THE MOVIES

All around me at The Godfather, Part II, people kept saying they liked it less than the first Godfather movie. The local newspaper reviewers, too, found Part II “uninvolving” and even “boring.” Since I find myself passionately disagreeing with both, I am tempted to proclaim, in the best pontifical-reviewer style I can conjure, that Godfather II is not only superior to the first film, but a masterpiece, or the Best Film of 1974, or something equally extravagant and meaningless.

But knowing all of this eventually will be printed -the extravagant critic’s most constant and brutal discipline-all I’m going to say is that I think Godfather II is not only anything but “boring” and “uninvolving,” but represents, in many ways, an engrossing examination of our notions of crime, violence and morality.

First off, comparisons of the two films are beside the point; their director, Francis Ford Coppola, has conceived them as essentially one film. I can’t imagine seeing Part II without having seen the first film, and I suspect the tepid response of some of the audience and the critics stems from the difficulty of holding on to memories of the first Godfather movie. For Part II is both prologue and epilogue to that film; it intercuts with fascinating complexity two stories: that of young Vito Corleone’s flight from Sicily, arrival in America, and rise to godfatherhood in New York’s Little Italy, and that of his son Michael’s power struggles 50 years later. If I prefer Part II, it is because it clarifies some of the implications of the first film, which could be viewed sim-plistically as the story of a big happy family who just happened to be gangsters-a kind of Sicilian-American Forsyte Saga.

In the last analysis, both Godfather films may be nothing more than gangster movies, but they are made with an ironic awareness that the mythology of the gangster is an important one in the American experience. Gangster movies usually summon forth our admiration for their heroes as rebels against conventional values; but the movies always end by affirming those values. Thus, the rebel and the conservative in each of us receives respective gratifications. But in some recent ironic treatments of the gangster myth, such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde or Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us,society’s retribution takes the form of an overkill which tends to make us question the values we normally hold. Coppola’s irony is subtler. Since the gangster movie is a special variation on the American myth of success through individual initiative, Coppola makes his gangsters succeed, but at enormous personal cost.



Part II is a revenger’s tragedy whose hero, Michael, we last see in a lingering closeup as a lonely, brooding, trapped man, an image made more poignant by a final flashback to his days as the idealistic, college-educated member of the Corleone family. Al Pacino’s performance as Michael is a triumph; he creates a grim figure of monstrously controlled power, but also elicits our sympathy by suggesting Michael’s vulnerability. Pacino’s most impressive moment comes when Michael’s wife, Kay, tells him she is leaving him. Coppola’s attention to visual detail heightens the scene’s tension. He poses Pacino in front of a bright lamp, so that every time the camera cuts from Kay to Michael, we wince at the glare -a correlative for Pancino’s intensity. We know throughout the confrontation that Michael is capable of enormous violence, and we watch with fascination as it wells up from the depths, works over Pacino’s face and body, and finally flashes forth.



Robert DeNiro’s fine performance as young Vito is somewhat eclipsed by the brilliance of Pacino’s performance, and DeNiro has the added difficulty of playing a young man who grows up to be Marlon Brando. But DeNiro establishes Vito as a romantic hero, an attractive young Robin Hood of the streets. Coppola and DeNiro make us suspend conventional moral judgment and watch with approval as Vito stalks and kills a petty racketeer who is bleeding the small merchants of Little Italy. But Coppola also introduces a hint of overkill (Vito sticks the gun into the mouth of the corpse and pulls the trigger) to make us realize how brutalizing the revenge code is. In the end, the code leads Vito back to Sicily to assassinate the Don who has murdered Vito’s mother, father, and brother. At the same point in the film, Michael grotesquely parodies this revenge, by striking out through his agents at a collection of worn-out and ineffectual enemies, indicating the depth of Michael’s corruption by the revenge ethic.

Coppola tries to make his film a parable of power, with episodes which take place in pre-Castro Havana and in Washington during the Kefauver committee hearings. In these episodes he allows himself some heavy-handed satire, such as the speech in praise of Italian-Americans delivered by the dim-witted senator whom Michael’s forces have blackmailed into submission. Similarly, the scenes of Mafiosi and corporation executives admiring a solid gold telephone which has been presented to the dictator of Cuba by “United Telephone and Telegraph,” or carving up a birthday cake decorated with a map of Cuba, are political cartoons which jar somewhat with the film’s scrupulously realistic recreations of time and place.



Coppola knows how to evoke recent political and social history by calling forth our television-created conceptions of it. The film’s climactic assassination of Hyman Roth is a chilling visual parody of the way television cameras saw Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Similarly, the film’s Senate hearings recreate our images of the Kefauver committee, as well as more recent Senate hearings: As Michael is being examined by the committee, Kay sits behind her husband with the glazed, vaguely distant look of a Maureen Dean. For a moment we can almost see Michael as one of that array of “dedicated public servants” caught in the snares of Watergate. Coppola’s point is that the Corleone Family has degenerated into a corporation, and that the Sicilian revenge code has become a vicious form of corporate morality, especially vicious because Michael can disavow all personal responsibility for his corporation’s misdeeds.



