Extravagant gestures of romantic adoration and solemn respect for womenfolk are combined with casual sexual abuse and women have to reconcile themselves to their role: a pretext for revenge. These Italian-American gangsters do not complain about the bigotry heading their way, and are themselves casually racist and antisemitic. ![]() ![]() ![]() Stomach-turning flourishes of violence are juxtaposed with elaborate rituals of familial piety and respect, which generations of real-life criminals in the United States treated as how-to behaviour manuals for decades afterwards. They took the figure of the ageing don as seriously as Lear, the careworn ruler of a secret American state-within-a-state. Their genius (and that of the film’s own godfather, producer Robert Evans) was to reinvent these criminals as a dysfunctional dynastic psychodrama. ![]() W hen director Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter-novelist Mario Puzo released The Godfather 50 years ago, the mobster had already been a stock figure in film for half a century.
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