A somewhat revisionist look at “The Godfather” trilogy

I rewatched the Godfather trilogy in three nights. I think the first is as great as ever. Pacino has as much or more screen time as Brando in the first one, but would not get my vote in a one-on-one contest. For best supporting actor, a one-on-three contest of “Godfather” nominees, I think I’d go for James Caan, but ratify the choice of Joel Grey from “Cabaret” (he was expecting to hear Pacino’s name rather than his).

I think the third is better than its repute, the second not as good. I’d go with Art Carney in “Harry and Tonto” over Pacino, who is mostly frozen through the second part. There were again three best supporting actor nominees (De Niro won, Michael Gazzo and Lee Strassberg were also nominated; John Cazale’s Fredo went unnominated.) Coppola’s younger sister, Talia Shire, who was outstanding across all three movies, was nominated for the middle one (losing to Ingrid Bergman, who did not think she deserved it, though I recall she thought that Valentine Cortese was her choice).

Sofia Coppola was ripped for her performance as Michael’s daughter, Mary. OK, more for the lack of chemistry with Andy Garcia, who played her older and ultra-hirsute (-chested) cousin, Vincent (losing the supporting actor to Joe Pesci). I don’t know why the lack of chemistry adheres to one side. She has had a crush on him, which seems plausible. What is not is that he would reciprocate his cousin’s love (he played the illegitimate son of Sonny). As the daughter Sofia was just fine.

I think the supporting actor nominee should have been Eli Wallach, who pretends to having retired from scheming, but is still very much in the game, though brought down by his sweet tooth (poisoned cannoli). (I’d bump Pacino from “Dick Tracy” rather than Garcia). I didn’t recognize Helmut Berger (he was no longer the beauty Visconti and Losey presented). I recognized George Hamilton, who was less interesting than Robert Duvall, as the crime family lawyer, being given no characterization.

It is necessary to note that Diane Keaton’s Kay (Michael’s girlfriend, then wife) grows more formidable with each installment. Talia Shire gains self-assurance in widowhood, though I don’t know why she becomes Vincent’s advocate. (One could say they lack “chemistry, “too.)

The plot is overly complex, though it is clear that the new pope (John Paul II) is murdered, along with Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) in another montage of murders, this time crosscut with “Cavalleria Rusticana” in which Anthony Vito, (Franc d’Ambrosio), the son of Michael and Kay, and brother of Mary, is making his debut as Turuidu in Bagheria (,Sicily). (There’s also a dollop of “Nabucco” when Anthony gets Bagheria and the Oscar-nominated song “Promise Me You’ll Remember” was voiced by Harry Connick, Jr.)

I remember being impressed by the church/murders montage in the first “Godfather.” It has lost its novelty and some of its impact. For me there is too much crosscutting in all three movies. I don’t see the need for the young Vito flashbacks in Part II, not least in that they are not flashes back to any character. De Niro was very good and won his first Oscar almost entirely in Italian, but to me these scenes are a separate movie and get in the way of the 1950s story. Also the scene at the end following Pearl Harbor in which Michael tells his brothers (including Robert Duvall’s quasi-sibling and Abe Vigoda) that he has joined the navy. I haven’t seen the chronological reshuffling that puts these before the start of Godfather I, but it seems like a good idea. There are plenty of set pieces spread across the three movies, though I also understand that throwing viewers in to a big fête had a strong impact.

Cinematographer Gordon Willis contributed an often sepia look to all three parts, Oscar-nominated and ASC Award-nominated only for the third.

 

©2018, Stephen O. Murray

John Steinbeck’s [Viva] Zapata screenplay

The Zapata Screenplay contains  Nobel Prize-winner John Steinbeck’s (Academy Award-nominated) screenplay for “Viva Zapata!” that in 1952 became a film directed by Elia Kazan with Marlon Brando as Zapata (109 pages), a very discursive (lecturing even) pre-screenplay treatment, “Narrative in Dramatic Form of the Life of Emiliano Zapata” (183 pages), informative and insightful introductions to both documents by Steinbeck Quarterly editor Robert Morsberger (34 pages), film credits, a filmography of adaptations to film of Steinbeck work (22 pages) and a pithy essay by Morsberger on Steinbeck on film (6 pages). I found what Morsberger wrote more interesting than the Steinbeck materials, which is not to say that what Steinbeck wrote about Zapata and his dramatization of Zapata’s career as an agrarian rebel is uninteresting.

