Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  Peggy Sue in due course is crowned queen of the reunion. When an enormous cake, topped with sparkling candles, is wheeled in to celebrate the occasion, Peggy Sue faints dead away. She wakes up back at old Buchanan High in 1960, her senior year. Although Peggy Sue appears physically unchanged to the filmgoer, her friends and relatives in 1960 see her as seventeen.

  The movie has its share of sly ironies that play on the audience’s knowledge of the subsequent course of history. Since Peggy Sue is a visitor from the future, she makes a number of remarks that baffle those around her. She giggles when she discovers that her father has just bought the family a new car—an Edsel. Although her father is proud of this vehicle, Peggy Sue is already aware that the Edsel, with its gaudy grilles and tasteless chrome decorations, would become the Ford Motor Company’s biggest commercial failure. At another point her parents are chagrined when Peggy Sue takes a couple of swigs from her dad’s whiskey bottle as she announces “I am an adult! I want to have fun! I’m going to Liverpool to discover the Beatles!!!”

  Peggy Sue has brought with her on her trip down memory lane her forty-two-year-old mind, and she thus views things from a more mature perspective than she possessed the first time around. So, when Peggy Sue tells her younger sister that she would like to get to know her better, she adds a perceptive remark that could only have come from her older self: “I have too many unresolved relationships.”

  One relationship she has failed to resolve in her later life is that with her estranged husband, Charlie Bodell, who, of course, is still a teenager when Peggy Sue meets him in the course of her return visit to her youth. She and Charlie married right after high school but have since split up because Peggy Sue discovered that he was cheating on her with a younger woman, whom she calls “Charlie’s bimbo.” Asked at the reunion why she has separated from Charlie, she answers laconically, “We just married too young, I guess, and ended up blaming each other for all the things we missed.”

  Charlie seems an uncouth, not to say callow, adolescent when Peggy Sue meets up with him as she revisits her past. Still, with adult hindsight, she regrets that his singing career as a member of a pop quartet fizzled and he had to settle for going into his father’s hardware business. In one scene we see Charlie, decked out in his garish gold-lamé jacket, singing with the group. He is hoping to make a guest appearance on a TV show as a vocal sensation, but the nearest he will ever come to television, Peggy Sue knows, is his appearances in his silly TV commercials as “Crazy” Charlie the Appliance King.

  Peggy Sue chats with Charlie just before he goes to audition for an agent, and after they part the viewer stays with Charlie as he gets the brush-off from the agent. Charlie, it seems, is dismissed as a “rebel without a cause.” This scene represents the only serious failure in narrative logic in the entire movie. Since the audience is seeing every incident in the film from Peggy Sue’s perspective, a scene at which Peggy Sue was not present has no place in her dream of the past. Nevertheless, Coppola slips this lapse of narrative logic by the filmgoer so adroitly that hardly anyone who sees the film notices it. Commenting on this scene between Charlie and the agent, Barry Malkin says that it was “an afterthought. We were trying to make Charlie’s character more sympathetic.” He feels that a filmmaker need not allow himself to be “boxed in” by the rules of narrative logic if it means missing out on a good scene—rules were made to be broken, he concludes.9

  In the course of reliving her past, Peggy Sue wonders if she could have made a better match than Charlie. So she reconsiders the two lads who were attracted to her besides Charlie. There is the brainy science genius, Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), who is generally considered to be a creep by his peers. Walter Getz has dubbed Richard “Mr. Square Root,” with the accent on square. Peggy Sue feels protective toward Richard. When the class bully torments him, she snaps, “You macho schmuck!” Little wonder that Richard acknowledges that she alone treats him with respect.

  Peggy Sue feels sorry for Richard, but she realizes that pity should not be confused with love. Peggy Sue tells Richard that she is reexperiencing her adolescence, and he assures her that he believes in time travel. In fact, he shyly proposes to her, beseeching her to marry him instead of Charlie and thereby changing her destiny. But Peggy Sue gently turns him down.

