Film Glow 3 - Blood Ties: The Godfather, Seven Samurai Revisited, Last Night in Soho...

Film Glow III, Saturday, October 30

Is The Godfather the best film ever made? It’s a rhetorical question. I mean, does it really matter? There are so many candidates for that lofty perch, we’re never going to come to a consensus. I can’t even come a consensus with myself. Allow me to point you in the direction of my 100 Perfect Films column, a riposte to those who ask after my favourite film at dinner parties. If nothing else, you’ll gain a fundamental understanding of why I rarely get invited to dinner parties. And before you complain, I appreciate that no film is actually perfect (by what scale would we judge such things?), it gave me a snappy hashtag. The joy of cinema is that we get to have all the best films ever made. Nevertheless, there is something about this gangster classic that still sings so clearly above the rabble.

The 50th anniversary of The Godfather looms in 2022, and the race is on to get the retrospectives written, think pieces thought, and ageing survivors of cast and crew on the record. To spin the gold of a new perspective. If that is possible. New books are being published: Mark Seal’s thorough history of the film’s tortured making, Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli (from Gallery Books); the excellent Sam Wasson, who went deep into Chinatown with The Big Goodbye, is busy on a history of the Zoetrope dream; and there is my own dancing, daring survey of a remarkable family, The Coppolas - A Movie Dynasty (from Palazzo Editions).

The turbulence of the Godfather years, the indelible link between strife and expression, fascinated me. Here lay the key to the man. Francis Ford Coppola needed to hold a film in a grip so tight it drew blood. To direct with such passion is to leave yourself vulnerable. But adversity always brought the best out of him. The Godfather serves as a test case for how greatness often emerges from the strangest and darkest and most human of circumstances. What was it Godard said? Every film is an autobiography of its own making, something like that. Does he get invited to dinner parties?

Of course, there is a very good argument that Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (technically it should be called Seven Ronin, but even the Emperor was slave to the snappy designation) is the greatest the medium has to show for itself, and the epic is taking a turn back in cinemas (mainly arthouses, but do try, you won’t regret it) restored to former glory. The entire action genre is rooted in its dynamism. Is there a greater film on rain? And Kurosawa too had his turmoil. Hold that thought.

First, the reason I’ll always take the Corleones over the Roys. Or how a masterpiece was made in a fit of pique…

The Godfather Vs. Succession

Coppola is a man given to regrets. Chief among them is The Godfather. “I see those films almost as a personal failure,” he said, a refrain he returns to as regularly as critics fall into raptures over the saga that made both his reputation and his first fortune (boom and bust was another lament). That first film alone, bathed in Goyaesque shadows, wells of sepia and inky black, or pierced by brilliant sunlight, a steady, unsettling rhythm of light and dark, is as familiar to us as our own memories. The undertaker Bonasera making his entreaties to Brando’s Don, looming out of the gloom like the prow of a ship. Jack Woltz awakening to sheets slicked with the blood of his prize thoroughbred, actor John Marley breaking into wails as the severed head is discovered (a very real prop, delivered from a New Jersey slaughterhouse). Former wrestler Lenny Montana holding his breath until his face turned puce as he is garrotted at the bar. Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. The final shot of the door shut in Diane Keaton’s knowing face as Kay, a wife witness to damnation. The problem with The Godfather is that it lives up to its billing.

Does Coppola really not see that he made one of the enduring monuments of American culture?

But his memories are forever tainted by the agonies he endured during the film’s making. “It was a total collapse of my self-confidence on my part; it was just an awful experience,” he said. “I’m nauseated to think about it.” Hindsight recalls a young artist cornered by circumstance - mostly financial, and mostly of his own making. George Lucas – best friend, collaborator, Jiminy Cricket - gave it to him straight: if he didn’t take the quick studio payday of The Godfather then their Zoetrope dream of freedom, the company they had formed away from the beady eyes of those studios in San Francisco, was as good as dead. The money had run out, and bailiffs were threatening to chain up the gates to their Folsom Street office. The ship was sinking. The Godfather, insisted Lucas, was a lifeboat. Still Coppola hesitated. Accepting the studio dollar might smother his career as an artist. It went against everything he was striving for - small, personal films encompassing life and family. The autobiographical touch. This was some cheap shot gangster flick midway down the Paramount roster. But as Peter Biskind concluded, “The Godfathers would be the most personal films Coppola would ever make.”

