The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972); The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Watching the two 1970s Godfather films in prep for The Offer, a ten-episode miniseries about the development of the first installment which premiered last night on Paramount+, I have come to the conclusion that Francis Ford Coppola's twin totems suffered from elephantiasis because they aspired to an art form that didn't quite exist yet: prestige TV dumped on one of the big streamers. Coppola needed, say, the 86 episodes granted The Sopranos to flesh out his big concepts about America. With "only" six hours to work with (nine if you count Godfather III), his films come off not just gassy but shoddy as storytelling. If they were the precondition that made The Sopranos possible, then I salute them; apart from select Ernie Kovacs and The Simpsons, The Sopranos is the greatest television I've ever witnessed. Unto themselves, the Godfather films are white elephant art. 

White elephant art is Manny Farber's term from his classic 1962 essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" wherein he defines the former as films that aspire "to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance" (143) while termite art revels in "buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed ; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin" (144).* Given the reverence with which the Godfathers have been treated over the last fifty years, one would think that every nanosecond of its six hours are 100% essential to their putative genius. But even a cursory watch reveals the same shortcomings exhibited by so much prestige TV, namely, catastrophic events that barely register in the narrative and/or have no discernible impact on the principals. They exist solely to puff up the running time in a quest for Significance (in his brilliant review of Taxi Driver, written with Patricia Patterson, Farber called the Godfather movies "uppercase filmmaking").

Take Michael Corleone's (Al Pacino) exile in Sicily in the first Godfather. While taking refuge from the Five Families war back in New York City, Michael falls in love with Apollonia (quick, name her**), a young Sicilian girl and, after many, many minutes, marries her. In their next scene together, she is blown up in a car bomb intended for Michael. And then...nothing. The murder is never mentioned again (apart from a brief allusion in Part II to Michael having a previous wife). We next see Michael back in the States when he surprises Kay (Diane Keaton, who deserved a special Oscar for dealing with all the priapism waving in her face), his former love. She asks how long he's been back. "I've been back a year. Longer than that, I think." You think? If you don't know, Mike, how on earth are we supposed to figure it out? Even more absurd, there's no indication whatsoever that Apollonia's destruction had any effect on him or anyone else. She's simply dispatched to make room for Michael's reconciliation with Kay which begs the question of why we had to sit through the explosion to begin with.

Similarly, in Part II, Senator Patrick Geary (G.D. Spradlin) has proven himself an enemy to the Corleones in the opening scene at the communion of Michael's son Tony (James Gounaris). Almost an hour later, de facto Corleone Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) meets Geary in a brothel where a prostitute (tellingly, I can find no credit for her) lies handcuffed and murdered on the bed. A shaken Geary claims to remember nothing about the incident. Hagen vows to help get rid of the body in implicit exchange for their friendship. It took me three passes through the scene and a visit to The Godfather Wiki to learn that Hagen and Corleone henchman Al Neri (Richard Bright) engineered the scene to force Geary on their side. When we next see Geary, he's partying with the Corleones in Havana. Presumably, he has recovered from such a horrific event and Hagen had no problem disposing the body. As Hagen noted, she had no family and no one knew she worked at the brothel (isn't that convenient?): "It'll be as though she never existed." Just like Apollonia. 

All of which might be worth the screen time if Coppola hadn't thrown away this character when the Corleones needed him most. At a U.S. Senate committee hearing on the mafia, Geary delivers a speech on how Italians are great Americans. But then he excuses himself from the proceedings in order to preside over another committee. What on earth is the narrative purpose for him to peace out, especially since he reappears, doing nothing, at the next Senate meeting? This is the fourth greatest film of all time?

Far too much of the duology is dragged out with this kind of pointless tumescence. The first one gets the nod over Part II for being 25 blissful minutes shorter. Certain of the franchise's greatness, Part II encrusts every moment in uppercase. It takes two scenes in Havana for Michael to realize that his brother Fredo (John Cazale) has betrayed him when one would have made Fredo's slip up more convincing. But that would have forced Coppola to cut one of the two bloated set pieces that frame the betrayal: a flashy production number and a live sex show. In a flashback to 1917, it takes over five minutes of creeping on rooftops and shimmying down staircases for young Vito (Robert De Niro) to murder the O. G. Fanucci (Gastone Moschin). And to compound the fact that the Intermission comes way too late, Coppola welcomes us back with endless takes of Michael moping throughout his Tahoe estate. All this before Kay has a second door closed on her. This is the second greatest movie sequel of all time? 

