MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Der Pate [de] )

USA 1972
d: Francis Ford Coppola
Paramount Home Video (Region 2 de)

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An everyday story of Mafia folk, incorporating a severed horse's head in the bed and a number of heartwarming family occasions, as well as pointers on how not to behave in your local trattoria (i.e. blasting the brains of your co-diners out all over their fettuccini). Mario Puzo's novel was brought to the screen in bravura style by Coppola, who was here trying out for the first time that piano/fortissimo style of crosscutting between religious ritual and bloody machine-gun massacre that was later to resurface in a watered-down version in "The Cotton Club". See Brando with a mouthful of orange peel. Watch Pacino's cheek muscles twitch in incipiently psychotic fashion. Trace his rise from white sheep of the family to budding don and fully-fledged bad guy. Singalong to Nino Rota's irritatingly catchy theme tune. Its soap operatics should never have been presented separately from Part II.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"A wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise. The movie is a popular melodrama with its roots in the gangster films of the thirties, but it expresses a new tragic realism, and it's altogether extraordinary. ... The visual scheme is based on the most obvious life-and-death contrasts; the men meet and conduct their business in deep-toned, shuttered rooms, lighted by lamps even in the daytime, and the story moves back and forth between this hidden, nocturnal world and the sunshine that they share with women and children. ... The dark-and-light contrast is so operatic and so openly symbolic that it perfectly expresses the basic nature of the material. The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters: innocence versus knowledge-knowledge in this sense being the same as guilt.... There are rash, foolish acts in the movie but no acts of individual bravery...[and] the recognition that the killing is an integral part of business policy takes us a long way from the fantasy outlaws of old movies. These gangsters don't satisfy our adventurous fantasies of disobeying the law; they're not defiant, they're furtive and submissive. They are required to be more obedient than we are; they live by taking orders.... The direction is tenaciously intelligent. Coppola holds on and pulls it all together. The trash novel is there underneath, but he attempts to draw the patterns out of the particulars. It's amazing how encompassing the view seems to be...."
— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
•••••
Great movies aren't usually planned as such; they happen through an unusual confluence of talents and qualities. THE GODFATHER is no exception. Coppola had set out simply to redeem a faltering career when he started to shoot the popular Mario Puzo mafia novel. His talent brought him luck. First he collected an extraordinary number of the great actors who made American filmmaking interesting during the 70s and 80s: Marlon Brando, James Caan, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall. Then he spiced the mixture with some accomplished character actors: John Marley, Al Lettieri, Sterling Hayden, and Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. Coppola also had the eminent good sense--or good luck--to get Nino Rota to write his last great score. He got a finely crafted script from author Puzo, and then worked obsessively to push all involved to the limits of their abilities, and sometimes beyond.
Puzo's novel (which also redeemed a faltering career) provided not one, but several mythic elements that Coppola was canny enough to reinforce in the film. THE GODFATHER is a generational saga; it's also an action film; but above all, it catches the imagination of audiences because it suggests that the career of a gangster is not so very different from the career of a businessman or a politician. This had important resonance for the generation of the early 70s.
The film is dark--Coppola had cinematographer Gordon Willis deliberately underlight each scene; the mood is dark; and the climax, in which Michael indulges in an orgy of blood vengeance, would simply be horrific, were it not for the ironic melodies of the Rota score, which underline the humane sensibilities of the storyteller and keep us at an appropriate distance. And this points to Coppola's greatest achievement with THE GODFATHER; he simultaneously presents us with two views of the Corleone family. We see it from within, sympathizing with the motives and dilemmas of these very real, attractive and charismatic individuals; and we see it from without, in a state of suspended disgust at a moral code that knows only greed and blood.
— TV MovieGuide

The Conversation

(Der Dialog [de])

USA 1974
d: Francis Ford Coppola
Paramount Home Video (Region 1 us)

