Camera And Action, page 30
Since one could practice getting back to the natural world by living in a tipi at a commune or buying an authentic Navajo blanket, building a log cabin by a river in Montana, or just by purchasing a ticket to Little Big Man, what was being consumed and appropriated was important. "Nineteenth-century" Indian imagery merged with activism, but what got lost in the metamorphosis was the use of the symbolic as a stand-in for social action. The appropriation of ethnicity as a thing involved several layers of essentializing when the intent was to free cultures from popular pigeonholes. Similarly, what appeared to give respect and dignity to people was their nativeness, as Deloria has argued, that served to mitigate the larger culture's own fears. The dilemma in addressing the problem of stereotyping by making the story more real" in the "tell it like it is" mode of Montana landscape and Indian primitiveness concealed the very reality it meant to confront. Penn's verisimilitude, like popular curricula and novels, may have appeared to produce more human and kind identities, but they still read as stereotypes, fixed and stable.38 What once seemed a resource had become a curse.
Similar to the larger society, Little Big Man helped convert the Hollywood Indian of the nineteenth century to the victims and protestors of the twentieth. Fiction allowed filmmakers to have it both ways, to say something powerful but not be held entirely responsible. "Authentic" actors played Sioux and Cheyenne, but anyone could play Jack Crabb, icon or not, and could be believed or not. The most popular actor for the younger generation at the time, Dustin Hoffman helped sell that malleability. His movement and mobility were reflected off authentics' stability. Hoffman retained his representation as an actor, but the chief- like the extras - corresponded to themselves. Actor/character/person blended, as if seamlessly the same -on and outside the screen similarly. As one writer put it about Little Big Man in a letter to the editor, "I left the theater wondering how accurate its portrayal of Indian life was" and so picked up Mari Sandoz' These Were the Sioux which, "like the movie makers ... treats Indian culture with the greatest respect, and makes us see the beauty of their `primitive' way of life. I now have an even greater admiration for `Little Big Man."'39
The beauty of primitiveness completed a New York resident's imagined America with the help of Jack Crabb, Sandoz, and Penn, never mind the tug of war about to besiege real Indian people over such issues as water and fishing rights, real estate development, tribal adaptation, or casino tourism. Shot on location for authenticity, the landscape was less a metaphor for America than a location, deterministic of an essentalized identity and a place for reification. The film kept Native Americans on location, remaining natural and forever native (though not vanishing). Penn's cultural construction of identity tied Indianness to the ideological role of geography. Indianness got at once deemphasized and reinstated, kept outside history and recognized in everyday life and practice as it appeared on the screen. The film therefore defined and assigned cultural value by exposing the problems in ways Indianness can be romanticized out of view. Flipping the coin fails to open the dynamic historical process in a shared history. In some ways the film turns Penn's phrase, "It doesn't get better than this," into a sinister premonition for Indian representation in historical narratives of the West.
Cinematic revisionism of the Old West began with critical looks at the Western's stereotypes. Similarly, Little Big Man set the standard for what audiences should expect from a new, more "enlightened" Hollywood. Real people played Indian in real spaces to show historical accuracy. Yet, what was intended to serve as a positive outreach from Hollywood to Native American cultures ironically reintroduced new victimization. The authentic, the native, the real became further irreducible, essential, and primitive, all in the name of "telling it like it is," with a little star appeal. As Deloria commented, Little Big Man's Indians "are funny, smart, and sexy."40 Dustin Hoffman returned to the screen as an American Indian and framed the preferred view of the native past and proper attitudes toward it in the present. Grandfather appealed to those in search of a wise, surefooted leader. These representations helped viewers work through a vision of America imagined as changed, more open and humane, just and liberated.