One could chalk up these inconsistencies to That's Just The Way Things Are. Geary is a sleazy opportunist. Fredo is boneheaded and impulsive. Michael is quietly psychotic. And they ain't ever gonna change. But that's the problem with so many beloved New Hollywood titles - the revolutionary gains of the 1960s were lost so let's settle in for the resignation. Jonathan Rosenbaum has written a compelling meditation on this very aspect of the franchise (also check out his fantastic review of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River which airs some of the same concerns). This idea that change can never happen and we're stuck with corruption as a natural way of life reaches its apotheosis in the most infuriating scene from Part II. With Fanucci murdered, Vito is the new bully on the block. A mean landlord, Signor Roberto (Leopoldo Trieste), disrespectfully resists Vito's attempt to bribe him. Once the neighborhood has informed him of Vito's power, he rushes to make things right with Vito and his nervousness is scored by a goofy, comical clarinet riff. Reduced to a bumbling idiot and unable to operate a door knob, he pays back the bribe and pledges to lower the rent of his wife's friend while Vito and his henchman smugly look on. The scene is played for laughs. But the effect is to paper over the fact that one murderous goon has replaced another. Forget it, Jake - it's La Cosa Nostra. 

To end on a positive note, I do love the wedding scene that opens The Godfather. That could have gone on for another half hour. I offer it to students as an example of how to introduce characters without appearing, to borrow a phrase from American Dad, clunky and expositional. 

I've never seen The Godfather Part III. I suspect I'll wind up liking it best of all.

The Godfather: B+

The Godfather Part II: B

(both upped a notch for fear of getting whacked) 

*Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Stonehill, 1971).

**Simonetta Stefanelli

The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours has a pretty big problem at its core. Two stories spin out from an account of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman in an Oscar-winning performance) writing Mrs. Dalloway and, like so many films about authors, neither screenwriter David Hare nor director Stephen Daldry provide much insight into Woolf's style or even the toil of writing. This fatal-for-some shortcoming is compounded by a further conceit dictating that each story plays out over a single day (despite a brief depiction of Woolf's suicide which frames the film). Would I could pump out even a blog post within 24 hours.

But if you can forgive these limitations (and again, I grant that it will be impossible for many viewers), The Hours is surprisingly moving, in more ways than one, for a project that threatens the most ponderous Oscar-mongering. The other two stories concern a housewife (Julianne Moore) consumed with soon-to-be-specified dread in 1950s Los Angeles and an editor (Meryl Streep) in contemporary Manhattan. Woolf's limning of the quotidian passions and disappointments of lesbian life filter through the latter tales for the kind of trenchantly observed film for grown-ups that seems to have retreated from theatres to the big streamers today. Best of all, Daldry keeps things brisk. Before one trajectory becomes too crusty, he switches to another for a productive middlebrow mental workout. That's no insult. The Hours allows us to think of lesbianism transhistorically and casts welcome doubt on contemporary life as always already more enlightened.

There are some crass moments such as when Moore's housewife bolts up from her attempted suicide and proclaims, "I can't!" The fact she did not, in fact, go through with it would have conveyed that information to us quite efficiently. But overall, the game time performances power over the few low points. And for all the accolades thrown at the three principals, the greatest performance here is owned by an unrecognizable-by-me Toni Collette as a fellow housewife trying to sublimate her desire for Moore. In just one scene, she motors through lust, containment, anger, propriety, resignation all while suggesting possibilities for different futures than her tract-home existence allows. 

Fleet, yielding, with a drive unexpected in such prestige items, The Hours is the rare kind of film to give middlebrow a good name.

The Hours: A-minus

Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967); Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)

At long last I have a compact answer to the question "What is the difference between kitsch and camp?": Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) is kitsch and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970) is camp. And if that shakes down yet again to "kitsch is what you like and camp is what I like," then so be it. At least for once I have some mainstream support on my side. Leonard Maltin gave Valley of the Dolls a BOMB rating whereas he awarded Beyond the Valley of the Dolls three (out of four) stars, noting that it was "picked by two prominent critics as one of the 10 best U.S. films 1968–78" (Richard Corliss was one; who was the other?). 