Fittingly (and Coppola’s career is crested by such symbolic moments) it was his father, Carmine, who soothed his troubled mind. Compromise was part of life. Take the money. Feed your kids. So the son took the offer, as he has been told so repeatedly, he could not refuse. And in regret he span gold.

As critic Michael Sragow ventured, on the occasion of the film’s 25th, Coppola had achieved a popular artist’s “Holy Grail” and Grails can be great burdens for those who discover them. His film was a marriage of “groundbreaking expression and popular acceptance”. The very first event film. And much of what we consider our golden age of narrative television is a legacy of its novelistic reach. Take the current brouhaha surrounding the third season of Succession with its global power-brokers and their complex offspring. The milieu of media magnates might be marginally more legitimate than those of the Mafia, but it it is a tale as old as the Sicilian hills. Blood ties.

Succession is richly dramatic and potty mouthed, coursing with humour as dark and tasty as truffle oil, so very hip, but it’s no Godfather. What Coppola gave us was grandeur and intimacy. He flipped a cash-grab potboiler into majesty. And it had the eyes.

Endless studio pressure (he was supposedly hired as a pushover), backbiting from within his crew, indeed outright mutiny, all stirred revenge - and retribution came in the shape of art infused with a life force, and a moral uncertainty that stopped your breath. Not once in this career, however mighty or fallen the outcome, could you accuse Coppola of indifference. This though was a new paradigm for film: realism and opera. In his exhaustion he changed an industry. As David Thomson extolled, we should “notice how it stands for a brief era when the details of our evil could be inspected without moral relief being insisted upon.” Could that exhilarating nihilism only be born of an artist at his lowest ebb?

Force of will won so many battles: to retain the the postwar America of Mario Puzo’s novel; to shoot on location in New York, which sent the budget spiralling; to cast Brando as the Don over Paramount’s strict edict that the idea was a not even to be countenanced, to cast “that midget” Pacino, as Robert Evans, Paramount’s dashing, difficult head of production, snapped. Victories all - triumphs in the final reckoning.

The point, however, is not that Coppola compelled Paramount, but that Coppola was finally compelled by The Godfather. That he found his peace with the material (if nothing else) when he saw the family saga beneath the melodrama of Puzo’s organised crime. This was King Lear or the Kennedys: fathers and sons, the small matter of succession, the transition of power. Which of the three brothers should wear the Corleone crown? Or when will the penny drop that there is but one choice - Michael, youngest and purest of the three.

Did we notice how each brother possessed a facet of Coppola himself: hotheaded Sonny; sickly, forgotten Fredo, icy visionary Michael?

History decrees that Coppola was saved by his footage. There were plans to remove him, with LA fretting they had made a terrible mistake over reports of murky, unusable scenes and a director in over his head, fighting daily skirmishes with cinematographer Gordon Willis. There were spies loose among his crew. Coppola’s paranoia was well founded. But the shooting of Sollozzo (the thuggish Al Lettieri), who has dared an assassination attempt on the Don, convinced Evans to stay his execution. This was scene 33 in the sublime gradient of sequences and styles, shot on the Wednesday and Thursday of the first week in Louis’s restaurant in The Bronx, a venue sliced out of history as finely as a garlic shaving. Recall the details: the tiled floor, white tablecloths, and quiet hubbub of locals at their leisure; the veal being slurped up by paid off officer and bodyguard McClusky (Sterling Hayden), the young Corleone, unwhetted in the family business, awaiting his moment. This is the scene around which the entire film pivots, when Michael’s fate is set.