The construction of Indianness on screen contained its own politics. Penn's film has the same "native imprints" as did the trend toward "primitivism" in earlier times.41 He has no answer for contemporaneous Native Americans who were more inclined toward modernity.4z The reality of Native Americans is subject to forever being the primitive. As Deloria argues, oftentimes the primitive Indian became more valued than "real native people."43 The film's rendition of the good Indian gave credence to the preservationist, both native and academic, who often denied the complexity of current social issues and the historical reasons for the clash of values and beliefs. The result is "victim history," remarked an Albuquerque, New Mexico, director of the American Indian Graduate Center. Well-meaning advocates for social reparation "sell our kids short when we treat them as victims," he continued. "Get over the trauma," he admonished when explaining that misguided thinking has objectified American Indians by promoting "multigenerational trauma" and excusing individuals from "responsibility for themselves" as agents in the present.44
Penn's film is very much referenced today and applauded similarly as in 1970 for its intent to de-Hollywoodize Native Americans. Vincent Canby helped set the trend of victimizing while humanizing when he placed Little Big Man on "The Ten Best" films list. "Mr. Penn's film is a tough testament to the contrariness of the American experience as survived by 120year-old Jack Crabb.... The movie attempts to take its horrors seriously by making them comic, and winds up in some confusion. But this sort of confusion is more important than the achievements of lesser movies."45 In January 1994 the film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in two locations and marketed as exemplary. "If Penn was looking for an American metaphor for the topsy-turvy sixties," one ad said, "he could scarcely have found a better one than Thomas Berger's portrait of the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century." The tragi-comedy of "a society in transition with its values in an uproar" makes unique use of Crabb's perspective from inside the tribe: "Here he learns Indian philosophy and how to be a'human being,"' it continued.46
Later in 1996, the novel and film were praised at the San Francisco Film Festival. The novel was spoken about "as a rueful reappraisal of the American West." Berger "saw the corruption and conniving of the frontier and the brave attempt by Native Americans to hold on to their identity" and following Penn's success with Bonnie and Clyde, he "won studio support." The writer lamented, "it was not until 1970 that the picture opened." It clearly brought into view "the portrait of the American military and their abuse of the Cheyenne and the Sioux ... as inevitably ... a metaphor for Vietnam." The writer argued, "As time passes, it's easier to see Little Big Man's tragedy as the helpless offshoot of wayward American energy and the great stew of history made by idiots, scoundrels and liars."47 The film appeared at the 1999 USA Film Festival on April 23 and was touted as a "masterpiece from Arthur Penn," still "retain[ing] its power to shock and amuse after nearly three decades."48
One ethnohistorian cautioned viewers about the way film continues to be a source of knowledge about heritage and identity. "We cannot dismiss the stereotypes as unimportant film portrayals," he warns, "because hundreds of millions of people the world over have acquired their beliefs about North American Indians through motion pictures." Part of the group are "American Indians [themselves who] draw heavily from these films in constructing their own views of their cultural heritage [text italics]." For the millions of viewers who consumed Little Big Man as "new, now, and real," what attitudes and beliefs the film advanced added a word about social change and persistence in the belief that there exists an essence to Indianness.49 The intent was to decode stereotypes through films such as Little Big Man. Those images disassembled the Westerns' cumulative knowledge about Indian cultures and helped build a new reality and thus circulate new information about Indianness. Long-lived films, as well as festival revivals of them, typified the way American feature films solved social issues and maintained cultural legitimacy.
With eyes watching the world through the lens of multiculturalism, independents and film school graduates entered Hollywood politically aware of these social efforts. Eager for cinematic acclaim, one young filmmaker took advantage of the multicultural turn in America and moved film in yet another direction, away from the experimental and adversarial style of sixties experimentation. Between 1972 and 1974, the University of California at Los Angeles film-school graduate Francis Ford Coppola brought American film back to a golden age, more conventional than experimental with The Godfather Part I and Part II. Coppola revalidated the importance of a formulaic romantic tragedy by forcing viewers once again to reassess the construction of Americanness. This time it was the question of how heritage figured into the American cult of individualism and the legacy of America for third- and fourth-generation European ethnics intent on rediscovering their past and reclaiming their heritage.
In the spirit of diversity and the seventies "mosaic" America, Euro-Americans contested, comprehended, invented, and flaunted culture and heritage. New faces began new traditions. Coppola's moneymakers placed the Pacinos, the De Niros, and other New York ethnics squarely in the center of the screen. Coppola brought Italian voices in sync with Hollywood's gangster tradition by taking a hard look at ethnic families from an insider's point of view four years before Alex Halley popularized the famous roots movement with his book Roots in 1976. The result was an offer Hollywood learned not to refuse.
