TS: Godfather vs Godfather II

It's not a BAD film -- Pacino is just about as good (and Joe Mantegna offed too soon), but almost everything else is two to ten notches below the standard.

i am amused that dom kind of repped for 'you've got mail', upthread.

The bum lines are worse in II, and the pattern repetition thing is overdone, and I still can't figure out exactly what Fredo did (give the location of Michael's bedroom? Kill the shooters himself?). I do think the De Niro stuff romanticizes the Don, and that his turn to crime is a little too elegant. But it's still a great family drama.

III sucked mainly because he stopped being Michael and started doing "Al."

er, yes. I'm not a fan of dark, "well-upholstered" interiors per se. I love Willis' dark moody semi-exteriors in ATPM, but perhaps only because they're balanced by the warm light of the newsroom (never has fluorescence looked so good) and the, er, harsh light of day when Woodward walks through that Justice Department (?) courtyard.

A rather perverse claim, since at the time of On the Waterfront I don't believe Brando was getting his lines through an earpiece or from cue cards scattered around the set and taped to his fellow actors' foreheads.

god cazale makes me want to cry in II. damn.

I think I like the first one better. They are both true masterpieces.

i used to be a big fan of these and have had this conversation a bunch of times with friends. i've flipped back and forth over the years, but at this time in my life i think my answer is: Goodfellas.

Godfather. Godfather II was very good too, no doubt, but it was mostly Coppola whereas the first one came directly from Puzo's book (and did a wonderful job of editing, as there was a lot of editing to be done).

I've always been iffy on the Hymen Roth story, but other story arcs like Fredo's betrayal, and the Robert Deniro scenes (which sort of come from the book, but are modified a bit) make up for it.

I've always been curious what would have happened if they had left in popular characters from the book Nino Valenti and Lucy and her doctor boyfriend, and ended the first movie after Michael shoots the cop and Sollozzo, and then picked up the second movie after that, ending it where the first movie did.

I kinda think though they did the right thing in getting rid of those excess characters as on the screen it can get tedious.

The Godfather remains the only movie I've seen more than 10 times.

it's too bad they couldn't get clemenza back for 2, and brando.

also anyone who complains about brando in one i am not on the level with

I'm going with the first one, though I like them both.

i mean for all the great sadness and double-layered story of the second, with the first you've got brando... james caan... clemenza dude (forgot his name)... abe fuckin' vigoda!!

My father loved the book, and when he originally heard in the 70's Marlon Brando was going to play Vito Corleone, almost blew a gasket, and said he thought he was going to be horrible. He loved his performance!

And so do I.

"Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking again!"

yea, it really was a tour de force of acting.

If they were making a movie like that for the first time today they'd get a bunch of pencil dicks to play half of the parts.

Ben Affleck as Fredo Corleone....

The ending of the first one is also just plain one of the greatest endings ever.

the murder of the heads of the five families while Michael becomes Godfather to Connie's son...gives me CHILLS

The ending of the first one is also just plain one of the greatest endings ever.

-- Eric H., Sunday, January 13, 2008 8:47 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

ya. it's so familiar and i've seen it a billion times and yet seeing it again the other day that last shot still hit me in the gut.

II. Because Leopoldo Trieste is in it and the whole Don Fanucci Assassination sequence is awesome. I love the entire DeNiro part of the film w/o reservation.

I like that Sterling Hayden is the bad cop in "I".

don fanucci so great. love the way he slurps back his coffee.

Don Fanucci : what a peacock. I kind of love that Vito messes with him for a bit before the meeting in the stairwell.

pretty great flicks, i'll go with II. the first one is awes but also just slightly more ridiculous and i've never been able to buy michael going from xmas-shopping civilian to ice-cold soldier that quickly, at least in the manner that it played in the film.

though i think as both versions of michael he's totally hoos for the role.

im surprised you dont buy the transition, i think that's done sooooo well.

i mean, if you think that doesn't work, doesn't that pretty much wreck the entire movie?

i don't understand the confusion about II's plot- it's a couple of years since i've seen it but i could follow it pretty well at the time.

anyway- II for me, but they're both great films. i've never seen three but might pull the boxset out of the xmas wrapping tonight if it's quiet.

ModigGrabb12 (6 days ago) Show Hide
Who is the Godfather in the movie The Godfather? and do he die? please answer and dont say like watch the movie : )

Thegodfather847 (4 days ago) Show Hide
watch the movie

lol

re-watched both of these recently. both great, but i think i'd go with one.

on the current "Coppola restoration" of I & II:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2008/09/the-coppola-res.html

"G,
I hear the new Godfather restorations are an improvement, and look as good as they ever did, but they do not live up to the expectations set by the home theater crowd. Apparently Gordon Willis, who supervised the operation, went back and duplicated the look the films had when they originally premiered...."

Not to be disrespectful or vulgar, but the "home theater crowd" can go eat a bag of dicks.