Morsberger deploys Albert Camus’s distinction between those who rebel at injustice and “revolutionaries” who use dissatisfactions to bring about their own rule of social engineering in the name of the people and recurrent waves of terror. Camus’s and Steinbeck’s rebel “stands for freedom and is willing to die for it but reluctant to kill for it…. The revolutionary, by contrast, speaks of liberty but establishes terror; in the name of equality and fraternity, he sets up the guillotine or the firing squad. For the sake of an abstract mankind, he finds it expedient to purge the unorthodox individual.” For the anticommunist critic of oligarchy and oppression Steinbeck and for the former communist HUAC “friendly witness” Kazan, the doctrinaire communist was the anti-Christ. Although the Mexican Revolution preceded the Bolshevik seizure of power from the first 1918 Russian Revolution, the character of Fernando (played by Joseph Wiseman) is sinisterly inhuman and bloodthirsty a revolutionary, competing for the soul of the revolution (and direction of the commander of the revolutionary Army of the South, General Emiliano Zapata) with the humane (read liberal anticommunist) Pablo (played by Lou Gilbert). They parallel Mac and Jim in Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle in particular but also the union boss and priest (Lee J. Cobb and Karl Malden) in Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” made two years after “Viva Zapata!”

Both the real Zapata (1879-1919) and the one in Steinbeck and Kazan’s movie are charismatic leaders, not ideologues. Although the vigorously anticommunist Steinbeck was recurrently accused (especially by California agribusiness) of communist leanings, it is clear that what he venerated (consider the dream of George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men, and also of the Okies who fled to California in The Grapes of Wrath) was the small-scale, independent farmer, which is to say the Jeffersonian ideal, which was an echo of the civic virtue of Republican Romans, embodied by Cincinattius taking up arms and returning to his farm as soon as he could (or George Washington refusing to be king). The political theory of “Viva Zapata!” is explicitly stated by Zapata: A strong leader makes a weak people. strong people don’t need a strong leader” (echoing The Moon Is Down). Or as Zapata’s (later: 1969) biographer, John Womack, put it, Zapata “did not want power. He wanted an end to harassment from outside, and local peace” (with land seized by hacienda owners returned to the peasants.”

The drama of the clash between the humane Pablo and the inhumane Fernando was close to the hearts of Steinbeck and Kazan, but was one of the ways of making the film dramatic (another was the contrast between the single-minded Emiliano and his undisciplined and self-aggrandizing older brother Eufemio (played by Anthony Quinn). In the pre-screenplay treatment Steinbeck addressed the problem for someone trying to write a drama rather than a hagiography: “Character on stage is usually a balance of weaknesses and strengths but this man [Emiliano Zapata] had practically no weaknesses. Therefore, he has practically no character dramatically. For drama is a resolution within one’s self during the play. The resolution in Zapata seems to have been born in him. That is the way it really was, and if I make it anything else, I will be lying about him. Even the people who hated him agree that he was devoted, incorruptible, and fearless always. There was no internal struggle in the man…. Compared to him, Eufemio, with his weaknesses, his violence, his drunkenness and lechery, becomes rather dear.”

In the screen treatment, Emiliano dealing with Eufemio’s excesses is far more central than in the screenplay (though Anthony Quinn managed to make the character vivid enough in the reduced number of scenes allotted him to garner an Oscar in the role). Eufemio is the head of the family and the deference due him complicates his being subordinate to his younger general within the revolutionary army.

Kazan cut the scenes of the enlightened—or pragmatic—hacienda owner trying to convince his peers to moderate their usurpation of land rather than risk losing everything, and a scene of Zapata’s grubby father-in-law complaining to his daughter that Zapata was not paying attention to enriching himself (like a good cacique, this also puzzled Madero when Zapata refused a ranch for his service to the revolution.