KAY ADAMS: It made me think of what you once told me: "In five years the Corleone family will be completely legitimate." That was seven years ago.
MICHAEL CORLEONE: f know. Ism trying, darling.
- The Godfather: Part II
For decades Italian Americans objected to representations of themselves as criminals in American cinema. From Little Caesar (1930) to The Untouchables television series, the image was the same. Italians were gangsters and violent, swarthy men who talked out of the corners of their mouths. It seems odd, then, that two Italian Americans, Francis Coppola, a filmmaker, and Mario Puzo, a novelist, would produce yet another portrayal of Italians as gangsters. At a glance, The Godfather films seem exploitative and manipulative. Don Corleone's (Marlon Brando) patriarchal family reverts to traditional attitudes, with women playing subservient roles and sons following the orders of fathers. Seemingly, it would be difficult to ignore the feminist challenge to male-dominant narratives at the time. Likewise, young people who imagined their generation as honest and forthright were rebelling against an overbearing paternalism that limited their lifestyle choices. Yet, when Don Corleone spoke, audiences applauded.
The Godfather films unequivocally tapped into a yearning for more than gangster drama or a return to patriarchal tradition. The generation seeking distance from traditional American institutions by popularizing such films as The Graduate, Alice's Restaurant, and Easy Rider looked to its roots for new moorings in ethnic values and identities by the 1970s. The release of The Godfather films paralleled the resurgence of ethnic advocacy in the United States and joined the critical conversation about the meaning of the Southern and Eastern European immigrant surge between 1880 and 1924. Placed in the cultural debates of the 1970s, The Godfather pair inscribed Italians with a new subjectivity in film. The results were two blockbusters that spoke about ethnicity with a wide audience.
Godfathers I and II helped reconstruct and reinvent American Italianness just as thirdgeneration Southern Europeans entered colleges and professional fields in record numbers. Obliquely, both films imprinted an immigrant narrative into American cinematic history by retelling the pertinence of the American Dream, the meaning of work, the importance of success, and especially the ethnic dimension of the immigrant story. Boomer ethnics turned to a new kind of empowerment that was once denied their grandparents. Primarily, younger generations widened the assimilation paradigm and enjoyed a new identification process. The Godfather films spoke to that change. In their attempt to present Italianness from an "insider's" point of view, the films were provincial and universal at the same time for a reason. Engaging the well-known and liked gangster story, the films achieved a delicate balance between the conventions of the genre and an immersion in ethnic culture.
The Godfather (1972) family photo (Photofest).
Similar to the The Graduate in 1967, the ticket lines at the theaters for The Godfather stretched for blocks. Hustlers capitalized on the popularity and sold places in line for $20.00. By the end of the first-week run, the film brought in nearly a half-million dollars. Critics saw Coppola's Godfather pair as "a primary example of... progressive film[s]."' New York film critic Pauline Kael declared The Godfather "one of the two or three best films ever made at a Hollywood studio." In her estimation it was "the work of a major artist."2 Time called it "an Italian-American Gone with the Wind," so effective "that [it] seems to have everything."3 The 1973 and 1975 Academy Awards echoed the same critical opinion. The Godfather received three awards from its ten nominations. It won Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screen Play. Two years later, Coppola's The Godfather: Part II collected six awards from its eleven nominations. This time Coppola walked away with Best Producer and Director. Part II was the only sequel to surpass its precursor in box office gross and win Best Picture. The pair was the only crime drama to win the same Oscar twice.'
The young filmmaker's success signaled a change in American film.5 In 1969, Coppola was working with experimental cinema and his new independent company Zoetrope in San Francisco. By 1974 he had created three classics with major .6 Given these successes compared to his experimental projects, he was well on his way to becoming Hollywood's charismatic filmmaking hero. The Godfather's creation and success meant to many that the experimental sixties had succeeded in reshaping the feature film industry. As film scholar Jon Lewis put it, the film is "a legendary American auteur picture - one that is generally and justifiably credited with starting the so-called auteur renaissance in the 1970s." 7 Producer and director Roger Corman claimed it was The Godfather that brought together "the American genre film and the European art film." As Corman remarked, "Beautiful, realist, revolutionary, The Godfather stepped outside the boundaries of the traditional in both form and story." Coppola synthesized European cinema and Hollywood convention. In Corman's opinion, he "eclipsed and conquered the mainstream."8 It gave experimental magic an American home and ethnic voices a new sound.
