Friday, May 18, 2012
Centennial Tributes: Richard Brooks Part I
By Edward Copeland
"First comes the word, then comes the rest" might be the most famous quote attributed to Richard Brooks, who began his life 100 years ago today in Philadelphia as Ruben Sax, son of Jewish immigrants Hyman and Esther Sax. He wrote a lot of words too — sometimes using only images. In fact, too many to tell the story in a single post. so it will be three. His parents came from Crimea in 1908 when it belonged to the Russian Empire. Like the parents of a great director of a much later generation and an Italian Catholic heritage, Hyman and Esther Sax also worked in the textile and clothing industry. Sax's entire adult working life revolved around the written word — even while he busied himself with other tasks. “I write in toilets, on planes, when I’m
walking, when I stop the car. I make notes. If I am working at a studio, I work at the studio in the morning, then come home. I am really writing two days instead of one. After the studio, I have my second day (at home). I write whenever I can,” Brooks said in an interview with Patrick McGilligan for his book Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. After high school, he entered Temple University where he majored in journalism, though he left early when he realized the financial hardship that his tuition put on his parents. After drifting around the eastern half of the U.S. for a while by train, Sax returned to Philadelphia and got a job as s sports reporter at The Philadelphia Record where he first adopted the name of Richard Brooks. When he later got hired by The Atlantic City Press-Union, he met another reporter with an independent streak who would eventually make his way to Hollywood by the name of Samuel Fuller. Shortly after moving to New York for a job with that city's World Telegram newspaper, only leaving the sports beat behind for crime reporting. Brooks discovered that radio jobs provided bigger paychecks so he took a job at the 24-hour radio station WNEW, first as a disc jockey. "Played records 23 of those hours," McGilligan described in the introduction to his interview. Later, the station promoted him to news where he edited four news broadcasts a day newspaper jobs and wrote one. His work there led to a news job at NBC Radio's Blue Network where he also got to do commentary. At the same time, in 1938, Brooks tried his hand at playwriting, which led in 1940 to co-founding The Mill Pond Theater in Roslyn, N.Y., with David Loew. It's on that stage that Brooks made his debut as a director, taking turns with Loew helming productions at the summer theater. A falling out with other members of the theater sent Brooks to California where he worked for NBC Radio from the other coast. Among his duties was writing and directing the broadcast Richard Sands. Brooks also began writing a short story every day and reading it on air. “I’d written some short stories before, but none was published. Anyway, every day, another short story. Everything became grist for a short story. It began to drive me crazy…a different plotline every day. My ambition: write one story a week instead of a different story every day. In about 11 months, I wrote over 250 stories. I even devised a system whereby on Fridays I wouldn't have to write a short story. I called that day 'Heels of History.' I would take a fable and convert it. As a matter of fact, I used one afterwards in The Blackboard Jungle,” Brooks told McGilligan. Brooks gave the example of how he took the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk," citing how while he's portrayed as a hero, Jack's actually a dumb, bad kid who ignores his mother's order, shows little concern for an ailing fire and steal, even if it's from a giant. Granted, it doesn't appear to have been broadcast nationally but I wonder if Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine came across this when
conceiving Into the Woods?. Witches can be right, giants can be good… Brooks, like what happened when he learned radio paid more than newspapers, discovered in California that screenwriters earned bigger paychecks than broadcasters. He set up a meeting with George Waggner at Universal, where Waggner — who later would direct The Wolf Man and much episodic TV including many installments of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Batman — was the assistant producer of White Savage, a Maria Montez film directed by Arthur Lubin. Waggner asked if Brooks wrote because they desperately needed a rewrite. It was his first movie job and Brooks made "$100 (weekly) plus a day or two prorated, and they put my name on (the screen) as 'additional dialogue,'" Brooks told McGilligan. White Savage wasn't the first film Brooks worked on to be released though — two others and a serial came first. He also hung on to the NBC gig and got the chance to write for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Brooks produced countless sentences and paragraphs and but still lacked a "written by" credit on a screenplay credit. Once he did and, later, when he directed, he'd impact filmmaking both during and beyond his life, often with social themes few would touch (though occasionally in a heavy-handed way). He also managed to write some novels on the side — while with the Marines during World War II, where he'd also crank out a couple of screenplays (including his first credited one on Cobra Woman, directed by Robert Siodmak and again starring Montez) and report for Stars & Stripes as well while learning about filmmaking from Frank Capra's motion picture unit and eventually on his own editing combat footage into documentaries while attached to the 2nd Marines, Photographic Unit. If the Allies only needed a typewriter to defeat the Axis, Brooks might have been a good option for the weapon. First comes the word… 
Though Brooks' legend derives predominantly from his film legacy, he experienced his first rush of acclaim with the publication of his debut novel, written while stationed at Quantico at night in the bathroom, according to the account in Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks by Douglass K. Daniel. Several publishers rejected it until Edward Aswell at Harper & Brothers, who also edited Thomas Wolfe, agreed to take it — and he shocked Brooks further by telling him (after a few suggestions) they planned to publish in May 1945. This news flabbergasted Brooks who obtained a weekend pass to go to New York because Aswell insisted on informing him in person. Now Brooks had to return to Quantico where the top officers of the Corps about shit bricks when The New York Times published a big review of The Brick Foxhole soon after it hit shelves. (Orville Prescott's take was mixed, assessing it as compulsively readable but weak on characterization.) Its story of hate and intolerance within the Marines brought threats of court-martialing Brooks, since he'd ignored procedure and never submitted the novel to Marine officials for approval ahead of time. They wanted to avoid bad publicity, especially with all the good feelings as the war wound down. "There was nothing in that book that violated security, but their rules and regulations were not for that purpose alone," Brooks told Daniel. Aswell prepared to launch a P.R. counteroffensive with literary giants such as Sinclair Lewis and Richard Wright ready to stand by Brooks. In case you don't know the story of the novel, it concerns a Marine unit in its barracks and on leave in Washington. Through their wartime experiences, some of the men truly turned ugly, suspecting cheating wives and tossing hate against any non-white Christian. It turns out, though the real Marines let the matter drop, what bothered them
about the book wasn't the anti-Semitism or racist tendencies of the characters but the murder of a Marine some of the other Marines learn is gay. The U.S. Marines didn't want to promote the idea there might be homosexuals serving in the military. Ironically, they got their wish when The Brick Foxhole transferred to the big screen in 1947 as Crossfire. Brooks wasn't involved in the film version, but they made the murdered Army (The Marines even got to toss it off to another military branch entirely) soldier Jewish in the film. The film actually happens to be very good and was nominated for best picture and earned Robert Ryan his only Oscar nomination ever as supporting actor. What's even sadder is that Crossfire ends up being a much more powerful film against anti-Semitism than the creaky Gentleman's Agreement that took on the same subject that year and won best picture. If there weren't already enough ironic twinges in that story for you, Gentleman's Agreement, probably the grandfather of that tried-and-true staple "let a white guy be the hero of a story about another ethnic group" with Gregory Peck playing a Christian going undercover as a Jew to learn about anti-Semitism, won Elia Kazan his first directing Oscar. Edward Dmytryk, one of The Hollywood Ten, directed Crossfire, which dealt straight on with anti-Semitism and the effects of warfare on men. Then again, once Dmytryk served his jail time, he became the only one of the 10 to name names to HUAC because he wanted to work again.