The problem with Valley has nothing to do with whittling down Jacqueline Susann's sweeping novel to a two-hour film. Compression was a huge part of what made the Minnelli/Sirk melodramas of the 1950s so intense. It's that the film plays like a ragtag highlight reel of the novel, the most egregious effect of which the lack of any sense of how the three principals come to be friends. That might have been attractive in a car crash sort of way if only the performances powered us through Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley's jagged screenplay. But Barbara Parkins and Sharon Tate are not bad enough to slot Valley as camp. They're just bland, the film equivalent of garden gnomes and gazing balls. By contrast, Patty Duke is a bit too good. Sure, no actress alive could deliver some of her riper lines with any credibility. But she gives the impression of conveying the interiority of a character rather than a tantalizing (and necessary) exteriority, the hallmark of camp. 

Camp requires a vibratory intelligence behind the proceedings, a force placing everything in quotes from a distance. There is no such intelligence behind Valley, least of all Mark Robson, a director so undistinguished that Andrew Sarris neglected to afford him an entry in The American Cinema. (His two greatest films, The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship, both 1943, reflect the hand of producer Val Lewton more than Robson.) The thing just sits there, authorless and waiting to validate your straight-and-narrow life path. Valley of the Dolls is less a showbiz exposé than a proto-Hallmark Christmas movie. It rewarded the Silent Majority for moving out of the big bad cities and as such, is most useful as an always welcome reminder that there was no Great Consensus in the 1960s (or any other era, for that matter). (Did anyone involved know, or care, that Sgt. Pepper was released five months prior?)

I desperately want to give Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a full A. But the brutal fact is that the film sags in the middle, most drearily in the protracted scene where Kelly (Dolly Read) seduces Porter Hall (Duncan McLeod). The first forty minutes, though, are beyond indeed, an A+ sugar-high masterpiece. In a film with room for the outsized personality of trans teen tycoon Z-Man/Superwoman (John LaZar), the great camp performance here comes courtesy of the incredible Edy Williams as porn star Ashley St. Ives. With her gargantuan slash of a mouth and her sultry aphorisms, she is pure externality, a sentient Id who emphasizes a line like "you're a lousy lay" with life-affirming unnaturalness. 

And oh what lines! I couldn't even hazard a favorite. Roger Ebert's screenplay reads like a Mad Lib with hip slang like "freak" and "happening" and "dig" wedged into each sentence. Russ Meyer's typical quick cutting heightens the hyperactivity. And there are no depths to uncover. Instead, we get Mama Lion Lynn Carey singing like a truck driver for the slight Dolly Read as leader of the Carrie Nations rock trio. There's also better bad music too. Even the version of Dionne Warwick's "Theme from Valley of the Dolls" included in Valley is an echoey horror.

And yet, for all Beyond's camp vitesse, there's one moment that puts the brakes on the film's rhythm and renders it more complex. Z-Man is spouting off his florid Bardisms to the Carrie Nations after a blockbuster performance. Each one buys into his babble until he gets to Casey (Cynthia Myers) who simply stares back at him unimpressed. And for a second, we get a glimpse of what Z-Man is like after he takes a bow and retreats to his bedroom mirror, a refraction that fills him with guilt and dysphoria. We glimpse the precondition of camp as a survival technique, a moment not amenable to camp snickering. Or kitsch validation, for that matter.

Valley of the Dolls: C

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: A-minus

 

Severance (created by Dan Erickson, 2022)

The Mr. and I zipped through Severance on Apple TV. I'll start with the bad, end with the good, and then I have a question. I'll speak in generalities to avoid SPOILERS.

Bad: 

1. One of my many problems with TV is that it's near impossible to discuss a series without spoilers. That's the case with some films but it's magnified with TV because the stories go on FOREVER.

2. Speaking of which, no matter how intense the final episode was, it still doesn't wrap shit up, yet another problem I have with TV. Life is short. I don't want to wait a year or two for the perpetual second act!

3. Why in GAY hell did the creators have to append a hetero escape clause to the office scenes at the last damn minute and pretty randomly, almost rotely? The surface narrative already hinges on the hetero as made clear by the very last line of the entire season. So why is it necessary in BOTH worlds? Oh yeah - to generate stories, right? How about generating DIFFERENT DAMN STORIES, though? Work isn't enough of a story generator?!? Gimme process, institutions, work, WERK! ARGH!!!!!!!!! 

