterful Oscar-worthy performance in a favorite film of mine, Dog Day Afternoon. That heist film, based on a true story, had Pacino as Sonny, a hapless young man determined to knock over a Brooklyn bank to finance his lover’s sex-change operation. If you see Dog Day Afternoon not long after Godfather II, I suspect you’ll be surprised that Pacino suddenly seems much younger, much shorter, and much more inept than in the previous film. That, of course, is what acting is all about.

 I should also mention that both Godfather II and Dog Day Afternoon also feature the gifted John Cazale, an ominous-lookng character actor who died much too young. 

 

Animal Attraction: Dog Day Afternoon

We’re fast approaching the time of year when the Library of Congress announces the new inductees for its National Film Registry, honoring movies with cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. I’ve just watched a 1975 film that made the list back in 2009. Dog Day Afternoon can be said to have historical significance, because it’s based on an actual true-crime incident that was covered in Life magazine in 1972. But with the great Sidney Lumet at the helm, it’s also an aesthetic marvel.

 Lumet’s long film career began in 1957, with the tightly focused, highly suspenseful jury room drama, Twelve Angry Men. Lunet directed several films based on classic American plays, including A View from the Bridge and Long Day’s Journey into Night (a powerful version of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical stage production). There were lighter works too (he put on screen The Wiz, the “ghetto” version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a huge Broadway hit), but he was perhaps best known for crime thrillers, like Serpico and his very last project (in 2007), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  He was four times nominated for Best Director Oscars, but could never quite eke out a personal win. (He did receive a richly deserved honorary Oscar in 2004, seven years before his death at age 86.) His most honored film was probably Network, a cutting satire of the TV industry that was nominated for major 9 Oscars and won four, though Rocky took home the top prize. I personally have a special love for his late career film, Running on Empty (1988), the poignant story of a counterculture couple whose son (the late River Phoenix) tries to opt out of their nomadic lives as fugitives from the FBI. On that film, as often happened for Lumet, his writer and lead actor got nominated for Oscars even though he himself didn’t.

 Dog Day Afternoon is surely one of Lumet’s mid-career best, made just after Murder on the Orient Express and before Network. It’s the story of a bank robbery, but with a significant difference. In most bank heist films, going back to the very early days of cinema, there’s a lot of money at stake: the bad guys either get it or don’t. If they succeed in robbing the bank, they either get away or (more often) are foiled at the very last minute, thus proving that crime doesn’t pay. But Dog Day Afternoon is much more of a character study: at its center is a loser who’s desperately trying to untangle a messy domestic situation by funding his male lover’s sex change operation. His solution is to rob a Brooklyn bank, one that turns out to have virtually no cash on hand. As the tension and the temperature rise, Sonny tries to achieve his goals by taking a clutch of bank-tellers hostage: their emotions range from fear to anger to perverse amusement. There’s also another gunman on the scene, the eerily silent Sal (John Cazale), who seems violent enough to commit mayhem.

 The Brooklyn neighborhood re-created on film by Lumet becomes part of the action, as counterculture crowds sympathetic to the hapless Sonny gather in the street to heckle the swarming NYPD cops and straight-arrow FBI guys. Though movies are, of necessity, filmed out of sequence, the mood of this one is so well-sustained that we feel we are on the spot, watching it all unfold in real time as the weather gets hotter, Sonny gets sweatier (inside the bank, the air conditioning has been dismantled), and the possibility of bloodshed becomes more and more likely. 

 

Third Time’s Not the Charm: The Godfather, Part III

In 1972, everyone was talking about the screen version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Who could forget the pageantry, the brutality, Marlon Brando stroking that cat? When awards season rolled around, The Godfather was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay. (It was a great year for movies. In the Best Director category, Francis Ford Coppola was beaten out by Bob Fosse and Cabaret.)

 A mere two years later, a second Godfather film showed up on movie screens.  With Brando’s Vita Corleone dead and gone, Godfather II focused on son and heir Michael (Al Pacino), now a reluctant crime boss trying to reconcile himself to his new power. Michael’s story in the present day is interwoven with that of Vito as a young man (Robert De Niro) leaving Sicily in response to the massacre of his family. Unusually for a sequel, Godfather II was perhaps even more admired by critics and audiences than the initial film. It was nominated for nine Oscars, and won an impressive six, becoming the first sequel ever to be named Best Picture, even though it was up against such masterworks as Chinatown.