While he didn't want to make a movie of The Brick Foxhole himself, another former newspaperman turned socially conscious film artist met with Brooks about working with his independent production company. At first, Mark Hellinger tried to lure Brooks away from Universal with the promise of doubling his salary if he'd adapt a play he liked into a movie, but before Brooks could consider that offer, Hellinger called with a more pressing matter. He was producing an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's famous short story The Killers. The problem: someone had to dream up what happened after the brief tale ends because it certainly wouldn't last 90 minutes otherwise. Hellinger flew Brooks out to meet Papa himself, but he didn't get much out of him but he did come up with an idea for what would happen after the story ends. Hellinger liked it and sent it to John Huston, who wrote the screenplay as a favor. Since both Brooks and Huston had contracts at other studios, neither got screen credits, so Ernest Hemingway's The Killers' official screenplay credit goes to Anthony Veiller, who received an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. He'd previously shared a nomination in the same category for Stage Door. The film also made a star out of Burt Lancaster, who would work with Brooks several times and be his lifelong friend. In fact, Lancaster would star in the next screenplay that Brooks wrote, a Mark Hellinger production directed by one of those people Edward Dmytryk eventually would name before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film, of course, would be the still-powerful Brute Force, the director, Jules Dassin.
John Huston wasn't happy. Producer Jerry Wald called him, excitement in his voice, to tell him he'd secured the rights to Maxwell Anderson's Broadway play Key Largo for Huston to direct. This didn't thrill Huston, who thought the play gave new meaning to the word awful. Written in blank verse, Anderson's play concerned a deserter from the Spanish-American War. People at a hotel do get taken hostage, but by Mexican hostages. Essentially, Huston tossed the play in the trash bin. Huston hired Brooks to co-write an in-title only version and, still pissed at Wald, barred him from the set. Part of Huston's anger stemmed from the HUAC nonsense, (His outrage would drive him to move to Ireland for a large part of the 1950s.) so he couldn't stomach adapting a play by Anderson whom he considered a reactionary because of his hate of FDR. Despite Huston's distaste for the project, he
turned it into a classic film with a little help from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor in her Oscar-winning role and, last but certainly not least, Edward G. Robinson as exiled mobster Johnny Rocco, who likes to brag about the power he used to wield. "I made 'em — like a tailor makes a suit of clothes," he tells a former associate. Knowing the story of what happened prior to filming makes you chuckle when you see the credit that reads, "As Produced on the Spoken Stage." It's great to watch Robinson and Bogart go toe-to-toe. Rocco makes a particularly memorable first appearance, lounging upstairs in a hotel bathtub, looking in a way like a prediction of that famous photo of Dalton Trumbo that would be taken decades later. Bogart, updated to a returning WWII veteran, perfectly plays his role of Frank McCloud so that you never know if he's being savvy or scared of the crimnals terrorizing them. "You don't like it, do you Rocco, the storm? Show it your gun, why don't you? If it doesn't stop, shoot it," Frank says at one point, but when he gets a chance to grab a gun and take him out (though Rocco's men would certainly finish Frank afterward), he nonchalantly declares, "One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for." The script's dialogue crackles and for additional fun touches we get a great Max Steiner score and the multitalented German émigré Karl Freund as cinematographer. The most remarkable thing that Huston did though was to invite Brooks to stay on the set during the film's shooting, something he'd never done as a writer and that he talked about in this YouTube video in 1985.While I would have liked to have viewed more of Brooks' work that I've never seen (and to re-visit some which I have), time and availability, combined with his prolific nature and the industry's increasingly cavalier willingness to let both old and recent films fade into oblivion, proved to be a problem. After Huston's generosity, Brooks' directing debut would arrive two years later. Four films where Brooks worked
solely as a writer remained — the Paris-set spy thriller To the Victor; Any Number Can Play with Clark Gable as an underground casino owner advised by his doctor to get out of the business because of his heart disease; Mystery Street with detectives Ricardo Montalban and Wally Maher consult a Harvard forensics expert (Bruce Bennett) to solve a mystery when a decomposed body washes ashore; and Storm Warning, where model Ginger Rogers goes to visit her sister in a particularly unfriendly town and secretly witnesses a mob lynch a man that her sister (Doris Day) tells her was a reporter who denounced the KKK. Rogers' character gets a bigger shock when she realizes baby sis' husband participated in the lynching. After 1951, every film Brooks worked on he at least held the title of director, beginning with 1950's Crisis with Cary Grant as a doctor vacation with his wife in a small country when the dictator (José Ferrer) kidnaps them to force the doctor to treat his life-threatening condition. The doctor's ethics get tested by his oath and the idea that if he lets the man die, life for the country's people will improve. For a writing-directing debut, Brooks makes a pretty good start even if it doesn't come close to some of the films he wrote. His next four films as director and writer or co-writer I haven't seen, though I tried to watch the last one. The next film, The Light Touch (1952). starred George Sanders and Stewart Granger a collector of stolen art and an art thief, respectively, trying to get their hands on the masterpiece Granger stole and that his wife Pier Angeli stays busy counterfeiting
enters their lives. At the time, Granger was married in real life to Jean Simmons, who would become Brooks' second wife about 10 years later. The next two films both starred Bogart. First came Deadline-U.S.A. with Bogie playing an investigative reporter trying to expose a gangster as his paper faces imminent closing followed by Battle Circus co-starring June Allyson where they played medical personnel at a MASH unit during the Korean War. The final film, which I almost watched, was The Last Time I Saw Paris, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and co-written by Brooks and the Epstein brothers, Van Johnson plays a former soldier returning to the city he liberated in the war, now despondent over his attempts to be a writer. He gets invited to parties with the city's beautiful people and finds one (Elizabeth Taylor) who enchants him. Unfortunately, the DVD transfer on Netflix’s rental copy proved abysmal. The Technicolor has faded beyond belief and it was filmed in an odd 1:75:1 spherical ratio, so every image looked distorted because they just flattened it full screen. After a few minutes, I had to shut it off. Apparently, it's a Warners Archive title now, but of course, they don't offer those for rental so the shitty DVDs will remain for people who don't believe in buying blind. I haven't caught his next two directing efforts either, but they stand out because they marked the first two times (and it only occurred three times) that Brooks directed screenplays written by someone else. In 1953, he directed Richard Widmark as a Korean War vet now serving as a tough drill instructor for new GIs bound for Korea while he's bitter that his request to return to Korea keeps being denied in Take the High Ground! In 1954, Brooks helmed Flame and the Flesh with Lana Turner as unlucky woman trying to get what she can for nothing visiting Europe who finds herself wooed by a gigolo.With 1955, Brooks wrote and directed the first film that truly garnered him an identity as more than a writer who directs but as a director with Blackboard Jungle, a film that admittedly manages to look both dated and timely simultanouesly, First, as so many old films did, it had to start with a long scroll explaining that American schools maintain high standards, but we need to worry about these juvenile