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An inner rather than outer-directed film about the threat of electronic surveillance, conceived well before the Watergate affair broke. Acknowledged as the king of the buggers, Hackman'ssurveillance expert is an intensely private man. Living alone in a scrupulously anonymous flat, paying functional visits to a mistress who plays no other part in his life, he is himself a machine; and the point Coppola makes is that this very private man only acquires something to be private about through the exercise of his skill as a voyeur. Projecting his own lonely isolation on to a conversation he painstakingly pieces together (mesmerising stuff as he obsessively plays the tapes over and over, adjusting sound levels until words begin to emerge from the crowd noises), he begins to imagine a story of terror and impending tragedy, and feels impelled to try to circumvent it. In a splendidly Hitchcockian denouement, a tragedy duly takes place, but not the one he foresaw; and he is left shattered not only by the realisation that his soul has been exposed, but by the conviction that someone must have planted a bug on him which he simply cannot find. A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film. — TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"The Conversation" is that rarity among Hollywood films: a formalist narrative. Not since Hitchcock has anyone contrived an American film with such intricate color patterns, subtly linked props and decor, intertwined musical motifs, and dialogue bristling with cross-references. But above all, "The Conversation" is a love story, the story of a professional eavesdropper who becomes vicariously involved with a woman he encounters through wiretapped conversations and surveillance cameras. Harry Caul steals privacy for a living but is so obsessed with his own privacy that he suffers near-pathological loneliness and guilt. Contracted to trail an executive's wife suspected of marital infidelity, Caul becomes fearful that he may be part of a murder plot. His every action becomes an imagined disaster; yet he dare not retreat into his customary paralysis. In many ways, "The Conversation" is Coppola's response to "Blow-Up", another film about a hero who can respond only through technology. But as Gene Hackman plays him, Caul is anything but emotionally dead. Unlike Antonioni's nameless photographer, Caul suffers from a surfeit of feeling, agonizing inside his self-made traps. Incidentally, "The Conversation" makes some of the most brilliant uses ever of sound on film; the whole morbid plot turns on an inflection. A disturbingly serious work.
— Pacific Film Archive

The Godfather: Part II

(Der Pate, Teil II [de])

USA 1974
d: Francis Ford Coppola
Paramount Home Video (Region 2 uk)

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Apocalypse Now

(Apocalypse Now [de])

USA 1979
d: Francis Ford Coppola
Paramount Home Video (Region 1 us)

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Film-as-opera, as spectacular as its plot is simple: Vietnam in mid-war, and a dazed American captain (Sheen) is sent up a long river to assassinate a renegade colonel (Brando) who is waging a brutal, unsanctioned war in Cambodia. Burdened by excessive respect for its source novel (Conrad's Heart of Darkness), this is a film of great effects (a flaming bridge, Wagnerian air strikes) and considerable pretension (quotes from TS Eliot). The casting of Brando is perhaps the acid-test: brilliant as movie-making, but it turns Vietnam into a vast trip, into a War of the Imagination.
— CA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
History will no doubt call Apocalypse Now the most astute, acute portrait of Americans at war in the post-WWII period. "The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now," Coppola said, "was to create a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war." Critical to this effect was the film's unique "sound montage," designed by Walter Murch. Sound is not "married" to image in the traditional sense; rather, as Murch has put it, "Image and sound are linked together in a dance. And like some kinds of dance, they do not always have to be clasping each other around the waist: they can go off and dance on their own" (in Theory and Practice: Film Sound).
— PFA
•••••
Coppola, as usual, was expansive and almost as self-indulgent in this production as was his temperamental star, Brando. The director began with a $12 million budget that surpassed $31 million before the 238-day shooting schedule ended, his costs so excessive that he had to sink his own money into the production. The film was also held up as Sheen recovered from a heart attack. Five years in the making--afflicted with indecision, huge costs, expensive technology, haphazard progress, foul weather--the creation itself of APOCALYPSE NOW can almost be interpreted as an appropriately ironic metaphor for America's involvement in Vietnam. The movie originally was a financial disaster, grossing little more than $5 million above budget. Coppola did produce an awesome film depicting the ultrainsanity of the Vietnam War. Everything here is perverted, from the commanding officers to the sleazy entertainment given American soldiers: instead of Bob Hope and wisecracks, there are talentless floozies; instead of resolute and somber militarists, there are schizophrenic and paranoid madmen. The photography and production values are faultless as Coppola reproduced the flavor of the Vietnam-Cambodian jungle--its suffocating foliage and lurking dangers--in the Philippines. But the slim story is slowed down by introspective passages, particularly the incohesive monologs mumbled by Brando that echo chillingly in his cave (reportedly inspired by Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness). One never clearly understands the lunatic's point of view--which might be the point, yet such obfuscating tirades could have been encapsulated for the sake of the viewer suffering through selfishly produced surrealistic scenes. Here again was a message no one understood but accepted in the name of muddled art. The juxtaposition of Coppola's swift and paralyzing action and the leaden weight of Brando's rambling do not justify the fizzling finale. We are given the tremendous build-up of Technicolor battle only to be offered an end in the shadows of a cave with a madman whose philosophy and rhetoric are about as interesting as those of a drugged-out guru contemplating his navel at the top of Big Sur. The point, of course, is that war is pointless and horrible and inhuman, and in those regards APOCALYPSE NOW succeeds with devastating accuracy. Yet it lacks anything really human--love, humor (outside the display of madness), reason, understanding, and people to whom the normal viewer can relate. There is no real feeling here for the Vietnam struggle where hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and more than 50,000 died, a universal attitude that is found in THE DEER HUNTER and even THE GREEN BERETS. Coppola's intense interpretation of the war is technically impressive and shocking, but it is woefully short on humanity.
— TV MovieGuide

The Rainmaker

(The Rainmaker [de])

USA 1997
d: Francis Ford Coppola
Kinowelt Home Entertainment (Region 2 de)

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