My wife and I have spent the past two nights watching The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, aired on successive evenings on AMC. Since the movies were (as is said) "edited for tv," one could perhaps say we did not really see The Godfather, in which Sonny, worrying about what might go wrong in a scheme to plant a handgun in the men's room at Louis' family restaurant in the Bronx, says he doesn't want his brother coming out of the toilet with only his dick, not only his stick, in his hands. But I don't want to complain about the gift of two evenings' free entertainment.
One of many great scenes, I think, is the one in which Carlo and Connie fight. It starts out in the way these scenes always do in the movies, the shouting and the breaking of dishes, but then he starts whipping her with his belt, and the camera follows as she moves through the house, he in pursuit and occasionally landing another blow. They arrive in the master bedroom and she makes for the master bath, which she enters, trying to slam the door behind her, but she isn't far enough ahead and, as the camera stays behind in the entrance to the bedroom, he bulls through the door. For a moment, the scene is held, and you can hear but not see the beating that continues to be administered in the bath. The only thing to look at is the bed, perfectly made, with a stuffed animal lying prettily over the pillows like a gargoyle.
This scene, we learn, has been staged. Connie, predictably, calls home, and Sonny, too enraged to think straight, jumps in his car alone and heads to her house. There is a tollbooth along the way and there the assassins are waiting. There is a fusillade of bullets and he is hit countless times as he falls from his car. Though the tv version omitted it, one of the hitmen approaches the dead body and, for good measure, shoots the corpse in the head at point blank range, pauses, kicks the head, walks away. Then the camera pans away and you see the car that Tom Hagen had dispatched approaching, too late to help, and a roadside billboard for Florida oranges. The effect is like that of the breakfast jingle, "mixed ready to begin the morning right," in Robert Frost's "Design."
With justice Pauline Kael called The Godfather "[a] wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise." The nightmare is highlighted by these small, carefully placed, subtly emphasized, luridly smiling gargoyles. Top o' the morning!
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