deliquents before this gets out of hand. It gets off to a rockin' start — literally — with opening credits that can't help but make you think of the original beginning to TV's Happy Days as Bill Haley and the Comets get everything moving to "Rock Around the Clock" as new English teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) arrives to work at all-boys high school North Manual Street. Most of the school overflows with miscreants, especially his class who start calling him "Daddy-O" to avoid pronouncing his name. (Though it's never been confirmed, many assume that the movie inspired Leiber & Stoller's lyric "Who called the English teacher Daddy-O?" in The Coasters' huge late '50s hit "Charlie Brown.") The ensemble Brooks assembled, including some of the "teens" who would make their names much later included Anne Francis as Dadier's pregnant (and, quite frankly, neurotic) wife; Louis Calhern as a veteran teacher left with nothing but cynicism and a
desire to beat the crap out of the punks; Richard Kiley as a nerdy math teacher with a love for jazz; Margaret Hayes as another new teacher who doesn't think about how she's dressing and nearly pays for it; Sidney Poitier as a student who appears to be one of the delinquents yet practices playing the piano and singing hymns; and Vic Morrow as the worst kid in the school, a downright criminal. Also, look for appearances by future writer-director Paul Mazursky as a student, Richard Deacon as a teacher and Jamie Farr as another student when he acted using the name Jameel Farah. While Blackboard Jungle offers much to praise, at times it comes off as too simplistic. It did dare to tackle bigotry and use the epithets. Sometimes, it feels eerily like the awful 1984 film Teachers. I kept expecting Calhern to turn out to be like the Royal Dano character and drop dead at his desk. I wonder what Brooks would have thought if he'd seen The Wire's fourth season. Blackboard Jungle earned Brooks his first Oscar nomination for best screenplay. Brooks' competition consisted of Millard Kaufman (who wrote Take the High Ground!) for Bad Day at Black Rock, Paul Osborn for East of Eden, Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart for Love Me or Leave Me and Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the teleplay that would be the basis for one of Brooks' 1956 films, for Marty. Chayefsky won his first Oscar. Nearly the entire cast excels in spite of some of the weaker parts of Blackboard Jungle (except Francis, burdened with a thankless role) but Morrow stands out in the ensemble as the worst punk. Tweet
Labels: blacklist, Bogart, Capra, Cary, Dassin, Doris Day, Edward G., Fiction, Fitzgerald, Fuller, Ginger Rogers, Glenn Ford, Hemingway, Huston, Lancaster, Liz, Mazursky, Poitier, Robert Ryan, Widmark
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Monday, April 30, 2012
A vision for all — perhaps not meant for one man alone
"I was most jealous of Truffaut — in a friendly way — with Jules and Jim. I said, 'It's so good! How I wish I'd made it.' Certain scenes had me dying of jealousy. I said, 'I should've done that, not him.'" — Jean Renoir
By Edward Copeland
From the first time I saw Jules and Jim in high school, the movie became a personal touchstone and remains one as we mark its 50th anniversary. Truthfully, I know the parallels my teen eyes recognized between myself and others in my life then didn't mirror the characters on screen as closely as my imagination wanted to believe, but as that fantasy faded away, I began to appreciate more of the artistry of a film that I already loved. In addition to what Jules and Jim contains within its frames, the movie also forged the connection I've always felt with François Truffaut.
If you discovered, probably early in your life, that your genetic makeup left you susceptible to artistic impulses of some kind — it needn't matter whether that creative bent took the form of movies, writing, art, music, whatever — the odds weighed heavily toward you falling for at least one Catherine in your lifetime. (Now, I'm speaking from the point-of-view of a straight male. I wouldn't dare presume straight female or gay perspectives, though I've witnessed similar dynamics secondhand.) As far as we go, the Catherines of the real world function like those purple-hued bug zappers hanging on summer porches and inevitably drawing us like moths to their pulsating light and our doom — and we wouldn't trade one goddamn miserable minute of it if it meant losing a single second of the joy. This isn't a new phenomenon:
F. Scott had his Zelda and Tom had his Viv during the same era when Jules and Jim takes place. (A brief aside: I think Tom sent me a personal message from the past when he published The Waste Land in 1922 and penned those lines, "April is the cruellest month.") To casual and outside observers, proclaiming that Catherine must be crazy comes rather easily and mounting a counterargument against that assumption makes for a steep climb. Yes, our real world Catherines come with a fair amount of mental instability, as do we, but without our neuroses and idiosyncrasies, we probably wouldn't be drawn to these wild, wonderful, wounding women in the first place. Of course, Henri-Pierre Roché's novel and François Truffaut's film take the men's point-of-view, even when filtered through Michel Sobor's narration, so Jules and Jim aren't portrayed as being as unstable as Catherine. The closest the male friends come shows through Jules' fear and neediness at times. As for the Catherines of the real world, people do have the capacity for change, no matter what David Chase might believe, and can end up being vital parts of your life even as you become the one holding the monopoly on the madness in the friendship. It's a cliché, but it originates from truth: Most of the best art stems from suffering. Anyone remember Billy Joel during the years when he and Christie Brinkley were happily married? Jules and Jim, for me at least, represents a cinematic temple to that idea. Of course, it also begs the question that if misery breeds great art, why in the hell haven't I accomplished something of note? Jules and Jim made its U.S. premiere April 23, 1962, the same year the film made its initial debut in France on Jan. 23. Though it marked Truffaut's third feature film as a director following The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim was only the second of his films to reach U.S. movie theaters. Shoot the Piano Player, though it opened elsewhere in 1960, wouldn't get its U.S. release until July 23, 1962. (Like Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows reached U.S. shores in the same year, 1959, that Truffaut's directing
