The Big Screen (68 page)

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:

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), but 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 Ji
í 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.

Forman was set with an American career. He would win Best Picture again (with Saul Zaentz), for
Amadeus
(1984); he would do the icy wit of
Valmont
(1989); and he would provide one of our least-acknowledged defenses of American libertarianism,
The People vs. Larry Flynt
(1996). Alas, by then, the public did not welcome such appealing subversion in its films. The other Czechs had far less success, though we should make space for Ivan Passer's
Cutter's Way
(1981), another film that failed to find its deserved audience. By the early 1980s the audience had lost its propensity for feeling alarmed at its own state and nation—it was the year of energetic escapism (
Raiders of the Lost Ark
), familial sentiment (
On Golden Pond
), and that curious example of a detached film about communism, Warren Beatty's
Reds
. At the same time, 1980 saw Louis Malle working in America on
Atlantic City
, a nostalgic recollection of American crime films, in which Burt Lancaster was able to show how his toughs from the 1940s might have grown sad and wise, without giving up their act.