Remind yourself of the monumentality of the film’s violence. The gun secreted behind the toilet cistern. Michael pulling the trigger, each crack a gut-punch: first Sollozzo through the forehead, a pink cloud blooming in the air behind him; then McClusky, through the throat, his expression momentarily perplexed, then through the head. The use of music is inspired, or the lack of it. Coppola holds back. Tension rises through background noise, the insistent thrum of a Subway train. Too loud to be real, an artistic choice. We stare into Michael’s eyes, a transformation underway. This was the secret alchemy of The Godfather - to be able to peer inside its hero and see the shutters fall.

Only when Michael’s gun clatters to the floor does the music return, Nino Rota’s unforgettable theme, taut with sorrow and yearning. Much fuss has recently been made over Hans Zimmer’s relentless ethno-industrial clamour in Dune that doesn't so much underpin the drama as overwhelm it. In The Godfather, the soft music pierces your heart.

Succession is Michael’s curse not his triumph - it is a tale of damnation, a damnation Coppola felt each day he returned to set and battle would resume. He was dammed into greatness.

Talking of which…

The Raptures of Seven Samurai

Two hours into Kurosawa’s seminal epic, his camera’s gaze becomes transfixed by a smouldering fire. There the camera waits. And just as the scene seems to stretch beyond its means, to teeter on discomfort, the fire begins to hiss and steam and slowly, surely is extinguished. Kurosawa’s tumultuous finale has arrived; an already evident triumph is about to be caressed by that elusive brushstroke known as genius. He made it rain.

There are symbolic reasons for the downpour: nature’s luminous tears spilled over man’s violence and Kurosawa’s signature use of elemental portents to signal his proud warriors’ impending doom. Ultimately, it was the director’s instinctive feel for visceral action that demanded the sodden battlefield, here his stunning dynamics are given a hellish acuity of mud and motion, the film’s incessant movement wrapped in silvery halos of steaming, breathless realism. There had been nothing like it anywhere in movies. If you're seeking a sequence to define what sets cinema apart, its distillation of life into rhapsodic imagery, you could do no better.

Director’s careers are often graced by periods of peak fitness: Leone in the mid sixties, Coppola in the early seventies, Spielberg’s eighties, Tarantino’s early nineties takeover. Few though can match the startling fertility of Kurosawa throughout the 50s, for this was the director’s exalted jidai-geki phase, a series of period films set amongst the embattled samurai of 16th century Japan that was to transform cinema just as The Godfather would almost twenty years later. From Rashomon, in 1951, through Throne Of Blood and Hidden Fortress, to Yojimbo and Sanjuro as the sixties began, he established Japanese filmmaking on the world stage, an auteur of blood, fire and fury, becalmed by a strong humanist streak. In 1954 he created his masterpiece, and Seven Samurai remains the measure for all action movies, standing guard over the landscape of film.

Kurosawa, hailed after the international success of Rashomon, had sought to use his newfound influence to expose the blank platitudes of a genre suffused with one-dimensional, blade-happy B-movies known as chambara. Like Coppola, here was an auteur determined to construct a meaningful past. Likewise, he wasn’t going to neglect the designs of populist moviemaking: “I thought I would make a film which was entertaining enough to eat, as it were.” And so he did.

Calling upon his own family heritage, Kurosawa bypassed the misty-eyed deification of the fabled warriors. Researching a script for a day-in-the-life look at a samurai, he happened upon a tale of a lonely village plagued by bandits as their crops ripen, reluctantly seeking the assistance of a band of samurai guardians, paid only in rice and board. Here he saw a perfect prism for the complexities of Japan’s debilitating caste system, and a chance to affirm a Zen-like creed of valour — not for glory, not for gain, but for one’s soul.