debut did elsewhere, just a few months later.) As I remind people as often as possible, all opinions about movies are subjective. Before beginning my lovesick tribute to what I think holds the title as the true masterpiece born of the French New Wave, I feel that I shouldn't pretend all critics agreed about Jules and Jim and I'd allow one to have his say before I got started. "With the years, I've sometimes felt the reputation of Jules and Jim is a bit exaggerated," this former critic said to Richard Roud, then-director of the New York Film Festival, in October 1977 on a television program called Camera Three. The ex-critic added, "and that I was too young when I made it." That appearance happened to be François Truffaut's first time on American television. I guess you can remove the man from the role of film critic but you can't take the critic out of the man. "I continue to re-read the book every year. It was one of my favorites. I've often felt that the film was too decorative, not cruel enough, that love was crueler that that," Truffaut went on to tell Roud. Now, François, don't be so hard on yourself. For those who haven't seen Jules and Jim, I'll be vague, I think you could call the film's dénouement fairly devastating. Besides, most recognize (or know from experience) that cruelty usually crosses love's path at some point. On top of that, the subject cuts too close to Truffaut for him to judge. Jules and Jim may speak to me in personal ways, but that isn't why the film rests among my 20 favorite films of all time. As John Houseman used to claim in TV commercials about how Smith Barney made money, Jules and Jim got that rank on my list "the old-fashioned way. It earned it."While I knew that Jules and Jim originated as a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, it wasn't until I obtained the Criterion edition that I learned that Roché loosely based it on his relationship with Franz Hessel, a German writer who translated Proust into German (as Jim does in the film) and Helen Grund, who became Hessel's wife and herself translated Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita into German. Legend has it that Roché also introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso through his original career as an art dealer and art collector. Though the circles that Roché circulated in preceded the time period of Woody Allen's recent Midnight in Paris, he did know many of the literary and artistic figures depicted in Allen's fantasy. The real-life coincidences that brought Truffaut and Roché together border on the extraordinary. Truffaut
stumbled upon the novel in a secondhand bookstore and it led to a letter-writing relationship between himself and Roché where the young critic Truffaut promised that if he ever made movies, he would bring Jules and Jim to the screen. Jules and Jim was the first novel that Roché ever wrote — which he did at the age of 74. His second novel, also autobiographical, Two English Girls and the Continent, eventually became the source material of a later Truffaut film, Two English Girls. Two English Girls, sort of the inverse of Jules and Jim with two women pining for the same man, marks its 40th anniversary this year but unfortunately, like too many other great films I'd like to write about this year, no proper DVD copy has been made for rental or at a reasonable price, the same situation that in the past two years has befallen other films such as Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, Barbet Schroeder's Barfly with its great performances by Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway and two of John Sayles' very best films — City of Hope and Matewan. Who said only old classics become lost films? With the constant format changes, some never made the leap from pan-and-scanned VHS. A true travesty, but I've digressed from the subject at hand. Roché didn't live long enough to see the movie of his first novel, but the film version brought best-seller status to his book that it never saw in his lifetime. One aspect that didn't occur to me until I re-watched the movie for this tribute: Not only has the film reached its 50th anniversary this year, 2012 also means a full century has passed from where its story begins in 1912.
The film starts in blackness — literally if you were in a French-speaking country or watching without subtitles. You hear a voice (Jeanne Moreau's as Catherine, though we wouldn't know that yet) say, "You said, 'I love you.' I said, 'Wait.' I was about to say, 'Take me.' You said, 'Go.'" Then, quite abruptly, Truffaut launches us into the film's imagery with a bouncy spirit, playing music beneath the credits that seems to herald that a carnival lies ahead courtesy of prolific film composer Georges Delerue, who scores the entire film, though it won't all sound like this energetic romp which accompanies clips, some of scenes that will arrive later in the film, others that just fit the tone of the piece — such as Jules and Jim jokingly fencing with brooms. As with many others, Delerue would collaborate with Truffaut on nearly all of his films, having first worked on Shoot the Piano Player. We'll also get a glimpse of an hourglass, its sand pouring through to clue us in advance of the importance the passage of time serves in the story. We see our first swift sightings of Moreau as Catherine, though her actual entrance
into the film doesn't occur immediately. While Catherine certainly acts as the catalyst for most events in Jules and Jim, her name isn't in the title for a reason. At its heart, Jules and Jim spins a story of friendship between two men. Oskar Werner's Jules acts as the outsider, the Austrian in Paris, until Henri Serre's Jim takes him beneath his wing, acting, quite literally, in the early days of their acquaintance as Jules' wingman. As with many Truffaut films, Jules and Jim employs a narrator (Michel Subor) not only to for exposition purposes but because Truffaut wanted to maintain as much of Roché's prose as possible in the adaptation he co-wrote with Jean Gruault. Jules and Jim's friendship begins when Jules, the foreigner in Paris, approaches Jim blindly to see if the Frenchman might wrangle him an invitation to the Quatres Arts Ball. Jim succeeds and a friendship blossoms as they search for a slave costume for Jules to wear to the event. From that, the men began to teach one another the other's language and culture and shared their poems,
which they'd translate into the other's native tongue. Before long, the men saw each other every day, talking endlessly, finding common ground such as, the narrator informs us, "a relative indifference toward money." The omniscient voice also tells the viewer, "They chatted easily. Neither had ever had such an attentive listener." Jules though lacks luck when it comes to love in Paris, even of the transitory kind while Jim draws women to him as if he were a magnet. Jim finds getting women so easy that he willingly hands some off to Jules, including a musician. "They were in love for about a week." This early setup runs us through the women, most of whom bear little importance to the story so they receive scant attention from the film. Desperate for some amorous action, Jules even ignores Jim's warning to stay away from the "professionals" only to learn that he should have trusted Jim's word and avoided the disappointment. This changes one evening, when the men encounter a woman named Thérèse (Marie Dubois) seeking refuge from her loutish anarchist boyfriend who blames her for a shortage of paint that he thinks will make people believe that anarchists don't know how to spell.