Kazan also extended the entirely fictitious dramatization of wanting to learn to read. Contrary to historical fact, Steinbeck turned Zapata into an illiterate and made this a major component of Zapata’s unease in dealing with politicians in the capital (both the old dictator Diaz and the reformist Madero, the Kerensky of the Mexican Revolution). Kazan turned Zapata into a monogamous husband (Steinbeck having already made Josefa more important than she seems to have been to Zapata). Steinbeck is responsible for making starting to learn to read the climax of the wedding night, and Kazan piled more onto this, but Steinbeck included other amours.

In addition to a capsule history of Mexico at the start of the treatment, Steinbeck began with scenes of childhood of Emiliano and Eufemio and early consciousness of their father’s land being taken away. Having just seen the 1934 movie “Viva Villa!” I wonder if that had some part in Steinbeck’s schema. Even more than “Viva Villa!”, “Viva Zapata!” ignores the later parts of the Mexican Revolution. Both show the defeat of the Diaz ancien regime, Madero’s vacillations about acting against his class and the general (Huerta) who will seize power and have Madero assassinated. Both films show taking up arms again, this time against Huerta. (Neither film shows the US ambassador’s supporting Huerta’s coup and the murder while in custody of Madero.)

“Viva Zapata!” misrepresents the attempt to disarm Zapata’s followers and kill those close to him as entirely Huerta’s doings, whitewashing Madero’s role (early) and the role of the final victors (who became the ruling Institutionalized Party of the Revolution for the next 90 years) who had Zapata eliminated (though the successful plot is shown accurately, involving a disgraced colonel pretending to defect, proving himself, and then luring Zapata to his death).

To learn about Zapata and his role in the Mexican revolution, one should read John Womack’s biography (first published in 1969). Morsberger shows how the characters Steinbeck imagined (based on considerable familiarity with Mexico and interviewing a number of those who had known Zapata in 1948-50) fits in Steinbeck’s oeuvre and how the screen treatment and screenplay dramatizes some recurrent Steinbeck themes such as the nature of leadership (specifically leadership of oppressed farmers who have lost their land), the willingness of those like Fernando to sacrifice the lives of others to advance their agendas (though Fernando was right that toppling Diaz was not enough to recover the peasants’ land), the ultimately self-defeating greed of agricultural capitalists, the corruption that can tempt reformers once they gain a modicum of power, the brutality of people carried away by mass violence, and the mythologizing of slain idealists. Despite an overlay of conventional romance, considerable telescoping/simplification of history and some mythologizing (especially the white horse escaping at the end), “Viva Zapata!” is a dramatization of political ideas, and the commentary of Robert Morsberger brings these out as well as providing considerable information on the genesis of the film project.

(Steinbeck in 1962, public domain photo from the Nobel Foundation)

 

This was part of a writeoff on epinions that I hosted for Steinbeck’s centenary.

©2002, 2017, Stephen O. Murray

 

“Apocalypse Now Redux” on Blu-ray

Four years after the helicopters left the US Embassy in Saigon, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” dazzled audiences (including me) with its operatic portrayal of madness in the jungle, particularly that of two alumni of Coppola’s “The Godfather,” the top-billed Marlon Brando and second-billed Robert Duvall. The protagonist and narrator of the account of a difficult patrol boat upriver (the Nung, an fictitious river, not the Mekong) is US Army Captain Benjamin Willard, played by a 36-year-old Martin Sheen (who looked younger).

At the start, he has returned from leave “at home” and is waiting for a mission in Saigon, where he seems to have gone pretty far into crazy. He is assigned a mission by a three-star (lieutenant) general (G.D. Spradlin) and a bespectacled plainsclothes colonel played by Harrison Ford (whom Coppola had earlier cast in “The Conversation”), to “terminate the command [pause] with extreme prejudice” of a highly decorated once rising star in the army, Co. Kurtz, who opted to join Special Forces, took command of a sector on the Vietnam/Cambodia border and did his own terminating with extreme prejudice (i.e., executing as double agents) four South Vietnamese officials, including two colonels. The US (and South Vietnamese) Army wants to try him for murder, but because he has become the leader of a murderous cult that mixes those he commanded from the US Army and Montagnards (Hmong) across the border in Cambodia, there is no chance of arresting him. Hence the “extreme prejudice.” Capt. Willard is being sent to assassinate Kurtz.

