Hi, I have no idea what you noticed that was important?
Mahloth I found the ketchup oddly out of place in the ultra expensive and supposedly classy lifestyle of Jack Woltz the extremely wealthy studio owner and it struck me as a throwback to a way more pedestrian palate of a working class guy. That ketchup bottle very subtlety rounded out the character of Jack Woltz as a man from a humble background who had clawed his way to the top. As later shown, his wealth did not make him immune to the underlying threat of the horse head in his bed but his reaction was that of a man who understood the violence implied by the threat.
Maybe I am looking too deeply into this, but the ketchup bottle on the fancy table set with expensive crystal and china, once I noticed it, was a glaring marker for me.
And buy really expensive ketchups with it.
All the fanciest dijon ketchups.
it was a bottle of Heinz
Ketchup is one of the few items where, until recently, there wasn’t a high-class equivalent. Everyone used ketchup, and there weren’t posh and common brands. It’s why Andy Warhol painted ketchup, though not with it - that came later in art.
Even now only foodies use brands that aren’t very well-known, and most people buy ketchup or a knock-off of it.
Anyone my age who grew up in Pittsburgh has probably toured the Heinz plant and had or has a pickle pin.
It could also be that Coppola used the Heinz bottle on the table to signify that Woltz is nouveau riche, because as Miss Manners would have explained, having any product (other than wine) on the dinner table in its original packaging is just not done. But having the ketchup in a silver salver, as Miss Manners might have recommended, wouldn’t have highlighted Woltz’s working-class tastes. So even though there were no posh ketchups available at the time, the Heinz bottle serves the filmmaker’s intent of commenting on the character, as longhair75 suggests.
There’s another possibility - if I remember correctly, it was a steak dinner. And ketchup on your steak is a class marker in a way that ketchup on your burger isn’t , regardless of how the ketchup appears on the table.
I remember an episode in The Wild Wild West where James and Artie have determined that the bad guy they’re after will be at a monthly dinner in a fancy dining club in San Francisco. Artie hires out as a French waiter to get close to him but, alas, the guy couldn’t make it and sent his boorish nephew instead.
The first thing after dinner is served he asks, “Where’s da ketchup?” Everyone – the other guests and staff – looks horrified but Artie brings a salver of ketchup. All during the dinner, the nephew’s manners do not improve; he has less class than the nouveau riche. After dinner, Artie has to have an excuse to follow the guy to his uncle so he’s leaning against a credenza whittling on a small bit of wood. The maitre’d asks, “What are you doing?”
In his outrageous French accent Artie answers, “I am carving a toothpick.”
“Why?”
“Every 'ash’ouse has toothpicks.”
The nephew strolls up. “Da chow was pretty good but I din’t like the ketchup – gotta toothpick?”
Artie proffers the one he’s just made on a serviette, the maitre’d and he watch as the nephew walks away, then Artie throws down the napkin. “I weel not work in a 'ash’ouse!” and leaves to follow the guy.
It’s also possible its presence was the result of a low-level set dresser putting “dinner-type stuff” on the table without giving it much thought, and that the director wasn’t even aware of it…
Possible, but unlikely. One thing I have learned from listening to professional filmmakers (including top-level crew members like cinematographers, production designers, costume designers, composers, etc.) is that almost *nothing *appears in any frame of a film by accident. They have selected every camera angle, every prop, every color, every note, everything for how it helps tell the story, what it says about the characters, the situation, and so on. If you asked Dean Tavoularis, the production designer on The Godfather, why he chose, say, the salt and pepper shakers on the table in that scene, he could probably tell you that they were historically accurate to the time and place, and a few other details that you and I would never have guessed about them.
The vast majority of these tiny decisions are never consciously noticed by the vast majority of viewers, but collectively they have an impact on the final production. (Or maybe they merely justify the big salaries these people are paid, and help film students write Ph.D dissertations. :D)
Oh, and another possibility that we haven’t brought up: maybe Heinz paid for the product placement.
I was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was in middle school. A bit later, in high school, I discovered Isaac Asimov’s robot stories and became a fan of those. And yet it took me an embarrassingly long time before I made the connection that the title of the TNG episode “I, Borg” was a tribute to Asimov’s “I, Robot”. In hindsight it was incredibly obvious.
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I understand your point but I don’t really feel it applies in this situation. There are going to be flubs on a movie set. People are carrying around coffee cups and there will be times when somebody puts one down on a table and forgets it’s there when the cameras start rolling. So you can find scenes in movies where you’ll see stage equipment or crew members or coffee cups or other stuff from the set in a scene.
But we’re talking about a ketchup bottle. It’s not likely some crew member was having a swig of ketchup on set and put the bottle down there. That ketchup bottle was there on the table because somebody made a conscious decision to put it in the scene.
Until relatively recently, there wasn’t a “high-class” version of ketchup, because ketchup wasn’t the sort of thing a “high-class” person enjoyed. Ketchup was distinctly a condiment of the working class. You’d no more include it in a fancy dinner than you would a platter of Hot Pockets.
You’re absolutely correct, of course - I just couldn’t resist the cheap shot.
“Season 8 Game of Thrones is no Godfather” would also have been an acceptable response.
Right, but “eating down” has always been a thing for all but the snootiest of rich Americans. Everyone ate hamburgers from time to time, rich and poor, and they all ate them with the same brands of ketchup.
I like to think of it as deliberate foreshadowing. Whenever oranges appear in The Godfather, it’s a indication that somebody is about to die. I believe the ketchup was meant to foretell the death of a horse. Had there been more horse deaths in the movie, no doubt there would have been ketchup preceding each one.
In Weird Al Yankovic’s “One More Minute” the obvious innuendo of being stranded in the gas station of love and having to use the self-service pumps completely escaped me for possible decades.