What separates Jules' and Jim's relationship with Thérèse from what lies ahead with Catherine comes from Thérèse clearly indicating a preference between the two men, in this case Jules. Though Dubois' role takes up very little screen time, she does prove a charmer (and remember that U.S. moviegoers, at the time of Jules and Jim's release, had yet to see her film debut as the waitress Lena in love with Charles Aznavour's piano-playing Charlie in Truffaut's second feature, Shoot the Piano Player). When they return to the house,
Jules acts the part of the gentleman, offering Thérèse his bed while he sleeps in a rocking chair, but romance occurs quickly and rectifies that situation. That hourglass first spotted in the opening credits reappears and Jules explains that he prefers it to a clock. When all the sand passes through to the bottom, that means it's time to go to sleep, he explains. She simply smiles and tells him he's sweet. Thérèse demonstrates for Jules her trick that she calls "the steam engine." She places a lit cigarette in her mouth and puffs out her cheeks like a blowfish and then chugs in a circle in the bedroom until she has reached Jules' chair, one of the many, recurrent visuals of circular imagery that Truffaut utilizes in the film. You shouldn't feel bad for Jim — he's busy bedding his frequent lover Gilberte (Vanna Urbino) and making excuses to depart her bed before the sun rises despite her request to lie beside her for a complete night for a change. Jim nixes that idea, saying that if they did that they might as well be married and she'd expect him to stay the next night as well. Gilberte expresses skepticism at his excuse, especially when he suggests that she imagine he's working at a factory, betting that his plan involves sleeping until noon. Later that night, Jules, Jim and Thérèse go to a café and no sooner have they sat down that after making eyes at another
man, Thérèse asks Jules for some change to play music. He complies, she takes the money and the man follows her. Thérèse asks if she can stay with him that night and the two depart. Jules starts to stand in outrage, but Jim grabs his arm and he sits back down. "Lose one, find 10 more," Jim advises. Jules admits that he didn't love Thérèse. "She was both mother and doting daughter at the same time," Jules says, sighing that he doesn't have luck with Parisian women. He shows Jim photos of some of the women back home he loves, presenting them in order of preference and contemplating returning for one of them in a couple of months if the situation in France doesn't change. However, Jules lacks a photograph of one named Helga so he sketches her in broad strokes on the café's table. Jim tries to buy the table, but the establishment's owner refuses unless he purchases the entire set.
That night, they go to the home of Jules' friend Albert (played by Serge Rezvani, a renaissance artist, though he prefers the term multidisciplinarian, who billed himself as Bassiak here and added the first name Boris when taking credit as the composer of "Le Tourbillon" that Moreau memorably sings) to see his slides of ancient sculptures he found around the country. (Somehow it slips my mind between viewings of Jules and Jim how little dialogue the actors actually get to speak openly in the film in favor of voiceover. For example, when Jules and Jim enter Albert's place, they exchange introductions out loud but then Henri Serre as Jim doesn't simply ask Oskar Werner's Jules, "Who's Albert?" Instead, we hear Michel Subor's narrator say, "Jim asked" — When I first heard
this the first few times I watched the film, it sounded as if Subor narrated this entire dialogue. After hearing it for the umpteenth time, it sounds as if Subor merely starts it the Serre asks in voiceover, "Who's Albert?" with Werner's voice replying, "A friend to artists and sculptors. He knows everyone who'll be famous in 10 years." I can't say with 100% certainty which interpretation stands as the correct answer. I've looked for verification, but found none. Jules' response tipped me in that direction because Werner's voice can be distinguished easily from Subor's while Serre's falls in the same vocal range.) One slide of a stone face particularly strikes the friends' fancy — and Subor definitely
describes this, informing the viewer, "The tranquil smile of the crudely sculpted face mesmerized them. The statue was in an outdoor museum on an Adriatic island. They set out immediately to see it. They both had the same white suit made. They spent an hour by the statue. It exceeded their expectations. They walked rapidly around it in silence. They didn't speak of it until the next day. Had they ever met such a smile? Never. And if they ever did, they'd follow it. Jules and Jim returned home, full of this revelation. Paris took them gently back in." Later, Jules and Jim hit the gym where they spar with some kickboxing. Jules inquires about the progress of Jim's book. Jim tells him he thinks it's going well and will turn out to be very autobiographical and concern their friendship. He proceeds to read Jules a passage. "Jacques and Julien were inseparable. Julien's last novel had been a success. He had described, as if in a fairy tale, the women he had known before he met Jacques or even Lucienne. Jacques was proud for Jules' sake. People called them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and rumors circulated behind their
backs about their unusual friendship. They ate together in small restaurants, and each splurged on the best cigars to give the other." Jules finds the writing beautiful and offers to translate it to German. Jim's brief allusion in his novel to "rumors" about his friendship with Jules marks the closest the film ever comes to implying anything homoerotic between the men. While Jules and Jim opened the door for many cinematic variations on your standard triangle, we'd still need almost 40 years before Y Tu Mama Tambien. As the guys shower, Jules announces that his cousin wrote him and three girls that studied with him in Munich would be visiting Paris — one from Berlin, one from Holland and one from there in France, Jules plans to host a dinner for the visitors the next night. Neither friend has any idea who Catherine happens to be yet or that she will be the French girl in that group of visitors. This Quixote and Sancho soon will be tilting at a very shapely and unpredictable windmill that will change the course of all three lives forever. The next night, when Catherine (Moreau) descends the stairs and lifts the lace netting covering her face, her resemblance to the sculpture stuns Jules and Jim, something Truffaut emphasizes through quick cuts, and Michel Subor's narration, and the young men will keep the oath they made to that statue — they've found that smile, now they must follow it. While for me, Jules and Jim stands at the high watermark of the French New Wave films, I know many others won't agree and when you look objectively at the story of Jules and Jim, it may employ many of that movement's techniques but many aspects of Truffaut's film set it apart from its cinematic brethren such as its period setting and a time span that covers more than two decades. Jules and Jim also caused moral uproars about the open relationships among the various characters in the film (and though Jules, Jim and Catherine might be involved simultaneously, they never took part in a ménage à trois). In a funny way, the 1962 film forecast the free love movement to come later that decade except its source material happened to be a semiautobiographical novel set in the early part of the 20th century. The prurience though lies in the mind of the fuddy duddy because part of what makes Jules and Jim so special comes from Truffaut's refusal to pass any judgment, be it positive or negative, upon the behavior of his characters. Despite the director's own criticism many years down the road that the film isn't cruel enough when it comes to love, the three main characters do suffer by the end but he doesn't paint it as punishment for their sins.