  The other chap who was interested in Peggy Sue during her high school days was Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor), a rebellious beatnik who is pictured at one point on a motorbike—recalling Motorcycle Boy from Rumble Fish. She is fascinated by this free spirit. Indeed, at the reunion she confesses to a friend that “Michael was the only boy in high school I wish I’d gone to bed with—besides Charlie.” Accordingly, in the course of her foray into the past she allows Michael to make love to her in a bucolic field after they smoke marijuana together. But it is all too evident that Michael is not the marrying kind, and so their romantic fling never really gets off the ground.

  Michael is an aspiring writer, a would-be Jack Kerouac, and Peggy Sue foretells his subsequent success as a novelist. She even encourages him to make their short-lived romance the basis of a novel. When she gives him the air, Michael smirks, “So are you going to marry Mr. Blue Impala and graze around with all the other sheep for the rest of your life?” “No,” she retorts. “I already did that.”

  Peggy Sue ultimately decides that none of the young men in her life—Charlie, Richard, or Michael—are viable prospects for matrimony. Therefore, she decides not to marry anyone this time around. “Petty Sue got married—case closed!” she states emphatically. “I don’t want to marry any one!” When Peggy Sue tells her story about time travel to her grandfather, Barney Alvorg, she confides to him that she does not desire to continue living in the past—she wants to return to her adult life. He spirits her away to his Masonic lodge, where his fellow members are prone to dabble in the occult. The grand master (John Carradine) accordingly presides over a ritual calculated to catapult Peggy Sue back to the future. But before she leaves the past behind, she has one last crucial confrontation with young Charlie.

  Early in the movie, during the reunion celebration and before being transported backward in time, Peggy Sue muses to herself, “If I knew then what I know now, I’d do a lot of things differently.” But the question is, now that she appears to have the chance of a lifetime to change her destiny by altering her past, will she?

  In Charlie’s case, when he comes to court Peggy Sue in the course of her return trip to her adolescent years, her sour experiences with him in later life prompt her to break their engagement. “I’m not going to marry you a second time,” she tells the uncomprehending Charlie, who cannot foresee the future as she can. Charlie woos Peggy Sue by producing a locket that her mother has given him, containing photos of him and Peggy Sue as babies. She realizes that the locket matches the one she carries—which she had showed her friends at the reunion—containing pictures of their two children, the fruit of their marriage. Their lovers’ quarrel comes to an end when they kiss and make up and make love—this occasion turns out to be the time Charlie gets Peggy Sue pregnant, with the result that she does in fact decide once again to marry Charlie. In short, she winds up not doing things any differently the second time around after all, although she had promised herself she would!

  Back in present time, Peggy Sue has been taken to the hospital in the wake of her fainting spell at the reunion. Charlie is at her bedside when she awakens and begs her to take him back. Their daughter is there too, and the three of them embrace. For Peggy Sue the high school reunion has proved to be the occasion of a family reunion as well. The reconciliation of Peggy Sue and her husband at the fade-out challenges the viewer with the notion that, as Gene Siskel puts it, “it is a generous and proper idea for us to accept the whole package, faults and all, of the people we care about.” Peggy Sue Got Married thus reaffirms the need we all have to preserve strong family ties in life, a perennial Coppola theme. “I think what Francis brought to the movie that is distinctive,” Turner obser
vers, “is his great sense of family.”10

  Peggy Sue’s one souvenir of her journey into the past is a novel by Michael Fitzsimmons, which was inspired by their brief encounter. He dedicated the book to her, and she has it with her in the hospital scene.

  The concluding hospital scene did not satisfy Coppola when he examined it in the rough cut during postproduction. Because he had committed himself to finishing the film on schedule, he had shot the scene in the wee hours of the morning on the last scheduled day of the shoot. In the rough cut the cast looked exhausted and his direction appeared perfunctory. Ray Stark granted permission for Coppola to reshoot the scene—indeed, Coppola wanted to restage it so that the last shot of the film would match the opening shot, thereby allowing the opening and closing images of the film to serve as bookends for the movie.