The farmers believe by necessity they have to grasp an evil to fend off an evil. Our samurai are in fact ronin, masterless, forbidden to take on the life of any other caste. It is hinted the bandits themselves are just such ronin curdled into wickedness by deprivation. When the seven arrive at the village they are met by fear, hatred, even disgust, not adulation. When the surviving samurai turn to leave at the close of the battle, the villagers have forgotten them, returning to their songs of rice and renewal. It is in Kurosawa’s onscreen muse, Toshiro Mifune, we find the film’s key: draped in samurai armour, pilfered by the villagers long ago, he rages to his fellow warriors: “But then, who made animals out of them? You.” He is the son of a farmer, not a true samurai at all.

Knowing even the tricky Buscholtz-Dexter corner of the Magnificent line up is nothing to reeling off the seven disparate voices of this fighting unit. Takeshi Shimura (the leader), Ko Kimura (the novice), Daisuke Kato (the best friend), Yoshio Inaba (the big man), Minoru Chiaki (the indifferent one), Seiji Miyaguchi (the sword master) and the great Mifune (the mad one): Kurosawa had a backstory, folders full of detail, for each of them. And, yet, each is bought to life with the simplest of gestures. Art invested with life.

Mifune, a last-minute addition to the script, is the beating heart of the movie, a squall of jitterbug volatility, a Bushido Jerry Lewis who only finally stills when we view his slain body washed by that tragic rain. He offers a polar opposite to Pacino’s quiet certainty as Michael Corleone, dancing over the hinterland of parody, yet this is equally a masterclass.

Over a troubled year-long shoot, almost entirely on location to feed Kurosawa’s lust for naturalism, the director divined processes with which to capture lightning in a bottle. He worked off three cameras, letting the action churn and knot without hindrance. Early on, the band is alerted by a clanging alarm bell, and in a blood-rush of visual control he cuts between the individuals, positioned identically in the centre of the frame, the background telescoped by deep focus, hurtling to the call to action. They are as one, aflame with purpose.

It’s not just a matter of the camera’s hyperactive zeal, the film is cut to a miraculous, economy of storytelling. Over three hours nothing is wasted, nothing overplayed. Death will come, acts of great courage, and finally victory, but for what? Shimura’s eyes pass from the graves of their fallen comrades, each marked by a single katana, to the farmers returned to their fields. “Again we lose,” he concludes sadly. Here lies Kurosawa’s truth: “being” is what has value, “reward” is as treacherous as the elements.

The director was attacked at home for sullying their national cinema. His tastes ran to the cross-cultural, especially Hollywood and the Western genre (whose folkloric depictions of wandering gunfighters was a mirror to the jidai-geki). He openly cited John Ford’s myth making as inspiration. Kurosawa’s influence flooded back to Hollywood, crashing through the Western, with Seven Samurai at the crest of the wave. John Sturges paid colourful tribute by remaking the film beat-for-beat as The Magnificent Seven. Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistful Of Dollars. And, of course, having chivvied Coppola into embracing destiny, George Lucas discovered his Star Wars mythos in Kurosawa’s version of the rank and file of Bushido lore. Later, in 1980, Lucas and Coppola would return the favour by producing a struggling Kurosawa’s rebirth in the way of the samurai with the mighty Kagemusha.

Other thoughts…

Last Night in Soho: you may have heard that Edgar Wright has a new film out, set in the neon-smeared heart of sixties London. You have to give him credit, he knows how to promote. He’s made a flashy, woozy number, hot with references to the movie lore of the swinging sixties and a fragrant stab at Giallo’s florid colour schemes. The recreation of the sleazy past is impeccable. The mirror shots are to die for. But I found the mechanics, the time slip that allows sensitive present-day fashion student Thomasin Mackenzie to inhabit the dark fate of Anya Taylor-Joy’s wannabe sixties singer, conveniently fuzzy. While the last act is pretty overwrought. Old habits cheapen the effect.

And with that farewell. But please spread the word.

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