Coppola reportedly hoped that the ending of Godfather II would leave the audience in tears. It doesn’t, for Pacino’s Michael is too austere, perhaps too tragic a figure to evoke so simple an emotional response. The film’s most affecting moment is the death of Fredo, a sequence of marvelous restraint in which, for. once, Coppola doesn’t bathe us in blood. We leave the theater haunted by the film’s images and by the performances of its magnificent ensemble of actors, especially Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen, John Cazale’s Fredo, Lee Strasberg’s Hyman Roth, and Michael V. Gazzo’s Frankie Pentangeli. Only Diane Keaton’s jittery, spacedout performance as Kay strikes a discordant note.

The Godfather films tell us little important about the Mafia; indeed, if we believe the films, the chief business of the members of the Mafia is killing one another off. But these are not mere crime-and-violence exploitation movies like some recent Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronsonvehicles. The Godfather films offer ussome new insights into our myths ofpower and violence. At the very least,they should send us back to the classic gangster films, to Little Caesarand White Heat and High Sierra, witha sharper awareness of what we arebeing led to believe and feel.

D-Rated Movies

David Brudnoy



Amarcord: Fellini’s magnificent reminiscence of his 1930s boyhood: lusty, loving, wry, a tender ramble through the four seasons and the many conditions of humankind; no sloppy sentimentality, no holds barred, and lacking the excesses of his most recent film before this, “Roma.” A joy throughout: magical mystery tour of the selective memory.

Andy Warhol’s Dracula: Same cast, by and large, as “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,” minus the 3-D, minus also any but the most fleeting humor. Here the shtick is that poor count D is dying for want of “wirgin” blood, but every lass he nibbles on turns out to have lost her wirginity. Marx-spouting servant Joe Dallesandro saves the one remaining wirgin from Dracula’s bite. Dracula goes to join his ancestors in the Happy Biting Ground in the Sky -in pieces, yet, hacked up by Dallesandro.

Earthquake: Number 38 of the current crop of disaster flicks, full of outrageous special effects and a cast of zillions, plus an added delight: the destruction of Los Angeles. Serves ’em right, too. The acting’s as heavy as the falling buildings, but the buildings falling are the real stars.

The Godfather, Part II: Surpasses the original by a mile, with Al Pacino as the young Don, and Robert De Niro in flashback as the original godfather (the Brando role in the first movie). Over three hours long, but worth every minute; probably the best examination of syndicate crime in the contemporary movies.

Lenny: Dustin Hoffman as the liberals’ scourge, Lenny Bruce, here transmogrified into a liberal saint. Somewhere deep inside there’s an important message: don’t stifle your eccentrics; let em be. But the film buries Lenny under the weight of its own reverence, showing us only a bit of the Lenny who skewered every convention, who made fun of everybody and everything, who rewrote the book on bad taste. Hoffman is superb, as is Valerie Perrine as his wife.

Murder on the Orient Express: The superlative Agatha Christie thriller now magnificently filmed, starring everybody: Lauren Bacall; Richard Widmark; Anthony Perkins; Wendy Hiller; Ingrid Bergman (as a Norwegian religious fanatic!); Albert Finney as the irrepressible Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot; Martin Balsam; Jacqueline Bisset; Sean Con-nery; Michael York; Vanessa Redgrave; and on and on. The victim dies of multiple stab wounds, but his train compartment is locked from within! Whodunnit? You’ll never guess, never.

The Phantom of the Paradise: A devastating reworking of the Faust story with elements of “Dorian Grey” and the “Phantom of the Opera” horror story rolled into one, attempting a dissection of the squalidness of the rock ’n roll industry.

Scenes from a Marriage: Ingmar Bergman’s investigation of a modern alliance gone quite sour, distilled from a lengthy six-part TV series into an awesomely jarring movie starring Liv Ullmann.

The Towering Inferno: When the tallest building on earth catches fire, all your favorite stars are caught within. Heroism, knavery, courage, fear, love, lust, hate, pretty clothes, and simply smashing special effects. Fred Astaire, Robert Wagner, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Faye Dunnaway, and everybody who’s anybody.

A Woman Under the Influence: The finest American film of 1974, John Cassavetes’ unnerving, devastating look at a wife distraut beyond repair. With Peter Falk (“Columbo”) and Gena Rowlands.

Young Frankenstein: Mel Brooks’ latest mad comedy, starring Gene Wilder as the Frankenstein’s grandson (“I pronounce it Fronkensteen; my grandfather was doodoo!”). The ultimate send-off of the enduring old classic, with enough In jokes to keep the film history buff happy, and enough broad humor for everyone. Marty Feldman as good servant Igor (pronounced Eye-gore), with a movable hump; Cloris Leachman as the mad Frau Blucher; Madeline Kahn as Frankenstein’s girl friend; Peter Boyle as the monster, who just wants a little lovin’.