  Peggy Sue Got Married begins with a shot of Peggy Sue reflected in her dressing table mirror. It concludes with a shot of Peggy Sue, Charlie, and Beth appearing together in the mirror in her hospital room. Whereas Peggy Sue was a solitary figure in her bedroom mirror at the outset, at film’s end she is surrounded in the hospital mirror by her husband and daughter. “Coppola’s last mirror shot frames Peggy Sue in a cheerful family context.”11

  Peggy Sue Got Married was selected to be screened on the closing night of the New York Film Festival on October 5, 1986, and it was hailed as Coppola’s spectacular return to form. The critics’ enthusiasm for the movie went a long way toward eradicating the disastrous premiere of Rumble Fish at the same festival three years before. Peggy Sue then opened on eight-hundred screens across the country, in a saturation booking, five days later. Given the commercial success of both The Outsiders and Peggy Sue, Coppola was now able to make a sizeable dent in his outstanding debts. Peggy Sue became his highest-grossing film of the decade. In its first three weeks of general release the picture grossed nearly $22 million.

  Jordan Cronenweth was the recipient of the American Society of Cinematographer’s first annual award for his work on the film, and he was likewise singled out for praise in several of the notices. So was Kathleen Turner, whose performance in a difficult role was universally acclaimed and merited her an Oscar nomination.

  Many reviewers were pleasantly surprised to find Coppola helming a light-hearted, humorous film, his first comedy since One from the Heart. One critic even suggested that Peggy Sue Got Married was the Coppola movie that really should have been entitled One from the Heart. After all, Peggy Sue is an anodyne recreation of small-town life in the 1960s and revels in the atmosphere of a kinder, gentler age. It evokes the past as an innocent, more wholesome time. In fact, it is more about preserving the past than changing it, as the central character sets out to recapture the family values of her youth.

  Some critics faulted Nicolas Cage’s performance as Charlie, but it was fundamentally a thankless role. Variety described Charlie Bodell as a “primping, self-centered, immature high school jerk who is really insecure deep down.”12 As a matter of fact, one can easily see how Charlie will grow into an obnoxious TV appliance pitchman later on. Consequently, Cage’s ostentatious, mannered approach to the role seemed on target. Charlie, as both teenager and adult, can be endearing or exasperating, and Cage at various times portrays him as both.

  Coppola had discovered several promising young actors in his earlier films, particularly The Outsiders. In the present movie, Jim Carrey, whom he chose to play happy-go-lucky Walter Gertz, would go on to become a superstar, as would Helen Hunt, who played Peggy Sue’s daughter, Beth. Hunt subsequently won an Academy Award for As Good as It Gets (1997). Coppola never lost his canny eye for fresh talent. All in all, Peggy Sue Got Married is a remarkable fantasy that was warmly applauded by the critics and the general public. Coppola managed to turn out a touching film that ranks high on the list of his best movies.

  When the starting date of Peggy Sue was postponed because of a prior commitment of Kathleen Turner’s, Coppola found time to direct a fifty-minute film for Shelley Duvall’s cable TV series, Faerie Tale Theater. Duvall, a veteran actress (The Shining) was executive producer and host of the series that featured TV adaptations of classic fairy tales. She offered Coppola “Rip Van Winkle,” the last of the twenty-six episodes in the series. Coppola was drawn to the project because the stakes were low and the salary quite reasonable. The TV production would help him continue to pay off his debts, which is also precisely why he signed to direct Peggy Sue.

  “Rip Van Winkle” (1985)

  Coppola began collaborating on the teleplay of “Rip Van Winkle,” based on the Washington Irving short story, with writers Mark Curtis and Rod Ash in late November 1984. Irving’s tale, first published in his Sketch Book (1820), depicts how Rip Van Winkle woke up from a twenty-year nap to find that he had missed the American Revolution. The schedule called for a six-day shoot with a $650,000 budget. Coppola rehearsed the actors for a couple of days, starting on November 28, before shooting commenced. “We’re breaking all records in Francis’s career,” stated coproducer Bridget Terry. “Not only is this the first television film he’s ever directed, but it’s the shortest schedule he’s ever had.”13

  Coppla was not dismayed by the frugality of the production. He was revisiting the days when he was turning out “no-budget” pictures for poverty row producer Roger Corman (see chapter 1). “The bigger the budget, the less freedom you have,” he explained. He pointed out that he had exercised considerable artistic freedom on movies like The Rain People, The Conversation, and Rumble Fish because they had relatively meager budgets. He thought that he was well suited “to a medium where the budgets are smaller and yet the imagination is bigger.”14

  Coppola cast Harry Dean Stanton (One from the Heart) in the title role; Talia Shire (the Godfather films) as Wilma, Rip’s shrewish wife; and John P. Ryan, who played a gangster in The Cotton Club, as the ghost of the ancient mariner, Henry Hudson.