Tweet
Labels: 60s, Books, Criticism, Dunaway, Fiction, Fitzgerald, Foreign, Mickey Rourke, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Sayles, Soderbergh, Truffaut, Woody
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Monday, March 26, 2012
Merging art and commerce
— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, March 18, 1972
By Edward Copeland
Picture this: The war Michael Corleone returns from at the beginning of The Godfather isn't World War II, but Vietnam. Perhaps Kay Adams looks more like a flower child (Diane Keaton had been a Member of the Tribe in the original Broadway production of Hair after all). Try to fathom what poor Fredo would be experimenting with once they sent him off to Las Vegas. If Paramount Pictures steamrolled over
Francis Ford Coppola from the minute he agreed to direct the film, these things might not be theoretical flights of fancy. On the commentary track of The Godfather DVD, Coppola tells how when he climbed aboard the project, Paramount handed him a completed screenplay that the studio had developed, much as they financed the writing of the novel, with Mario Puzo. Only for some bizarre reason, while setting the story's beginnings in 1945 satisfied Paramount for
the 1969 novel (which, remember, wasn't the blockbuster best seller yet as production plans began), it didn't work for a studio looking to make a quick feature on the cheap. The screenplay given to Coppola moved the events to the 1970s, added hippies and, according to Coppola, this quintessentially New York story would be filmed in Kansas City (though later in the commentary, Coppola refers to a plan to shoot it in St. Louis). "There was none of that post-war ambiance," Coppola said, which was one of the major attractions for him to the project in the first place since he didn't like the novel with its graphic sex and general tawdriness until he discovered the story of the family buried underneath the trash. I imagine that few people out there now have endured the actual reading of Mario Puzo's novel, which, awful as it is, spent 67 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Coppola's commentary, recorded in 2004, tries to be as nice as possible about the book because Puzo became a close friend right until his death in 1999. Pauline Kael's review of the movie goes into a lot of detail about the novel before she even starts writing about how good she thinks the movie turned out to be, but a few of her words give you who haven't read it a much better idea than my fuzzy memory of it could conjure.
"The movie starts from a trash novel that is generally considered gripping and readable, though (maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash) I found it unreadable.…Mario Puzo has a reputation as a good writer, so his potboiler was treated as if it were special, and not in the Irving Wallace-Harold Robbins class which, by its itch and hype and juicy roman-à-clef treatment, it plainly belongs.…The novel…features a Sinatra stereotype, and sex and slaughter, and little gobbets of trouble and heartbreak.…Francis Ford Coppola…has stayed very close to the book's greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and the strength that popular novels such as Dickens' used to have.…Puzo provided what Coppola needed: a storyteller's output of incidents and details to choose from, the folklore behind the headlines, heat and immediacy, the richly familiar. And Puzo's shameless turn-on probably left Coppola looser than if he had been dealing with a better book…"
Of course, Coppola had a long way to go and many battles to wage before that finished film could win Pauline's seal of approval.
Before we delve deeper into some of the behind-the-scenes brouhahas, I do want to pause for a moment to mention the one detail of the novel still trapped in my brain that convinced me the book stunk. Admittedly, this stretch of Puzo's work thoroughly amused friends of mine around the same age (junior high), who found the entire sequence hysterical. On the commentary, Coppola raises this, though he can't bring himself to talk about it in clinical detail, other than to say the lengthy plot point stood as a key factor in his thinking long and
hard about whether or not he wanted to make a film version of this book. Now, the movie does show that James Caan's Sonny Corleone gets laid a lot, but that's nothing compared to Puzo's description of Santino. In the novel, covered over many pages, readers learn that Sonny isn't just a lothario, he happens to be a well-endowed lothario. Apparently, when standing at full attention, Sonny proves to be so mammoth in size that his mistress (who eventually will give birth to Andy Garcia for The Godfather Part III) requires corrective gynecological surgery because just having sex with him disfigures her vagina. (She needed the surgery or Baby Andy Garcia might have just slid out like a bowling ball through the return, dangling between her legs by the umbilical cord.) I know what you are thinking — did the Farrelly brothers help Puzo write The Godfather? I have no evidence to support such a rumor, though Peter was 15 and Bobby was 13 when the novel came out, so the two had hit the correct age for that kind of humor — and with The Godfather turning into such a huge hit, who could blame them for never wanting to abandon that mentality? Anyway, Coppola wisely decided that the film could leave out that part of the story, but what he did do borders on genius. He alludes to it by a simple, visual gag by unnamed female wedding guests after they spot Sonny sneaking off with his mistress for an assignation.
In Kael's review, she writes that Puzo claims that he wrote the novel "below my gifts" because he needed the money (other stories report that Puzo was drowning in gambling debts at the time). Coppola, Kael similarly said, told everyone he took the film for the money.
Though he never makes that case on the DVD commentary, most stories sound different depending on the storyteller and evidence exists that Kael had the story correct when she penned that Coppola sought the cash so he could make the movies that he wanted to make. In Kael's opinion, Puzo taking the dough turned out a much worse result than Coppola doing it for the money did. "(Coppola) has salvaged Puzo's energy and lent the narrative dignity," Kael opined. First, he had to land that job. Mark Seal wrote a fascinating look of the events surrounding the making of the film in the March 2009 edition of Vanity Fair titled "The Godfather Wars." In it, he chronicled Coppola's initial reluctance to take the job as well as Paramount, which back then had the oil company Gulf & Western as its parent, considering selling the property instead of ponying up the money to make it. According to Seal's article, Coppola's chief cheerleader for the job at Paramount was Peter Bart, then vice president in charge of creative affairs at the studio. Bart later would run Variety before leaving as the once powerful trade paper went into its death throes, with its probable mercy killing appearing imminent any day now.
"Bart felt that Coppola would not be expensive and would work with a small budget. Coppola passed on the project, confessing that he had tried to read Puzo’s book but, repulsed by its graphic sex scenes, had stopped at page 50. He had a problem, however: he was broke. His San Francisco–based independent film company, American Zoetrope, owed $600,000 to Warner Bros., and his partners, especially George Lucas, urged him to accept. “Go ahead, Francis,” Lucas said. “We really need the money. What have you got to lose?” Coppola went to the San Francisco library, checked out books on the Mafia, and found a deeper theme for the material. He decided it should be not a film about organized crime but a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America."
