The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  The issue of Vito was still unsettled. A casting list existed, crazy with speculation: George C. Scott was sensible; John Huston was intriguing; but Paul Scofield, Victor Mature, and Laurence Olivier? You have to realize how lucky you have been.

  When Coppola insisted on Brando, Paramount turned ugly: they would only take him if he signed a bond guaranteeing no delays, if he agreed to a per diem salary, and if he did a screen test. Those obstacles were meant to provoke anger and refusal. You can understand how Brando had become so “difficult” over the years, and you may appreciate his generosity here. He consented to the screen test. Francis flew down from his home in San Francisco. He hired Hiro Narita as cameraman. And they arrived at Brando’s mansion on Mulholland Drive.

  The actor put black boot polish in his blond hair. He stuffed a few tissues in his mouth to change the shape of his face. He experimented with a husky voice and a thin mustache. This took half an hour and then they shot some footage on video. When Charles Bluhdorn, the head of Paramount, looked at the test he didn’t know who it was, but he said, “Hire him!” So the deal went down whereby Marlon Brando played Vito Corleone for $50,000, with $10,000 a week as expenses and a profit percentage on a rising scale from 1 to 5. Then, when he saw the cut of the film and reckoned it would flop, Brando went to Robert Evans and traded back his points for $100,000. No one ever knows, not even the geniuses.

  They shot the film, despite early hints that Coppola might be fired. The cameraman was Gordon Willis and the production designer was Dean Tavoularis. Willis was an East Coast cameraman, masterly but testy. He had just shot Klute for Alan Pakula, a study in colored gloom. Coppola encouraged a similar look for The Godfather, on the principle that Italian interiors were usually brown and black. Still, the two men argued a lot as Tavoularis (he had been on Bonnie and Clyde) delivered sets of such warmth, texture, and shadowy intimacy that we feel at home. But The Godfather was never bright or energetic—and those attributes usually attended big American pictures. It was still the industry’s idea that the audience deserved and expected a lot of light—for therapy or sizzle. You can say The Godfather feels authentically Italian and of the 1940s—Coppola had insisted on doing it in period—but the subdued look is more profoundly emotional. It is a darkness, not too far from wickedness, maybe, yet just as close to comfort, security, and home.

  They shot most of it in New York and Sicily, and the costs climbed. When Coppola had trouble with the final conversation between Michael and his father, he asked an old friend, Robert Towne, to come to the location and provide some rewrites. In the end, a film always gets shot, even if everyone there thinks it’s a disaster and they can’t wait to go home.

  It was filmed in the summer of 1971, with Paramount pledging itself to a December opening. But as the editing set in, at the offices of Francis’s American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, the picture seemed closer to three hours than two, and not ready until 1972. There were bitter arguments, most of them lied about later in the glow of success. Two editors were at work, William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, with another longtime Coppola friend, Walter Murch, as postproduction consultant. The length of the movie edged back and forth between two hours fifteen minutes and nearly three hours. With the final cost at $6.2 million, it became clear that a Christmas opening was impossible.

  There had to be a score, too, and Coppola upset Paramount when he proposed Nino Rota, who had done La Dolce Vita (1960) and The Leopard (1963). Al Ruddy admitted he had never heard of Rota. The studio had had Henry Mancini lined up. But today, Rota’s elegaic score is not simply as familiar as the Tara theme from Gone With the Wind. It is another keystone to the emotion of the picture that gives access to a level of feeling not heard in Mancini’s music (including the syrup of “Moon River” for Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Of course, Coppola’s father, the dad encountered at Burbank airport, had once played the flute in Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra, and he wrote extra music for the picture.

  In the end, Paramount respected the work: they let it play without an intermission, when most theaters wanted that to make their money on refreshments. The film opened in New York on March 14, 1972, and the audience was appreciative, without standing to applaud. Many were taken aback by the violence and the endorsement of this Mafia family. There were some who wrote it off: William F. Buckley said, “it will be as quickly forgotten as it deserves to be.” Arthur Schlesinger found it “overblown, pretentious, slow and tedious.” But in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin thought it the fastest three hours in movie history. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.” Pauline Kael remarked on “the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’s used to have.”