 You can’t blame Paramount Pictures, which had optioned Puzo’s 1969 novel, for wanting to take full advantage of its golden goose, even though, after the release of Godfather II,  Coppola considered the Corleone saga complete. That’s why Paramount hired a string of established writers and directors to come up with Part III. Some versions had the Corleones working with the CIA in Latin America. One involved a turf war with the Irish Mafia in Atlantic City. In another, Michael Corleone is killed early on, and the entire focus is on his surviving children.

 Some twenty years later, Puzo and Coppola were finally persuaded to return to the project, and much of the original cast signed on. The focus is now entirely on an ageing Michael, still trying to balance his criminal activities with a desire to lead a worthy life. It’s striking to see what time has done to the familiar Corleone family members. Michael is greying and fighting health problems. His estranged wife Kay (Diane Keaton) has a rather silly new hairdo, and her sadness over the hand she’s been dealt is a bit hard to buy. (Since we’ve all seen Keaton be adorably addled in Annie Hall, it’s easy to think she’d face tragedy with a blithe and dithering la-di-da.) Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire), whom we first met as a jubilant bride in Part One, has been turned by circumstance into a black-clad angel of death. New characters include Michael and Kay’s grown children. Son Anthony, who has turned his back on his father’s murderous ways, aspires to be an opera singer, and his stage debut in Palermo (in an opera that features Godfather-style violence) provides a nice excuse for the entire family to end up in Sicily. Daughter Mary (played by Coppola’s own daughter, future director Sofia) is her dad’s loyal sidekick. Her performance was much derided back in the day, but the truth is that it’s a thanklessly unconvincing role. And of course there are lots of thugs, connivers, and assassins-in-waiting. (Watch out if you see a cop or a priest on the streets; he’s probably a killer in disguise.)

 What makes Godfather III worth watching? Coppola is still brilliant at staging public spectacle:  a street fair, a night at the opera, an innocent-seeming place where danger lurks. Palermo and Manhattan both look gorgeous. And the music—that plaintive trumpet theme—lures us into a story that might not be quite worth telling.

 

 

The Cat Came Back: “Harry and Tonto”

Hard to believe that Art Carney, best known for playing Ralph Kramden’s blue-collar buddy on TV’s The Honeymooners,  beat out some of Hollywood’s finest for the Best Actor Oscar of 1975. His competition? Jack Nicholson for Chinatown, Al Pacino for The Godfather, Part II, and such also-rans as Dustin Hoffman (playing Lenny Bruce) and Albert Finney (as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express). Roman Polanski’s Chinatown nabbed eleven Oscar nominations that year, though it won only for Robert Towne’s scintillating screenplay. It had the misfortune of being up against Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather sequel, which won five statuettes, including Best Picture, out of a possible eleven. By contrast, Carney’s Harry and Tonto was nominated only for its original screenplay and for Carney’s performance.

 The win for Carney came as a surprise to many, including my former boss Roger Corman, who was reveling in the fact that so many of his B-movie alumni (including Nicholson, Coppola, and Towne) were nominees that year. He was quoted as joking that Nicholson’s loss had spoiled his personal sweep.  It’s certainly possible that Nicholson and Pacino, both playing intensely dramatic roles, cancelled each other out in the voting. But Carney’s victory also indicates the Academy’s affection for the fifty-plus-year-old veteran, despite the rise of a generation of Young Turks.

 As a film, Harry and Tonto isn’t much. Directed and co-written by Paul Mazursky, it’s one of his typically modest offerings (see also Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman, and Moscow on the Hudson) that take up a timely topic and treat it in a low-key manner. In Harry and Tonto, the subject is the plight of the elderly. Harry, a rather dapper retired schoolteacher whose wife died years before, is being thrown out of his New York apartment because the building is being “improved” into a parking lot. With his ginger cat in tow, he is taken in by a son in the suburbs, but is well aware he's disrupting a family already near its breaking point. The bulk of the film is his odyssey first to Chicago (and a daughter with whom he can’t help sparring) and then to Los Angeles (where his youngest son is overtly needy). There are interesting stops along the way, including a visit to a first love now in the throes of dementia, and he connects while on the road with some colorful characters, like the good-hearted fifteen-year-old runaway played by Melanie Mayron. But basically the film is on Carney’s shoulders. By the end of Harry and Tonto, we know him well: his gruffness, his surprising erudition, his quiet live-and-let-live generosity of spirit, his overriding desire not to be beholden to the younger generation.