  Coppola engaged Japanese production designer Eiko Ishioka to create stylized sets for the telefilm. Irving remarks that the Catskills are really enchanted mountains and appear at times to take on a life of their own: every change of weather produces some change in the hues and shapes of these mountains. This observation, which found its way into the script, inspired Eiko Ishioka to create a “living mountain” (a common technique of Japanese stagecraft) consisting of five people crouching under a sheet of canvas that alters in shape and color to suit the mood of a given scene. For example, when Rip’s wife berates him for being a shiftless no-account, the mountain undulates ominously in the background to suggest her mood. Coppola instructed director of photography George Riesenberger to favor primary colors in shooting the picture: deep blue for nightfall, glowing scarlet for sunset, and an eerie green for the apparition of Henry Hudson and his ghostly crew.

  As the telefilm opens, a pair of gnarled hands takes a book off a cob-webbed shelf, while the narrator intones, “This story takes place in the early Dutch settlement of New York, before this country was a country.” We then meet Rip Van Winkle, an amiable Dutch loafer who is regularly scolded by his peevish wife for loitering at the local tavern and going hunting in the Catskills instead of toiling on their little farm. Talia Shire, decked out in a fearsome black wig, recalls Connie, the disgruntled wife she played in the Godfather films.

  One evening Rip goes off hunting in the upper reaches of the Catskills to escape his nagging wife. As he wanders deeper into the woods, a ghost suddenly materializes from the murky green fog. “I am Commander Heinrich Hudson,” the spectral figure declares to Rip. Hudson is dressed in a traditional Dutch naval captain’s uniform, which is tattered with age. He then introduces to Rip his band of merry men as the crew of the good ship Half Moon, which foundered off the coast some one hundred and fifty years before. “We discovered this land at the time, and it is sacred to me,” Hudson explains. “I return every twenty years to see if future generations are taking care of it.”

  Rip is appointed cupbearer to the crew. He is given a keg of a mysterious brew an
d told to keep their flagons filled as they engage in a spirited game of ninepins (bowling). Rip samples the tasty draught himself and eventually imbibes copiously from the keg. The revelers finally disappear, leaving Rip behind, sound asleep. As a matter of fact, the magic beverage causes Rip to sleep for twenty years. When he awakes, he is sporting a straggly white beard, and he finds the village much changed.

  For one thing, the sign over the village inn, which once bore the likeness of King George III, has been replaced by one with the image of George Washington, thereby indicating to the viewer, if not yet to Rip, that the American Revolution has transpired while Rip slept. When he inquires at the tavern if anyone knows Rip Van Winkle, the customers point to Rip Van Winkle, Jr. (also played by Stanton). The young man is dozing on the porch (like father, like son). Young Rip informs his father that Wilma “broke a blood vessel screaming at a travelling salesman a couple of years ago and died.”

  Rip regales the group with the tale of his fantastic experience with Henry Hudson and the crew of the Half Moon. The narrator adds, voiceover on the sound track, “In time he became a legend in the village, and he never grew tired of telling the children his story.” A shot of Rip and the village children freezes into a picture in the same book which the narrator was holding at the beginning of the film. He then closes the volume and replaces it on the shelf, and we see his face for the first time: it is Henry Hudson, grinning at us at the fade-out.

  Since Coppola’s episode of Faerie Tale Theater was slotted as the last segment of the series to be televised, it was first aired after Peggy Sue Got Married had opened. Some critics noted a link between the telefilm and the feature: In Peggy Sue the heroine is transplanted into the past—in “Rip Van Winkle” the hero is transported into the future. Moreover, “Rip Van Winkle,” like Peggy Sue, got uniformly good notices, and deservedly so (although more than one critic stated that the telefilm’s literary source was a novel, rather than a short story). Coppola’s telemovie was described as a slightly fractured but never totally Grimm fairy tale.