By the end of the movie, however, when the new Godfather presides over the murders of the heads of the New York underworld’s five families, as well as two or three miscellaneous enemies (I lost count) these deaths are becoming mechanical and meaningless. “With startling close ups, vivid death agony sequences and Technicolor blood spurting everywhere, these new style movie murders do manage to hold audience attention. This is the way he describes the violence. Shannon, and this was, you know, this was a time when you could still be morally outraged by sex and violence in the films and still be able to be published in New York Times. Wes: And but there’s one in The New York Times by William V. And, you know, I poked around for some contemporaneous reviews, and there’s one really cool one by Pauline Kael. Wes: I didn’t do a lot of secondary reading for this, although you turned me on to The Godfather Notebook, which is absolutely amazing and shows how much thought Coppola put into all of this. Wes: When the norm becomes murder and you can’t even think of what the other kind of death is…Įrin: Exactly! I mean, I wonder what that says about me or about culture, that I’m like, “Oh, this one is better because it has so many great deaths in it.” But I think that’s a big part of the appeal of these films. Everything else is just murder.Įrin: One non-murder death, one natural… natural death. But the first one has so many iconic deaths, death and murder scenes, and I just I guess there’s only one iconic death in it. There’s something really poetic about that. So even though my favorite death occurs in the second film, when Vito’s mom dies in the garden of that evil Sicilian…Įrin: …and those two guys come with shotguns and they just like, blow the mother… she’s knocked back, you know, she’s blown away by the blast. But I realized that one of the reasons why I like the first film better, which I don’t know what this says about me, is there are more deaths in the first film, and the deaths are way more interesting and creative. But I think the stuff with Michael, in Cuba, it just gets so depressing. And I love the scene at the San Gennaro Festival in the streets of Little Italy, when he’s on the rooftop looking down. I think that Part II has that great prequel, with Vito’s rise and those great scenes of him coming as a kid through Ellis Island, which I love. I think I’m now a Part I person, as I get older, weirdly. What do you think?Įrin: I used to be a Part II person. But I haven’t seen it recently enough to evaluate. I mean, I’ve seen it, of course, several times, but God knows when the last time I saw it was, and I know that there are many people who say that the second one is the best one. Wes: I was worried you’re gonna ask me about Part II. Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.Įrin: Wes, where do you fall on the Part I versus Part II supremacy debate. Subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Android | RSS Visit to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Food with Former New York Times food journalist and bestselling author Mark Bittman and Movie Therapy, in which Siskel & Ebert meets Dear Abby.Įmail enquire about advertising on the podcast. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Get (post)script episodes by becoming a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Within and without the world of the film, can one consider Don Corleone a great man? Or does his moral code, like his favor, always hide a transaction? Wes & Erin give their analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film, “ The Godfather.” It is not money, but friendship that he asks of Buonasera. As the camera draws back, we see the outline of a face, a hand… Don Corleone holds court at the confluence of loyalty and duress, generosity and calculation, power and fragility. He pleads for the justice that the American legal system denied him. Out of the darkness of the opening frames comes a supplicant- Buonasera the undertaker.
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