 It’s not a long movie, but it IS a slow one, and some critics have complained about its pacing. Personally, I admit to getting restless . . .  but it was worth it to see (pleasant surprise!) Harry finally find happiness on his own terms.  I had dreaded watching a film in which the elderly are made to look both creaky and cute, and I’m happy that Harry is portrayed as very much his own man, still smart, and without a shred of self-pity. Stand-outs in a stellar cast include Ellen Burstyn as Harry’s daughter (she won her own Oscar in 1975 for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and Larry Hagman as his younger son. I particularly liked Chief Dan George, as a philosophical Native American whom Harry meets in jail.

 And then there’s Tonto the cat, who fittingly won the Patsy Award as the year’s best animal actor. 

 

Donnie Brasco: Why I Can’t Fuhgeddaboudit

It’s not 100% correct to say that Donnie Brasco, the 1997 crime thriller I saw last night, haunts my dreams. Still, I woke up this morning realizing that the central strand of the film, which stars Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, had woven its way into my subconscious. I’ve long since come to recognize my basic need to keep writing, no matter what: hence the longevity of this nine-year-old blog. And, especially of late, my dreams have been full of moments in which I’m doing archival research, wrestling with words, and otherwise  making like a writer.

 Donnie Brasco, though, is not about writing at all, except perhaps when we see cryptic messages being tapped out on an old-fashioned typewriter keyboard. Instead, it’s about a murderous Mafia gang, based on the real-life Bonnano crime family that helped to rule New York’s mean streets in the 1970s. Donnie Brasco was real too, sort of. His was the actual nom de guerre of an undercover FBI agent whose mandate was to infiltrate the gang and take it down. As played by Depp, he’s a solemn young fellow who scowls often and has a wicked right hook. He knows the local goombah lingo like a pro, and he seems capable of intense  personal loyalty. All of which helps him to connect with Lefty (Al Pacino), an ageing hitman who’s chafing under the realization that he’ll never be “upped” to a position of power. Lefty takes Donnie, posing as a jewel thief, into his confidence and introduces him to the big boys. Soon Donnie is being pressured on all sides: by the organization, by his FBI bosses, by the suburban wife and kids he keeps carefully hidden. But his personal affection for Lefty and for the thrills of the loud, crude lifestyle that Lefty represents exert a powerful tug.

 So how does this fit into my nocturnal cogitations? Well, in my dream I am (much as I am in real life) a biographer, researching a behind-the-scenes Hollywood personality. I know this guy slightly, and so I hang around, trying to pick up tidbits that will someday be of use. I also take advantage of a passing acquaintance with his ex-wife, all in the service of trying to probe his secrets. Like, for instance, the fact that at a low point in his life he survived by selling genocide insurance (say what?) to elderly Jews fearful of another Holocaust. As a would-be biographer of this man, I am his secret shadow, much as Donnie creates and sustains a deep friendship with Lefty that justifies his covert professional role, but also at times transcends it.

 For the truth of the matter is that Donnie not only likes Lefty; he likes being a Wise Guy. And the Wise Guy persona – pugnacious, brutal, quick on the trigger – is one he comes to adopt more and more in his personal life. So, ultimately, something has to give.

 We’ve all seen our share of Mafia movies: it sometimes seems that every major filmmaker out there tries to put his stamp on the genre. This one, surprisingly, is the work of a British director, Mike Newell, who’s best known for delightful froth like Four Weddings and a Funeral. He’s done nicely here: Donnie Brasco is a darkly elegant piece of work. But the heart of the film is doubtless the interplay between Depp and Pacino. Depp’s usual tightly clenched wariness is effective, but it may be Pacino I’ll remember most fondly. Once he was the up-and-coming junior godfather Michael Corleone; now he’s world-weary and unforgettable. Fuhgeddaboudit!