4. Will historians 1,000 years from now be able to tell the difference between the final episode, directed by Ben Stiller, and the bomb defusal skit from the (great!) Ben Stiller Show? Does history repeat itself first as farce, then as standard operating procedure?

Good:

1. Set design? Chef's kiss-plus, especially its role in the many decentered compositions, e.g., a character squeezed into one slice of the frame by the nothingness of an office divider or wall.

2. GENERALIZED SPOILER. It was canny for the creators to dive into being severed from non-work life because so many spheres of our lives are, to borrow a phrase from the show, emotionally inconvenient for us. As such, this series would pair quite nicely with The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021).

3. The final episode was as hilarious and it was nail-biting, a difficult trick to pull off. So if someone asked me to relate Severance to film, I would posit that it is a mixture of Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) with just a dash of Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999).

4. I might be Captain Obvious here is but Dylan George (Zach Cherry) is the hero of the series.

Question and GENERALIZED SPOILER:

Why does a certain higher-up freak out that severance may be unraveling at the end of the season when she has already exhibited rage over being fired? 

Monthly Top Ten: March 2022

1. camp.o.rama instagram. (https://www.instagram.com/camp.o.rama/). Londoner Myles Lester describes his Instagram as a mixture of "high and low camp and everything in between." He pays homage to some typical gay icons to teach the children. But his Brit base means he has plenty to teach me. If you were already aware of Cilla Black's "All Night Long" from her 1983 Christmas special, featuring children attempting The Robot but achieving...something else, then you're one up on me.

2. The 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies virtual conference. We were crushed that we couldn't meet in Chicago. But the conference platform (where you could leave messages, start polls, upload files, etc.) was a model for how to pull off a virtual conference. Some vestige of it should remain when (when!) we return in person.

3. Hash browns. Their simple structural integrity is welcome on the east coast where canned potatoes in a sea (literally) of unpredictable vegetables (especially yucky-ass green peppers and oppressive onions) are apparently the norm with breakfast.

4. Tony's Chocolonely 32% milk chocolate caramel sea salt. Godawful name. But so transcendent that I long to try this Dutch confectionery's plain ole milk chocolate. Even sweeter, the company strives to make all chocolate 100% slave free. More here.

5. The Righteous Gemstones, Season Two (created by Danny McBride) (HBO Max). A bit too broad this time out. And Kelvin Gemstone's muscleman side cult subplot was a disaster. But Eric André as oily televangelist Lyle Lissons owns the best line of the series. To Joe Jonas playing himself at a groundbreaking ceremony: "Get your Christian ass up here!"

6. Servant, Season Three (created by Tony Basgallop) (Apple TV). The most streamlined season of this scary, wacky series. The creators are right to have Season Four be the last. Nevertheless, each episode still feels like it's about to jump the shark when a twist worthy of executive producer and occasional director M. Night Shyamalan recalibrates the entire edifice.

7. The Lost Leonardo (Andreas Koefoed, 2021). An infuriating documentary on the Salvator Mundi which brought out the Judge Judy in me. Imagine these questions in her vice-like voice: Where exactly did this painting come from? Did you or did you not deem it to be a Leonardo?

8. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. My very first James! And I much preferred the film adaptation The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). 

9. Jess Conrad: This Pullover (Jasmine, 2022). The idea that pre-Beatles early-1960s popular music was a vast wasteland has been debunked so thoroughly that it's refreshing to encounter an act that bears out the thesis. The title track from this recent compilation was voted the World's Worst Record on Kenny Everett's Capital Radio show in 1977 and it just might be: bottom-of-the barrel teen idol tissue paper with no camp escape valve discernible. Later, Conrad showed up in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980) presumably to take up his place in a time-honored tradition.

10. Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (4AD, 2022). As always with this band, it starts out a bit too contained, a bit too Apollonian. Then the title track pauses your treadmill of a day as chief Thief Adrianne Lenker accesses the provisional calm in Yoko Ono's "Mrs. Lennon" and your favorite non-"Sara" Steve Nicks track off Tusk. At which point the entire album opens up and honors an outfit Wiki describes as "an American indie rock band with folk roots based in Brooklyn, New York." Far more consistent than Tusk and the best album of the year so far.