Posted on 09/24/2008 9:39:24 AM PDT by Borges
The “Godfather” films remain the 20th-century answer to Shakespeare’s plays of royal succession, with the twist that here Prince Hal grows up, not into Henry V, but Richard III.
Watching the first film, you are struck again by how little screen time Marlon Brando actually occupies. Most of his work is done in the 20-minute opening sequence, as the Godfather sits in his study, receiving supplicants on the day of his daughter’s wedding. This is a piece of superbly efficient expository writing, setting out an exotic milieu, describing its rules and moral configuration, and establishing the larger-than-life figure who presides over and protects it.
Like another venerated American epic, “Gone With the Wind,” the first “Godfather” film is essentially a study in vanishing feudalism: the old, aristocratic masters who made their empires out of sweat and blood are fading into the background, to be replaced by the middle-class, mercantile interests represented in “Gone With the Wind” by the blockade runner Rhett Butler and in the first “Godfather” by the drug-dealing upstart Sollozzo.
Part II takes place in a more modern world, where capitalism is king, and it is difficult to tell where gangsterism leaves off, and normal business procedures begin. The action shifts to a global scale, as the Corleones conquer Nevada and, very nearly, Cuba — and Mr. Coppola rises to the occasion with a sense of physical scale and epic conflict that no amount of computer-generated-imagery enhancement has yet been able to reproduce.
At the center of it all, of course, remains the family drama. In an increasingly rootless country American audiences envied the Corleones for their powerful sense of ethnic and family identity, the privilege of belonging to an extended, self-reliant and self-protecting group.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Of course, without the guns, Sonny would’ve left Tony a little oil spot on the ground. ;-)
I couldn’t buy Sophia Coppola as a love object in part III.
A good old fashioned beat down!
Goodfellas is certainly the most imitated film of the last 20 years.
You tink I’m funny? Why do you tink I’m funny? Funny how? How’m I funny?
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