I've looked at about an hour of the Blu-ray of One, and I admit they did a very bold thing. They reproduced the film with all the grain, with all the blown-out whites of the wedding scene...all the same "imperfections" that made the studio people want to fire Willis. And help make Godfather the glorious film it is. I'll be looking at a lot more in detail soon.

There's no fucking hope for these people, I swear.

more on the new discs... I've seen these enough for awhile, but would visit if someone has BluRay.

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/006733.html

I really wish the Godfather Epic thing they did for NBC back in the day was on DVD. Still the best version I've seen.

all that footage is available in one of the older sets, yeah?

or just not cut together 'chronologically'?

I really wish the Godfather Epic thing they did for NBC back in the day was on DVD. Still the best version I've seen.

^^^

Kehr's review today made these new prints sound mouthwatering.

As bonus scenes maybe, but yeah the NBC version (which they released on VHS in the 90s) is the only one which sets it up chronologically.

I remember that version, and you can see why they cut scenes like Vito and the boys visiting the dying consigliere, but they do add texture.

plus young hyman roth!

I watched the two of them eight years ago, and haven't seen them since. At the time, I thought the first one was superb and was left lukewarm by the second one, but I'm not sure if there was necessarily anything rational about either reaction.

the NBC recut is the only version I've seen, when it was rerun on AMC or something a few years ago. but I didn't see the whole thing, so as a result, I've only seen part of 2 and part of 1! I should finally watch these

Rosenbaum on I & II, Kael, and Bush's America:

For the Pauline Kael who viewed Kane as “kitsch redeemed”, the notion that The Godfather could be viewed as a different kind of kitsch rather than as a noble Shakespearean tragedy is never considered, because there are certain ideological givens about American violence and power, even at their most infantile and unreasoning, that are too serious to be scoffed at, especially when they’re bathed in “Rembrandt” lighting....

This development can perhaps be traced in part back to Kael’s use of the adjective “Shakespearean” near the end of the first paragraph of her review of The Godfather, Part II. Her second paragraph—– which casually identified its predecessor as “the greatest gangster picture ever made,” immediately after announcing that Part II “enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning” of its predecessor—–marked the lamentable suspension of her Orwellian scoffing at pretension that was perhaps the strongest virtue of her early criticism. In terms of her own unapologetic trash aesthetic, a far better candidate for “greatest gangster picture” would surely be the Hawks-Hecht-Hughes Scarface, no less arty than Coppola’s blockbuster but far more exuberant and irresponsible (and far more honest about its own amorality), and in most respects closer to the starkness of Greek tragedy, incest and all, than to any Shakespearean tragedy or historical melodrama.

It’s a moot point whether Coppola intended this, but the ethical contrast between Vito Corleone (Brando) as an earthy, charismatic gentleman Mafiosi and his cold-blooded son and successor Michael (Pacino), a Machiavellian who winds up engineering the deaths of family members—–a brother-in-law in the first film, a brother in the second–—tends to mystify or at least detract from the degree to which both men are killers. If we’re being asked to brood about the moral and stylistic decline of the Corleones, we’re less likely to be attentive to the continuity of violence between the nostalgically depicted past and the more coarsely perceived near-present.

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=14913

Mocking pretension does not mean you accept trash at all times.

good article but this:

Mythologies about macho power and the pride of wanton blood-spilling are arguably at the roots of what put George W. Bush twice into office

is total bullshit.

I would agree -- no more than they raised the new Michael Corleone to power.

^^ not sure if that is or is not a ref to obama

By contrast, consider all the depictions of violence in such otherwise very different films as Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and Jarmusch’s Dead Man, which refuse the very possibility of violence having any kind of dignity whenever or however it occurs.

really have no idea what he's getting at. TRotG really is too dissimilar and i don't know why he's brought it up. but i don't think the violence in 'the godfather' is more dignity-y than in the (incredibly boring and lame) 'dead man'. even then, is this a generalizable principle? he appears to be applying it as one.

it's illegitimate to bring in bush to back up this point anyway.

i think he's in dodgy territory talking about that tudor propagandist shakespeare, too.

The outsized success of both Godfathers helped to mark the eclipse of foreign film distribution in the U.S. for the sake of glossy American art movies, a little bit before Woody Allen’s (and Martin Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s) mining of similar fields started to take hold.

interesting point (although it can't be a criticism of 'the godfather', or indeed of any other film), though, y'know, bertolucci released 'last tango' and '1900' after it, and in fact 'the conformist' had been a paramount film; and iirc 'the leopard' had hollywood money in it (and it was rubbish). something tells me there may be bigger reasons why art-house distrib declined after the early '70s.

the relevance of 'psycho' eludes me.

'the leopard' had hollywood money in it (and it was rubbish)

rong but it was also '63 so I'm not sure how that fits in unless you think it was by Bertolucci (wdn't surprise me)

imo he's drawing a false dichotomy between european and american cinema, the date is irrelevant.

i have no idea why you would think i would think bertolucci directed that film.

would have to look into it, but as remains the case, european cinema tends to depend on upfront distribution $$$ from the evil americans. why coooouuuuld explain why the (incredibly awful) film stars an american.