  Those instincts about popular appeal proved prescient. For the biggest American shows, movie or otherwise, the reviews rarely matter. Paramount had planned to charge $3.50 for a ticket (more than twice the going rate). But they put it up to $4.00 when they felt the interest in the picture. In its first week, the movie grossed over $7 million. By April 12, it was at $26 million. The eventual gross would exceed $130 million; the rental income to the studio was over $80 million. For a few years, The Godfather could claim to be the biggest box office winner in history—it took over from The Sound of Music (1965) and would yield to Jaws (1975).

  Theaters were packed and audiences thrilled in ways that reclaimed the past, especially the mid-1940s, when most of the action takes place. Once again, a three-hour film felt normal, if it worked. The whole value of young filmmakers out of film school seemed like wisdom. If there was a silver age, then The Godfather is its crown. So many people were vindicated (if their furious disagreements could be forgotten): Puzo, Robert Evans, Al Ruddy, and Coppola. An ensemble of actors passed into steady careers, and Marlon Brando was back to his old glory for a moment. The gangster film was made respectable, though soon people who knew enough about the Mafia said it was pipe dream. Martin Scorsese delivered Goodfellas (1990) to show what the real thing was like, and David Chase’s TV saga The Sopranos would be slice upon ugly slice, the cold cuts of a dysfunctional family. The Corleones are not dysfunctional. Try heroic.

  There’s the dream we have always cherished. Willis and Tavoularis had made it plausible. The cast had poured their truth over the screen. Who could dispute the toughness of it all? Still, it was a superb, arranged show, from the moment when a humbled supplicant seeks the Don’s grace to the calculated affront to conventional morality that links drastic business slaughter and religious ritual. Coppola had said at the outset, and would reiterate, that it was a study of American capitalism, of crime getting so organized and so American it no longer seemed like crime.

  The film is as dark as Michael’s having Fredo killed in Part II. But we do love these sinister people. On-screen, it became clear Michael was its center, and his dramatic arc is one we have followed so often: the ordinary, decent guy who gets into the light or the limelight and rises to its opportunity. Michael’s hitherto secret dream of himself becomes ours.

  Audiences had often gone with gangsters before. But Cagney’s outlaws paid with their lives, in payment for our fun. Michael is revealed as lethal, cold, a liar to his wife, a man who hires killers and arranges massacres, but he is not repudiated. His authority works on us as much as on his henchmen. Once, he was the white hope of the family—he went to Dartmouth and served with honor in the war. But honor never convinced him. Something else was weighing. “That’s my family, Kay,” he says. “It’s not me.” But in the film, we realize that becoming his wife does not qualify Kay as family. Michael may be more impressed by his Sicilian bride, Apollonia. He has sex with her, not with Kay (just heirs). Yet he doesn’t seem to mourn Apollonia when she is murdered, because death and vengeance have become his trade. It is his code to let business bury personal things. He might kill anyone—he says as much in Part II. Forty years ago, nearly, those messages slipped by. But now the
y seem like a premonition of America.

  There are matchless moments. Outside the hospital, trying to guard his wounded father, Michael notices that his hand does not tremble in the crisis. At the family gathering to discuss a response to the attack on Vito, the camera slowly identifies the seated Michael as the new leader. These scenes lead up to the restaurant confrontation where he takes the gun planted in the lavatory and kills Sollozzo and McCluskey (Sterling Hayden again). It is his coming-of-age with courage we participate in. That scene is characteristic of the film’s epic pitch: the gunfire, the music, and the noise of the subway are so orchestrated (by an uncredited Walter Murch) that the room becomes a far-fetched place—can you imagine a working restaurant where every subway train is so loud?—but where the cinematic opera is vibrant and triumphant.

