Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Issue 07 May-July 1975 Source: ejumpcut.org Jump Cut was founded as a print publication by John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage in Bloomington, Indiana, and published its first issue in1974. It was conceived as an alternative publication of media criticism—emphasizing left, feminist, and LGBTQ perspectives. It evolved into an online publication in 2001, bringing all its back issues with it. This electronic version was created with the approval of the Jump Cut editors and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. Table of Contents Jump Cut, no. 7, May-July 1975 The Godfather, part II by John Hess Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More by Russell E. Davis Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More by Teena Webb and Betsy Martens Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More by Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary The Middle of the World by Ying Ying Wu Chac by Shelton H. Davis Westworld by Gerald Mead and Sam Applebaum Galileo by Martin Walsh Le Gai Savoir by James Monaco Le Gai Savoir by Ruth Perlmutter Images of minority/foreign groups in U.S. film, part 1 by Patricia Erens Metz and film semiotics by Sam Rohdie Responses to The Pedestrian by Evan Pattak Film as a Subversive Art reviewed by Chuck Kleinhans The Wheel of Law by Ho Chi Minh Editorial: Theory/criticism/reviewing/practice To navigate: Other than the table of contents the links inside a PDF are active. Use the bookmarks to the left on a PDF file. If they don’t appear click the small ribbon icon on the left edge. Search by using ctrl-F (PC) or command-F (Mac). Clicking “Edit” on the top ribbon will bring up a menu that also has a find function (PC or Mac). If you’re on the Archive website then use the “Search inside” field at the top right. Other options are available for different types of files. JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA Godfather II A deal Coppola couldn't refuse by John Hess from Jump Cut, no. 7, 1975, pp. 1, 10-11 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1975, 2004 “The film always was a loose metaphor; Michael as America.”—Francis Ford Coppola GODFATHER II is the greatest Hollywood film since CITIZEN KANE and one of the three or four best Hollywood films ever made. I think the film affected me so powerfully even after several viewings because it presents and plays on most of the now threatened bourgeois values which I was taught to believe in and respect—family ties, social mobility, the quest for security and respectability in a competitive world, the friendship between men engaged in the same work, the importance of religion, and individualism . I grew up in a large, newly urbanized, upper middle-class Pennsylvania German family whose religion was Mennonite. I spent the first sixteen years or so of my life surrounded by relatives; the experience was mostly positive and comfortable. As I grew older, it and I both changed. I left it behind, but deep inside many of those ideals and the childhood experience which gave then strength remain intact. When Michael reaches out to Connie, who has returned to the family, when a confused Michael seeks the advice of his mother, when Vito Corleone’s mother begs for the life of her only remaining son, when Vito builds his family and gathers his friends—I am affected because these scenes evoke in me the past experience of and the present need for the community that is being expressed and groped for on the screen. The film’s all-pervasive theme is the warmth, strength, and beauty of family ties which, in bourgeois society, alone appear to meet the desperate need we all feel for human community. The counter theme and the real strength of the film is its demonstration that the benefits of the family structure and the hope for community have been destroyed by capitalism. Thus all those tender, moving family scenes are immediately crushed by the needs of “business,” Coppola’s word for capitalism in the film. Connie and Michael never speak after the scene mentioned above. The next time we see Michael, after the scene with his mother, he is denying before a Congressional committee that he runs drug traffic, prostitution, gambling, and other “nefarious” business activities in the State of New York. Vito’s mother is shotgunned because the very existence of the young Vito threatens the business and life of Don Ciccio. Vito’s brutal murder of Fanucci is the prelude to his success. All the tender and moving moments in the film are only warm interludes among the lies, horror, brutality, and murder. The idealized familial cohesiveness and the power this cohesiveness seems to assure the threatened individual in our irrational, dehumanizing society explain, in part, the current interest in the Mafia and the popularity of the gangster film (especially those couple-on-the run films such as SUGARLAND EXPRESS, BADLANDS, etc.). For the family is the last apparent refuge against the enforced socialization and alienation of human activity under capitalism. And while the defense of the family must be seen as reactionary during the transition to socialism, this defense is perfectly understandable. People do not defend the real, actual, everyday family experience, but the Ideal of the Family, the emotional communion it represents and promises, the special beauty attributed to it by bourgeois ideology (“And I take a Geritol tablet every day”). To present and explain this complex interaction between our social system and our personal lives, Coppola set himself a large task without having the conceptual equipment—a marxist analysis of society—to carry it out clearly. GODFATHER II has been unfavorably compared with THE GODFATHER. The sequel, if we can call it that, does not have the fast pace and the drama of the first film. It does contain a great deal of sentimentality, repetition, and melodrama. By comparison with THE GODFATHER and THE CONVERSATION, it is an awkward, rough film which often seems on the verge of breaking down. Had Coppola and his coworkers had the time to edit the film properly, they might have produced a smoother film. But the basic structure and ingredients would have remained the same. I'm second-guessing Coppola, but I see these apparent weaknesses as part of Coppola’s attempt to present his vision of the United States as he has experienced it. The slow pace, the repetition, and the lack of drama are distancing devices which are designed to prevent the kind of misunderstanding which surrounded THE GODFATHER. “I was disturbed that people thought I had romanticized Michael, when I felt I had presented him as a monster at the end of THE GODFATHER.”(1) The sentimentality is there, but only to set up the audience for the demolition of the sentiments in the following sequence. The sentimentality of Vito’s arrival at Ellis Island only softens the audience up for the lawn party in the first Michael sequence which follows it. The film works, makes its statement, through juxtaposition. Either of the segments, Michael’s or Vito’s, or both connected in a linear fashion, first Vito’s and then Michael’s, would be the traditional dynasty film, such as GIANT, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, and THE DAMNED. It’s in the juxtaposition, in the simultaneous presentation of the two time periods, that Coppola makes the associations necessary to produce a more analytical description of this historical process(2) For example, in the Cuban sequence, which comes at the mid-point and is also the turning point in the film, Coppola juxtaposes a major Mafia- corporate deal with the advent of the Cuban revolution. This is as far as Coppola can go toward a socialist analysis. But only here is a counter force to the corruption of capitalism shown. Coppola can't deal with this important historical event very clearly. But one thing is clear: the venal gangsters, businessmen, and politicians, who symbolically divide up a cake with a map of Cuba in the icing, are thrown out by a superior force. This revolutionary force is superior because it does not rely on money but on the belief in a new and better way of life. Coppola achieves his aim at the most obvious level by contrasting the rise of Vito Corleone and the degeneration of his son, Michael. The film consists of five Vito sequences, five Michael sequences, and a short coda which ties all these sequences to the previous film, THE GODFATHER. The transitions between the sequences concern the themes of family and business, the search for bourgeois security and its elusiveness. The first Vito sequence ends on a note of sad hope. The young Vito, who has miraculously escaped the wrath of Don Ciccio, sits alone in a quarantine cell on Ellis Island, calling on the only community left to him —he sings a hymn. Outside the window is the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of the new, hoped-for community in the United States. Both the music and the image dissolve slowly to the first communion of Michael Anthony Corleone (Vito’s grandson). The juxtaposition of the ragamuffin singing in his cell and the wealthy grandson participating in a richly appointed church service indicates hope fulfilled, in fact, represents the fulfillment of the dream of all those tattered masses who passed through the turnstiles of Ellis Island. But this appearance is quickly destroyed by the garish, hectic, repulsive lawn party at Michael’s Lake Tahoe estate.