When Robert Evans, then-head of production at Paramount, heard what Coppola thought the story should be, Evans thought the young director had lost it. More importantly, he feared that Paramount execs above him such as studio president Stanley Jaffe would sell the
rights. Burt Lancaster had offered $1 million for them because he lusted after the role of Don Corleone for himself. The top studio brass weren't as hot as Evans on making the film anyway. Seal's account says "the studio bosses didn’t want to make the movie. Mob films didn’t play, they felt, as evidenced by their 1969 flop The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas as a Sicilian gangster." Evans employed a last-ditch maneuver in hopes of keeping The Godfather, Seal recounts further. "(H)e dispatched Coppola to New York to meet with (Gulf & Western Chairman Charlie) Bluhdorn. Coppola’s presentation persuaded Bluhdorn to hire him. Immediately, he began re-writing the script with Mario Puzo, and the two Italian-Americans grew to love each other.'Puzo was an absolutely wonderful man,' says Coppola. 'To sum him up, when I put a line in the script describing how to make sauce and wrote, ‘First you brown some garlic,’ he scratched that out and wrote, ‘First you fry some garlic. Gangsters don’t brown.’'" Crisis averted. Now Coppola and Paramount just had each other to fight, especially about casting.Since they thwarted Burt Lancaster's dream of playing Vito, Coppola and crew would need an actor to play the don. During discussions, according to Coppola's commentary track, they determined that the Don needed to be played by one of the world's greatest actors and
Coppola narrowed that list to two men — Brando, who being in his 40s at the time was younger than the sixtysomething Corleone, and Laurence Olivier, who was in the right age range, seen in the photo at the left as he looked in 1973 in a television production of The Merchant of Venice playing the original Shylock. When casting The Godfather though, representatives described Olivier's health to them as precarious, almost implying the bell would soon toll for the actor. Of course, this wasn't the case and Olivier recovered soon enough that when Brando won the best actor Oscar for 1972 for playing Vito, Olivier held one of the other four nominations for Sleuth and didn't die until 1989. While Brando did get the part, the studio fought like hell to prevent it. His
reputation as difficult and eccentric superseded his reputation as brilliant in their collective minds and it took a screen test, makeup tests and many promises that he'd be on his best behavior before Paramount agreed to let him play the part. Aside from his usual pranks on the set (such as in the scene when two men carry Vito upstairs on a gurney and he secretly added hundreds of pounds of weights beneath the sheet to watch them struggle), Brando actually stayed on his best behavior. Brando saved his only stunt for Oscar night when the world met a Native American woman who called herself Sacheen Littlefeather. (Digression: Coppola won Oscars for adapted screenplay three times: for the first two Godfathers and for Patton. Twice, the films also won best actor and both times, the actors refused to accept the Oscar — though George C. Scott announced in advance he wouldn't if he won and had said the same when nominated for The Hustler.) Imagine another scenario, one Paramount considered before Coppola's hiring. At one point, they seriously planned to cast Danny Thomas as the senior Corleone. I don't know if the film's title would have changed to Make Room for Godfather.Casting Vito turned out to be a breeze compared to many names floated to play Michael before Coppola was involved and the director and Paramount displaying equal intransigence about who should play Michael. From the beginning, Coppola visualized the actors as certain
characters in his head, going so far as to bring them down to American Zoetrope's San Francisco offices before any discussions with the studio. In his mind, Sonny always looked like James Caan and no one but Al Pacino played Michael. Back when it looked as if Danny Thomas would be playing the Don, the Gulf & Western CEO approached Warren Beatty not only to take the part of Michael but to produce and direct the film as well, Beatty told Mark Seal. This was 1970, not even a full three years since Bonnie and Clyde. Beatty said to Bluhdorn, "Charlie, not another gangster movie!" Film lovers reaped the rewards of Beatty refusing that offer, not only because ultimately it would lead to Coppola and Pacino in The Godfather but because instead Beatty teamed with Robert Altman on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Other actors considered for
Michael, some who actually received offers and turned them down included Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Ryan O’Neal, David Carradine and Jack Nicholson. One thing became clear: Once Paramount determined that it would make the film, it fought about everything. They hated the idea of Pacino as Michael. Evans told Coppola that Pacino was too short for the part and that "a runt" couldn't play Michael. Caan called up Coppola before the film started and informed him that the studio and just offered him the part of Michael. Not only had Coppola always envisioned Caan as Sonny, he viewed the character as the Americanized one and that Michael should look more traditionally Italian which Pacino did and Caan did not, especially since Caan's ancestry was Jewish not Italian. The studio relented long enough to get production started, though Coppola just knew he'd be fired at any time so, as an insurance policy, he scheduled Michael's killing of Sollozzo and police Capt. McCluskey (Al Lettieri, Sterling Hayden) for the first week of filming. Coppola credits this memorable sequence, seen in the clip below, for selling the studio on Pacino and saving his job — temporarily, but the director continued to feel at risk as the studio tried to undermine his ideas at nearly every turn.Robert Evans didn't like Nino Rota's score. Coppola decided to start playing rough with the studio. His certainty that he could be fired any moment freed him in a way so he began telling them to fire him each time the studio wanted to change something important to him. That music qualified as one of those for Coppola. Evans wouldn't budge, so they agreed to let a screening decide. The audience loved the
movie so much, no one even noticed the score, if you can believe that. Another time, the studio complained that the film didn't have enough "action" in it and told Coppola that they planned to send an action director to the set to see how to pick it up. To beat them to the punch, so to speak, he came up with the scene where Connie (Talia Shire) gets into a huge fight with Carlo (Gianni Russo) when she intercepts a phone call from a woman and assumes he's cheating on her. She starts throwing every dish in the apartment at him. Coppola's young son even got in on the fun — handing objects to his aunt from offscreen for her to let fly. If the studio
wasn't bitching about scenes they didn't see, they'd whine about ones that they told him should be coming out. On the commentary track, Coppola refers specifically about a studio hack that he doesn't name since the man has died who constantly appeared on the set saying, "We don't need that scene" or "That scene has been cut." Fortunately, on some sequences, Coppola covered the sequences with two cameras so when this man showed up to try to stop the famous scene of the Don's death in the garden while playing with his grandson, Coppola was able to shut off one to appease him while the second camera continued to work. The studio particularly hated that scene because of the costs associated with flying in the tomatoes and the hack's belief that just
cutting from the previous scene to Vito's funeral would make the point just as well. The other incident when Coppola believed his firing was imminent concerned the scene where Brando as the Don met with Sollozzo. The studio only would tell Coppola that something dissatisfied them about the scene. Coppola offered to reshoot it, but he was informed that wouldn't be necessary so he knew what that meant. Then, on the commentary, he offers one of his many pieces of advice that he directs specifically for young filmmakers. They'll never fire you on a Wednesday. They'll always wait until Friday, wanting to use the weekend for a smoother transition. Coppola realized he wasn't just making a movie. If he famously described the making of Apocalypse Now as Vietnam, then shooting The Godfather paralleled mob warfare so Coppola hit them before the studio could whack him. Coppola fired four people that day — assistant directors and others that he suspected as being the traitors, and threw Paramount into disarray. With those four gone, he reshot the scene, Paramount didn't object any longer and Coppola didn't get the axe. The final battle over the film came down to the editing process itself. Coppola wanted to cut the film in his San Francisco studios, Paramount wanted to cut it in L.A. Evans relented, but warned Coppola that if he turned in a movie with a running time longer than 2 hours and 15 minutes, they'd move editing to Los Angeles. The first cut ran 2 hours and 45 minutes. Coppola got brutal, removing anything that added color or could be considered extraneous. When done, he had trimmed it to 2 hours and 20 minutes. He took his chances and delivered that to Paramount in L.A. Evans complained that he cut all the color and best stuff and they were moving the editing to L.A.. Coppola realized they would have done that no matter what, but they basically put back everything he cut and then some ending up with the cut we know that's just five minutes short of three hours.Once the film had finished and it became abundantly clear that Coppola had made a hit for Paramount, they loved him. Its very limited opening weekend in merely six theaters took in $302,393 (an average of $50,398 per screen). That calculates today to $1,646,978.41 on six screens for a $274,491.86 per screen average. As The Godfather became a bigger hit, Coppola didn't get to enjoy its early success because now that Paramount valued him so much, Robert Evans begged him to come help re-write Jack Clayton's troubled adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford. For three weeks, Coppola says he was "pulling his hair out" trying to fix that. In the end, Coppola doesn't think that Clayton used any of his revisions in the dreadful Gatsby adaptation, which might end up looking better once Baz "Short Attention Span" Luhrmann releases his 3D version of Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
"I felt so embarrassed…I was very unhappy during The Godfather. I had been told by everyone that my ideas for it were so bad and I didn't have a helluva lot confidence in myself — I was only 30 years old or so — and I was just hangin' on by my wits…I had no idea that this nightmare was going to turn into a successful film much less a film that would become a classic."