  It is a film about a force taking over the family, with Michael surpassing Sonny, and that’s where it is autobiographical. In childhood, Francis Coppola felt outclassed by his older brother, August, widely perceived as smarter, more creative, and more handsome. Artists need to tell their own story, and The Godfather contains the seething emotional drives of an overlooked son coming through.

  That leaves less room for a critique of American capitalism. In life, by 1972, government attacks on the real Mafia were finding success. It was also the year of Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks reelection. Yet this movie offers the Corleone family as a place where we might belong and it presents a model leader bleaker than Nixon, yet more effective, too. The film is deeply conservative in its inner being: for it says to us all, come inside, join the family, be a part of something large and strong. It says to the huddled mass, fly to this bright light, rest in its amber gloom, and savor the meatball sauce and the companionship. This is not an attack on Coppola or ourselves, the people who have loved the picture for forty years, but The Godfather is a patriarchal encouragement about a haven and a stronghold that Clerici from The Conformist might treasure. The outstanding modern American film says to the huddled mass, join us, we’ll lead you on.

  What happened? First The Godfather won Best Picture and Brando was awarded (and declined) Best Actor. In the Supporting Actor category, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Al Pacino all lost to Joel Grey in Cabaret—Pacino was still misread as a support. Grey was memorable and very clever—plus lucky. Bob Fosse won as director for Cabaret, which now looks like a fevered Nazi nightclub, dominated by Grey and Liza Minnelli but abandoned by everyone else. Puzo and Coppola won for their script. Gordon Willis and Dean Tavoularis were not nominated. The Oscar for Best Score went not to Nino Rota but to Charlie Chaplin, for the belated appearance of Limelight. (It was claimed that Rota had used some of his music before, in another film; Chaplin used most of his on every picture.)

  There was a sequel, The Godfather: Part II, which opened in 1974. (Don’t forget that Coppola squeezed The Conversation in between the two parts!) The second part was a business decision for the studio, of course, though it did less well ($57 million gross on a budget of $13 million—the cost doubled, the revenue halved). But it was a sign that Coppola wished to expand and reappraise the first film. (His fee went up, too, to $1 million, plus 13 percent of Paramount’s rentals.) As Kael saw it, Coppola had inherited “the traditions of the novel, the theatre, and—especially—opera and movies.”

  Part II won Best Picture. Coppola at last won as director. Dean Tavoularis got an Oscar, Nino Rota (and Carmine Coppola) won for the music, and Gordon Willis was once again not nominated. (The Towering Inferno took the cinematography Oscar.)

  The sequel has more dramatic intelligence, yet it is not as shapely or gripping a film as the first. It has many new virtues or discoveries: De Niro conjuring a youth for Vito based on Brando’s bearing (he won for Best Supporting Actor); Mulberry Street in New York at the turn of the century—Tavoularis’s triumph; much more of Fredo, which builds to tragedy in John Cazale’s drained pathos; the starched quiet of Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth (he was nominated); the Havana scenes; the re-creation of Lake Tahoe in the 1950s; a Washington hearing; Michael’s frozen stare as evil consumes him, like plastic surgery; and the continuing minimization of all the women in the story. If the two parts of The Godfather have a debilitating weakness, it is that Kay is not allowed to stand up against wickedness. In the drama, it is agonizing when Fredo is disposed of. But if Michael killed Kay as she sought to speak out against him, that would be an outrage; and if the film was ever going to be a proper critique of America, it required outrage.

  In the era of America’s silver age, there was a ferment of movie ambition in other parts of the world, especially Europe, so that it is often hard to determine where the real silver was being mined. Just as Bonnie and Clyde had begun life as a “French” movie, so many non-American directors were looking at America and bringing fresh visions; and many pictures made in Europe were given courage and creative excitement by the thought of finding a revenue-bearing audience in America. More than ever before, there was a natural feeling of internationalism and the exchange of ideas. It’s hard to say now whether “national cinema” exists still, except in countries isolated by language or political inclination.