Getting to Kurtz’s fiefdom is a challenge, with the enemy (“Charlie”) controlling much of the river. Another pretty insane (Lt.) Col., Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall in a role that won him a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, as well as an Oscar nomination) airlifts the patrol boat to the mouth of the river. (Couldn’t it go by sea?) Willard is a surfing fanatic and one of Willard’s (Navy) crew is a legendary southern California surfer, Lance B. Johnson (Sam Bottoms). The air cavalry (helicopters) strafes and bombs the village at the mouth of the river, and then calls in napalm of the jungle behind it, all to “The Ride of the Valkyrie” broadcast from Col.Kilgore’s chopper. The napalm ruins the surf configuration, and Willard takes off (with Kilgore’s prized surfboard).

There are more set pieces upriver, including a a tiger attack, a USO show with three Playboy models, a sampan that the PT boat commander, Chief Phillips (Albert Hall) insists on boarding and having searched, and two US outposts in neither of which Willard can find a commanding officer. One of these sites has the Playboy bunnies (in an extended scene not in the 1979 release, but added to the 2001 “Redux” version). The “Redux” version also has a scene of being fed and sheltered by a French clan still in place (still running a place), headed by Christian Marquand. It includes a nude scene of Aurore Clement, a widow and mosquito netting that could not possibly keep out mosquitoes. This sequences accounts for about half of the 49 minutes of greater running time in the 2001 “Redux” version. IMHO it stalls the movie and was wisely removed for the 1979 theatrical release. Screenwriter John Milius welcomed the cut. (The Blu-Ray of “Apocalypse Now, Redux” has a conversation of nearly an hour between Milius and Coppola. Milius relates that he twisted “Nirvana Now” into “Apocalypse Now” in adapting Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War.)

The images and sound of the 2001 version (allegedly edited from scratch, which is to say the two million feet of footage Coppola shot in the Philippines) are so great that I can’t recommend watching the original (1979) version, but I do recommend fast-forwarding through the French plantation interlude.

What has been a road movie turns into a horror film when the boat arrives at Krtuz’s base with the bloated Brando imprisoning Willard but then consenting to be killed by him, with the feverish blabbering of Dennis Hopper as a hero-worshipping photojournalist enhancing the madness. I think the Redux version has a bit more of Brando, but all the character development occurred as Willard read the dossier while traveling up river. I find Brando’s Kurtz more ridiculous than menacing, his hold over his followers mysterious (since I don’t recognize any charisma in Brando’s Kurtz), and the whole mission preposterous. More than Willard does, I bonded with the crew (billed as “Larrry,” Laurence Fishburne was 14-15 when “Apocalypse was being filmed; Frederic Forrest (who had been in “The Conversation”, Sam Bottoms (who was 22), Albert Hall (as the commander of the boat) and even Willard, despite his finishing off a wounded woman in order to get going again en route.

The sound (Oscar-winning), editing, and cinematography (for which Vittorio Storaro [The Conformist, Reds, The Last Emperor, Coppola’s Tucker and One from the Heart] won his first well-deserved Oscar) were outstanding, though I think the 1979 cutting of the plantation scene was totally right, and think the opening scene of a line of palms that are napalmed set to the Doors’ “The End” is very self-indulgent. “Apocalypse Now” may be a great movie (sometimes I think so, other times I don’t), but it is not a good one for all the great work by cast and crew. The Blu-Ray, which includes both versions on one disc and many bonus features on another, is superbly and generously crafted.

The madness concocted for the movie involves baroque overkill. And, as with almost all American films set in the Vietnam War, the focus is exclusively on the American characters. There are no Vietnamese characters, and only a few lines spoken by a man on the sampan that the PT-boat stops and searches and some taunting from megaphones at the bridge the Vietcong/North Vietnamese blow up every night). There is no indication of anyone (like, say, the South Vietnamese amry) other than Americans fighting the Vietnamese. Vietnamese exist in the movie only to silently menace the Americans or to be killed by Americans.

©2017, Stephen O. Murray

 

Also see Brian DePalma’s Casualties of War.