Well, maybe directing a movie isn't always fun, at least that's Coppola's recollection of his time on The Godfather. He shot the film for $6.5 million in 52 days, but he admits he felt like an outsider on his own set. (Since it did become a huge blockbuster, Part II received a
budget bump to $11 million and they actually got to go on location for shooting.) He speaks honestly about how the great cinematographer Gordon Willis and other crewmembers wondered why Coppola got the job. They didn't quite understand things that he tried but by the sequel, that had all changed. That took some time to happen though. Willis, the man who deserves much of the credit for the film's great look, often shook his head at Coppola's ideas. He particularly disdained high shots, though Coppola made him do some anyway, specifically when they try to kill Vito so you can see the oranges roll into the street and during the Sollozzo killing. Coppola recounts one incident when nature called and as he sat in the bathroom stall, two crewmembers walked in, unaware of Coppola's presence. "What do you think of this director?" one asked the other. "Boy, he doesn't know anything. What an asshole he is!" the other replied. It didn't help Coppola's confidence. Listening to his commentary, it doesn't just illuminate the history of the film's production, you also hear Coppola react to things that still bother him because of the cheap production such as obvious stock footage of cars driving in New York in the 1940s or cheap second unit shots of signs in Las Vegas. The low budget did force some ingenuity on him as well. When it came time to
film the sequence where Michael goes to the hospital to see his recovering father and notices the lack of security, they didn't realize until editing that not enough suspense had been built up because where they filmed had such limited space. George Lucas searched through discarded strips of films for shots made of the hospital corridor and they strung them together to give the illusion that it was longer and to increase the suspense. Late in production, there turned out to be several scenes that Coppola realized they needed, the most important being that he'd failed to write a one-on-one scene between Pacino and Brando. Since he was in a frenzy as it was, he called up his friend Robert Towne and he quickly cranked out that memorable scene where Vito tells Michael what to watch out for and expresses regrets that he has assumed his role as don since he never wanted that life for him. He dreamed of a "Senator Corleone" or "Governor Corleone." Finally, Vito sighs, "There just wasn't enough time." "We'll get there, pop. We'll get there," Michael replies. One of the best-written scenes in the entire film came from a screenwriter who received no credit for it. Forget it Robert, it's Hollywood.
The Godfather comes stocked with so many memorable sequences, it's damn near impossible to list them all, but perhaps the most famous one of all, one which Coppola conceived for the movie, remains the most imitated of them all. Coppola himself tried to do variations in both of the Godfather sequels but, as with most things, it's hard to top the original. The ending killing spree montage surrounding the baptism of Carlo and Connie's newborn son with Michael standing by to be the child's godfather came about as a matter of practicality. In the novel, the revenge taken on the heads of the five families and Bugsy Siegel-stand-in Moe Green out in Vegas (played briefly but memorably by the great Alex Rocco) covered about 30 pages or so in the book. In the script, Coppola needed to condense that to two pages. As coincidence would have it, around the same time of the contemplation about how to accomplish this, Coppola's wife gave birth to future Oscar-winning screenwriter Sofia Coppola. Baby Sofia wasted no time joining the family business, even though she took on the acting challenge of portraying a baby boy. Her birth inspired Coppola to unify the killings around the baptism ceremony, something that seemed even more appropriate once he reminded himself of the specific baptism text. "Do you renounce Satan?" Still, Coppola said that the ingredient that makes the sequence truly work came courtesy of co-editor Peter Zinner who added the organ tract. Play the clip and try to imagine the sequence without that organ. I think Coppola has that exactly right.
Now, one final time I'm going to plug the Vanity Fair article from 2009 by Mark Seal called "The Godfather Wars". It's online and free and I was tempted to use a lot of material from it, but I had to cut somewhere so I didn't get into the really juicy stuff involving the real Frank Sinatra, the real mobsters and the interaction between the Mafia and the studios. Hell, I didn't even go into the story of who the real Johnny Fontane might have been. It's all in there, so it's worth reading. However, I'm not done. The Godfather was a trilogy after all, so I have one more post coming, which mostly will just me talking about what I think about the film itself with a little bit of other gangster-related entertainment thrown it. I give you my word: I'll do my damnedest to make certain that my third part turns out better than Coppola's did. I end with one last bit from Seal's piece, relating to something from the novel and what Mario Puzo said once.
"One of the most quoted lines from Puzo’s novel never made it to the screen: 'A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.' Before his death, in 1999, Puzo said in a symposium, 'I think the movie business is far more crooked than Vegas, and, I was going to say, than the Mafia.'”
Tweet
Labels: 70s, Altman, Brando, Caan, Coppola, Diane Keaton, Fitzgerald, George C. Scott, Hayden, Kael, Lancaster, Lucas, M. Sheen, Nicholson, Olivier, Pacino, Redford, Sinatra, Towne, W. Beatty
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