  In the year of Bonnie and Clyde, 1967, a young Englishman, John Boorman, came to America, found an unexpected ally in the actor Lee Marvin, and made Point Blank, a dream of film noir, about a criminal outsider’s wish to reclaim a mythic $93,000 that the Syndicate owes him. It was shot with immense dynamism and violence in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and you felt the English eye eager for those hallowed locations. It looked more alive or ambitious than so many American films. But what was unique in Point Blank was its inner mystery: that Marvin’s character, Walker—or was it sleepwalker?—might be dead the whole time and just dreaming the stages of revenge. It was as if a film theorist had taken up a familiar noir story and redone it to address the rapture of fantasy we require in a movie.

  But the film depends on an unexpected rapport between a young English director and a famously difficult rogue actor. Walker is a burnt-out case, a dangerous ghost, and Boorman discovered in Marvin the kind of grief that often exists in stardom. So many great actors believe they have lost themselves. As Boorman put it:

  The young Marvin, wounded and wounding, brave and fearful, was always with him. The guilt at surviving the ambush that wiped out his platoon [in the war] hung to him all his days. He was fascinated by war and violence, yet the revulsion he felt for it was intense, physical and unendurable.

  His power derived from this. He should have died, had died, in combat. He held life, particularly his own life, in contempt. Yet he was in possession of a great force that demanded expression. So Point Blank starts with a man shot. Lee knew how to play a man back from the dead. Superficially seeking revenge, but more profoundly trying to reconnect with life.

  In the next few years, Boorman went to the South Seas with Marvin and the Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune, as marooned wartime soldiers in Hell in the Pacific (1968), and then he did Deliverance (1972), from a James Dickey novel about city guys who go canoeing, get lost in the Georgia mountains, and face an epic ordeal of rape, murder, and panic-stricken survival. What was most striking about Point Blank and Deliverance was how someone raised in South London seemed to have such a grasp of America—was that from personal experience of the country, or because every filmgoer anywhere in the world had had the chance to absorb the American imagination, and found the country itself trapped in its own imagery? It was one of the new German directors, Wim Wenders, who observed that America had colonized the world’s imagination. Surely no American could have caught the desolation of American lives as well as Wenders did in Paris, Texas.

  Bob Rafelson, once of BBS, visited Paris a lot and so he became uncredited producer and adviser on Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973), one of the least inhibited and most pained studies of human sexuality, a film that makes Last Tango in Paris look like a magazine article next to a novel. François Truffaut had a debacle in London with Fahrenheit 451 (1966), b
ut he maintained his international art house career (with films such as The Story of Adele H., 1975, and Two English Girls, 1971), and in the late 1970s he appeared in Hollywood in dazed rapture as the scientist who can play music for aliens in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). (“It’s occasionally amusing,” Truffaut would say, “but very slow, very long.” Spielberg had lost all sense of how quickly some people had to work.)

  In the mid-1960s, in Czechoslavakia, the liberal stirring that would go critical in the Prague Spring of 1968 made for a generation of enterprising filmmakers, working on very low budgets but with a new, ironic sense of human behavior in a conformist society. Jan Nemec made Diamonds of the Night (1964), Milos Forman directed Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967), Vera Chytilová made Daisies (1966), Ivan Passer delivered Intimate Lighting (1965), and Jií Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1966) won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1967. Most of those films had openings in America and Europe, and several of the directors would go to America as the hopes for Prague deteriorated. Forman had the happiest landing: Taking Off (1971) was a funny picture about American youth, and then, for 1975, with Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas as his producers, Forman made a film from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which had defied every previous effort. No one doubted that Forman’s experiences under communism had stimulated his vision of the unfriendly mental hospital where Jack Nicholson’s Randall McMurphy becomes a sacrifice to repressive order. Cuckoo’s Nest won five major Oscars, including Best Picture and prizes to Nicholson and Forman. No film had swept the top awards since Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). When it opened in New York, there were audience members crying out in support of its in-patients in a mixture of anguish and elation. It seemed as if movie was at the forefront of populist sensibility again, and the idea of Prague and New York being kindred cities hung in the air.