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The shift is from Visconti to Rosi, thus Salvatore Giuliano for the Sicilian opening and Lucky Luciano for the Senate committee hearing. The gangster goes west, Las Vegas at the end of the road started on Ellis Island, "the business we've chosen." Power weighs heavily on the capo (Al Pacino), the expansion of his dominion in tandem with the petrification of his soul is the theme ruthlessly pursued in one tenebrous chamber after another. It's one thing to buy a senator, quite another to enter a "real partnership with the government," Batista-era Havana fits the bill until it doesn't. (Moneyed revelers disperse on the eve of revolution, as befits a tale of regimes changed or enforced.) The contrasting narrative chronicles the original patriarch's younger days in a storybook Little Italy, with Robert De Niro's shrewd rendering of the elegant leopard who will grow into a serene bulldog. The Corleone crime organization, "we called it the family." Francis Ford Coppola sees the first film as a stem here given root and flower, his monumental structure allows for intricate analysis of promise and corrosion, sacrament and bloodshed, burnished sepia and frigid gloom. Brothers become suspects, the surrogate one (Robert Duvall) negotiates the veneer of legitimacy while the real one (John Cazale) sinks into his reclining chair in a snow-choked office. (Talia Shire as the wayward sister lends a note from Scarface.) "If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anybody." Michael V. Gazzo's Mediterranean expansiveness asking for a tarantella and getting "Pop Goes the Weasel," Lee Strasberg's avuncular canniness turning up the volume of a game on TV during a mob discussion. Bullets erupt as fireworks, a Roman Empire suicide emerges in an FBI prison, a fishing boat turns into a floating coffin. "Tempi cambiano." Coppola's coda a decade and a half later seals the lavish family crypt. Cinematography by Gordon Willis. With Diane Keaton, G.D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Gastone Moschin, Bruno Kirby, Morgana King, Leopoldo Trieste, Dominic Chianese, Troy Donahue, Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, Marianna Hill, and Danny Aiello.
--- Fernando F. Croce |