And you have to sneak that hatred into places like Cafe Society where it doesn’t belong.
Anyway, if you want to blame someone for the downfall of complex movies with important cultural things to say, you can blame the Chinese, and all the other countries that make up the now globalized movie marketplace. It’s hard to have a deeply nuanced movie when it has to work for people in New York, Shanghai, and Mumbai.
When you are making a movie for an intersection of cultures, you appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everyone likes basic stories of good and evil, explosions, and spectacle. So now that’s what the major studios focus on, If you’re going to spend $300 million making a movie, it has to sell worldwide.
There’s still quality cinema out there, but it’s being made by small studios on small budgets. And television has never been better - especially on streaming. Movies are now for brainless action, and TV is where the complex, nuanced stuff is.
As I wrote in one issue of the now-departed Teemings, Star Wars affected other, only marginally SF movies that came afterwards. Moonraker is a case in point. The next James Bond movie after The Spy Who Loved Me was supposed to be For Your Eyes Only. They’d announced it, as usual., at the end of the closing credits for TSWLM. That was in the summer of 1977.
And then Star Wars happened.
So they dusted off their plans for Moonraker, probably upped the science fiction content, brought back Richard Kiel as the abysmal “Jaws” (and gave him a girlfriend!!). And, of course, they tacked on a “Use the Force, Luke” ending. It came out in 1979 and didn’t look derivative at all. No, no, not at all.
Three years later they put a “Use the Force, Luke” ending on Clint Eastwood’s Firefox. Nigel Hawthorne’s voice-over saying “Think in Russian”, though, is a poor substitute for Alec Guinness’ “Use the Force, Luke”. (And it’s hilarious that one of the movie’s conceits is that Eastwood’s character Mitchell Gant speaks Russian “like a native”, when we can actually hear him trying to speak lines in a Russian accent.)
Liking or hating these movies aren’t tied to any political party, though. we can all make fun of them together.
I though it was pretty clear that the death of Apollonia changed Michael from an idealistic war hero to a psychopath. His military service was an indication of his leadership qualities that carried over to being a mob boss.
It wasn’t a single thing, it was a step by step process. First there was the attempted hit on his father, followed by Captain MacClusky breaking his jaw. That enraged Michael enough to commit murder in revenge. Appollonia’s murder tipped him even further into being vengeful, as did Sonny’s murder while he was gone. Without these successive blows, I think it’s likely Michael would have gone on to a career outside of crime.
Except his father didn’t want him to be in the family business. He might not have approved of joining the military, but he approved of him staying away from the crime business.
I think Michael joined for the same reason many other young American men joined (Including, in the book, other Corleone members) : America had been attacked and he wanted to help out with the war effort.
We’re seeing this only slightly differently. I see Appollonia’s death as the turning point, he embraces revenge at that point, it was only duty to his family before that. He has changed after that, clearly the ideals are gone and he has become the cold compassionless man that his father was.
Its completely sane to pursue revenge against the people who just murdered your young wife. Also, his father had plenty of compassion. He helped those around him. He kept his illegal business as victimless as possible; giving people what they wanted. Were Vito the psycho you made him out to be he would have been the lead in selling hard drugs.
People who are downplaying Michael’s idealism as a motive for enlisting are ignoring the fact that this is a drama, and that Puzo and Coppola had a dramatic point in making him idealistic at the beginning: As I said before, it makes his fall more compelling and the character more interesting. In the opening, Michael as a clean cut noble war hero is contrasted with the sleaziness of the goings on within the family behind the scenes. Clearly Coppola intends to characterize him in this way. If Michael’s idealism was intended to be superficial, Coppola would have indicated that. Of course, you can believe whatever you like about a character’s “real” motivations, but you’re ignoring what Coppola actually shows.
Yeah, I guess you’re right. He just killed people and cut horse’s heads off like your average sweet old Italian man.
I think Michael’s time in Sicily was such a big a part of the story because it wast such a significant factor in Michael’s life. Appollonia’s murder wasn’t a final straw, it was a ton of bricks dropped on Michael. He had no forgiveness in him after that, even for his own family.
Michael isn’t a hothead like Sonny and I believe his motivation at this time was still primarily to protect his family. Sonny accuses him of hatching the plan to take vengeance but Michael makes a logical and persuasive argument for why it’s necessary to kill McCluskey and Sollozzo and why he’s the best person for the job.
Coppola made it a point to avoid showing the nastier side of Vito’s business because it’d make it difficult to sympathize with the family. We don’t really get a glimpse of the regular people victimized by the family’s criminal activities.
Well, gosh, what’s the evidence he was idealistic? There isn’t any, except that you assume that’s why he enlisted. No effort is made to show that he enlisted for noble reasons.
In 1972, World War II was still sufficiently recent - most guys who’d fought in it were still in the workforce - that people understood a lot of men who enlisted didn’t do so for noble reasons.
What does Coppola actually show, though? We’re told that Michael has these ideals through character dialogue, but do we ever see him acting idealistically? He doesn’t participate in the family business, but he also doesn’t seem hesitant about personally benefitting from the proceeds of that business. When do we see him sacrifice something in pursuit of his ideals? The onl “ideal” he ever seems to pursue is “family before everything,” and that’s what makes him a monster by the end of the film.
