American Realism

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) apotheosizes the American gangster picture genre. It subsumes all other classic gangster pictures, from Underworld (1929), The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), and Scarface (1932) to The Roaring Twenties (1939), White Heat (1949), and The Killing (1956). But The Godfather Part II (1974) does what no other gangster picture—even The Godfather—ever did. With the relentless, excoriating scalpel of nineteenth-century novels and the plays of Chekhov—the laboratory of literary realism—Part II flayed the layers of superficiality (those earlier movies’ stock in trade) off the underlying complexity of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). As a study of despoiled idealism and the effects of social organization on the members of a powerful tribal family, Part II analyzes Michael as profoundly as any of the main characters are analyzed in the novels of Balzac, Howells, Wharton, or Eliot.

The Godfather was perhaps the single greatest example of epic romanticism in the New American Cinema. The tidal-wave sweep of the story and the gallery of characters are rich and expertly acted but framed in melodramatic terms scaled to the spectacle of the film. Michael, his siblings, his father (Marlon Brando as the old Corleone, the family man as institution), his family’s caporegime and legal retainers, and the maze of partners and “soldiers” are realistic types, but types (and stock characters) nonetheless: the proud patriarch; the thoughtful, independent younger son; the hothead older son (James Caan); and the array of lackeys, bodyguards, and operations men. These characters are vibrant examples of literary and cinematic creations, but they don’t really evolve or reveal new shadings over the course of the movie, and we aren’t shown their doubts or twisted self-hatred. The movie succeeds as brutal enchantment—as a charismatic cast of characters in a sophisticatedly stylized melodrama. There’s something Dickensian about the dramatic parade of character types passing across the screen. The movie’s visual richness, framing, and montage (which speeds up and cross-cuts so suspensefully you may be reminded of the competing and ultimately colliding stories in the climax of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance) are pitched to the dimensions of the theater. (More than just about any other movie of its era, The Godfather deserves to be seen on the big screen.)

Real men. Al Pacino

The Godfather Part II is equally a triumph of personal filmmaking, but its analytical mind is far deeper. It goes beyond the romanticism of its predecessor into a new vein of realism in American movies. Part II puts Michael, Fredo Corleone (John Cazale) and Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg)—and perhaps even the Frank Pentangeli of Michael V. Gazzo as well as Robert De Niro’s beautifully realized Vito Corleone—under closer scrutiny (as if the camera were a magnifying glass), demonstrating a complexity of character analysis you almost never saw in genre movies until this one. The treatment of these characters fills them out with the complications and completeness of real human beings. Coppola replaces much of the mythic resonance and symbolic significance of the first Godfather film with a new naturalism and verisimilitude. Michael’s and Fredo’s motives and moods alternately lurch forward and fold back on themselves in unpredictable yet totally believable ways, their emotions bubbling to the surface one minute and being sublimated the next (Pacino excels at abrupt flareups of anger—you’re shocked but fully convinced of his frustrations). These characters are anything but stock and they aren’t even symbolic here. They are far too complex for facile symbolism or the creaking mechanics of traditional storytelling devices. Like us, they change their minds and grapple with the messy self-doubts and sordidness of life. The complexity of Part II is that these men aren’t mouthpieces for ideas or dramatic “techniques” or tools for advancing the plot; like the great characters in novels, they seem to have lives outside the text—lives, in fact, that are far richer than even Coppola’s operatic vision can capture.

As an epic generational saga and a portrait of the moral ambiguity at the heart of finance and business (possibly a metaphor of the movie business itself), The Godfather Part II is peerless. It casts an influential shadow over just about everything after it, including John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and Martin Scorsese’s rather facile Goodfellas (1990). Even Quentin Tarentino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Brian De Palma’s nervy, erotic thriller Carlito’s Way (1993) pay homage to Part II (and have to grapple with new styles to escape its massive imprint). Of what other postwar American film can you say that even major works look like tinfoil up against it?

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Sidney Lumet, who died in 2011, directed Dog Day Afternoon in 1975. It’s his most concentrated and emotionally stirring work. Like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), and Lumet’s own Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon plays its themes with compelling vigor, and its story arc (carried along by an expert script) is tuned perfectly to the movie’s gathering emotional and comic turmoil. Lumet uses the script and his great cast to balance the elements (crime, crowds, police, and spot-news press corps) against the enervated realism of a Brooklyn afternoon.

The movie is hugely successful at what it sets out to do. It drops you into a neighborhood bank as a heist is being carried out, immersing you in the comically pathetic tension of a botched day on the job. This may be the first movie ever to mine equal amounts of humor and pathos from a couple of numbnuts bank robbers. These guys aren’t superficially likable in that phony, audience-pleasing way that characterizes the scam artists in other heist movies, like The Sting (1973), Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and The Italian Job (2003). The more decent and pragmatic of the two, Sonny (Al Pacino in a career-making performance), needs the cash for his transgender wife Leon’s sex change operation (Chris Sarandon). Everything goes wrong for Sonny; he can’t catch a break. He’s like a Polish Alvy Singer, a bumbler whose good intentions put him in a nonstop pickle. With his deer-in-the-headlights stare and endless exasperation, he’s a comic hero of the Watergate era. (The character is based on the actual bank robber John Wojtowicz.)

Watergate hero. Al Pacino

What happens in the movie illustrates the ambiguity and confusion of the era’s urban counterculture, but Lumet doesn’t turn the events into a grandstanding metaphor of corruption—he’s working in a hyperrealistic vein. The two crooks, Sonny and Sal (John Cazale), are just young saps who get criticized and corrected by the people they’re robbing. The joke is in the criticism and suggestions for improvement coming from the hostages in the bank. The movie’s everyday realism keeps its inventiveness and jokes believable—that’s one of its strengths. Even the relatively few great heist movies of the past—Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1955), for example, or Jules Dassin’s Rififi that same year—have a slick shallowness at their core.

Lumet and his team combine just the right amounts of asphalt realism and expressionist distortion: the smoggy afternoon sunlight sinks into an Edward Hopper urban evening. As night falls, beads of sweat drench everybody’s face: the law enforcement negotiators, the hostages, the reporters on the scene. The air conditioner in the bank chugs noisily, its condensers and coils rattling with exhaustion. Everyone grows frazzled with the passage of what feels like real time in the movie. As the action moves between the two sets—the bank and the street outside—a mob in a news-feeding frenzy has gathered to cheer on Sonny as an anti-establishment hero and to jeer at police attempts to end the stand-off with bureaucratic efficiency. But in this comedy of errors, the crowd ultimately starts taunting Sonny and Sal for their personal problems. The tone alternates between frantic suspense and exhaustion, but Lumet maintains control of the material, guiding it to its remarkable conclusion at Kennedy Airport without whoring after phony climaxes or pausing for didactic “lessons.”

Dog Day Afternoon is unusual for Watergate-era movies because its point of view is that the street crowd’s response to Sonny’s plight—treating him like a rock star celebrity—is hollowed-out madness. You can see right through their cheering. They’re not committed to Sonny’s symbolic value as a countercultural hero standing up to the flunky pigs, but to the frenzy he is generating in them. Pumping their fists in the air as Sonny parades up and down the sidewalk outside the bank door, shouting “Tell them to put their guns down! Put the fucking guns down!” they’re not cheering for anybody or any progressive Sixties principle. In one great scene, Sonny tells the FBI agent Sheldon (James Broderick), “It’s your job, right? The guy who kills me—I hope he does it because he hates my guts, not because it’s his job.” How did Lumet know that movie audiences would be willing to see the bureaucratic rot beneath their own corrupted Sixties ideals?