Zoetrope and his Godfather films earned Coppola the reputation as "the patriarch of the `Auteur Renaissance' in Hollywood." The 1972 and 1974 releases became two of Francis Coppola's most memorable films and earned their director the title, "godfather of the blockbuster." Film critic Nick Browne even described Coppola as the "linch-pin of the notable change in a post-1960s' studio system." His "personal artistic vision," Brown continued, showed what "could be, and might even be necessary to, the foundation of enormous financial success, one that inaugurated the Hollywood blockbuster syndrome."9 These studio pictures set the standard for the seventies style moneymaker dominated by the younger generation of filmmakers. Where the experimental trend defined Coppola's 1960s projects (Rain People, for example), the conventional story line marked his seventies undertakings.
Getting Paramount to sign the initial project, however, took some coaxing. The studio had recently been stung by another Mafia picture, The Brotherhood, released in January 1969, starring Kirk Douglas, and the last thing executives wanted to risk was another gangster failure. With Douglas at the helm, company and reviewers alike agreed that the Brotherhood "had all the makings of a hit." Unfortunately, no one went. Paramount's financial loss meant that if Kirk Douglas (in black hair and shaggy mustache) could not pull off a hit in a popular genre, then why should the studio risk making the same mistake twice? As one critic observed, "the prospect that The Godfather could be the financial triumph and cultural phenomenon it became had all the potential of a ticket in a billion-dollar lottery.""
Burt Lancaster production executives approached producer Robert Evans and offered to make The Godfather provided Lancaster starred. Evans refused because he believed him wrong for the part. Well-established filmmakers such as Fred Zinnemann and Richard Brooks turned down the initial project because "they thought it was just a big commercial project about gangsters and didn't see it as a film with redeeming social or any other value."" Others were worried "about being associated with a potentially incendiary ethnic picture .1112 Peter Bart suggested Paramount try Francis Coppola as the director and Evans took advantage of the opportunity so he could avoid the Lancaster deal. Coppola's appeal as an Italian American attracted Paramount since executives saw him as a cover against accusations of stereotyping and defamation. His name and identity would ensure protection.13
Coppola himself was not initially interested. He shied away from sensational feature films with tight Hollywood control, believing an Italian "Carpetbagger" style crime drama would cheapen his artistic career. By the spring of 1970, however, Hollywood seemed attractive, especially since he was in financial trouble with Zoetrope, his independent film studio in San Francisco. Coppola conceded. He would make the movie if he could take it in a direction different from that in The Brotherhood. Rather than "a film about organized gangsters" it would be "a family chronicle" and a critique of "capitalism in America. 1114 Coppola brought an artistic dimension to the genre with notable framing, composition, and juxtaposition. His skill, as Roger Corman noted, was "gritty" and "elegant," realistic and beautiful. No longer would art and blockbuster seemed an oxymoron. The ethnic eye "confirm[ed] the place of artistry in American gangster cinema."15 First, Coppola helped convert Puzo's bestseller The Godfather, a book about the Mafia, into a family story about power, loyalty, conflict, and regeneration. Coppola's talent and visionary cinematic capabilities blended with his desire "to make this an authentic piece of film about gangsters who were Italian, how they lived, how they behaved, the way they treated their families, celebrated their rituals." Clearly, this filmmaker understood the power of film and its global reach. If ever there was a chance to test that, it was now. In collaboration with Mario Puzo, who was in the midst of worldwide fame, Coppola agreed that the film would be "about more than the Mafia." The story would address the "conflicts in American culture" and center on "a powerful man who builds a dynasty through crime -but he wants his son to be a senator, a governor." The larger task was to make it "about the very nature of power. What it does to you. Who survives."16
