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. 

 

T is for Talia Shire, Who Dated Roger ‘Way Back When

Back when the world was young (okay, it was 1968) a young actress named Talia Coppola played the “1^st girlfriend” in The Wild Racers, a low-budget race car drama directed by Roger Corman’s veteran art director, Daniel Haller. The film starred familiar B-movie names -- Fabian, Mimsy Farmer, Dick Miller – and its plot, as well as its title, sounded a lot like The Young Racers. When Roger Corman had directed and produced that earlier Grand Prix flick in Europe in 1963, his assistant Francis Ford Coppola had gone along as a very novice sound man. Talia of course is Francis’s little sister, and in 1972 her role as The Godfather’s Connie Corleone Rizzi would make her a bankable Hollywood star. But in 1968 she, like brother Francis, was just getting started.

In 1969, three years before The Godfather, Talia was directed by Roger Corman himself in the film that acrimoniously ended his long relationship with American International Pictures. It was an oddity called Gas-s-s-s! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It, and it reflected Roger’s countercultural impulses in that turbulent era. The premise of Gas-s-s-s! is that a mysterious air-borne poison has killed off everyone in the United States over the age of twenty-five. Corman’s youthful characters form into family units and begin a strange odyssey through the American Southwest. Though the cast included, along with Talia, such rising stars as Ben Vereen, Cindy Williams, and Bud Cort, no one’s career was much advanced by this box office flop.

Around the time she was appearing in Gas-s-s-s!, Talia worked behind the scenes in other Corman films, and dated Roger briefly. She was one of many bright young women over the years who have benefitted from on-the-job training in a Corman company. As she told People magazine in 1980, Roger’s assistants typically begin by answering the telephone, and two weeks later progress to reading scripts and scouting for locations: “It beats hell out of going to the Yale School of Drama.”

Though I’m sure Talia did well in the role of what Roger has always liked to call his “ace assistant,” her success in the Godfather films, and as Adrian in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky franchise, ensured that she would have no further need to sit behind a desk in a Corman office. Ironically, it was in a Corman office that I met her. Circa 1994, she’d approached  Roger with a screenplay for an erotic thriller called One Night Stand. Her plan was to make this her directing debut, and so we spent many hours beefing up the script. Alida Camp, the film’s producer, later told me that Roger had always thought highly of Shire. For that reason, said Camp, “he was willing to let her have a lot of freedom. And he put more money into her movie also. Well, it ended up being more money than he wanted to put in.” The upshot was that Roger abruptly slashed several hundred thousand dollars from the budget, but Shire refused to believe he was serious. She ended up owing him money, and the once-cordial relationship soured.

Sadly, during the script development phase of One Night Stand, Talia’s husband Jack Schwartzman passed away, following a long illness. The couple had two sons together, and both of them have followed their mother into the acting profession. Jason Schwartzman, a favorite of Wes Anderson, has enlivened everything from Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom. So the Coppola dynasty continues.