Camera And Action, page 44
33. Lebo, The Godfather Legacy, 1-2.
34. Michael Barone, "Italian Americans and American Politics," in Beyond The Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, ed. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Purini (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997), 241-246.
35. Lebo, The Godfather Legacy, 127.
36. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 93.
37. Corman, "The Godfather and The Godfather Part II."
38. Albert Rosenfeld, "What is the Right Number of Children?" Life 71.25 (17 Dec. 1971), 99.
39. Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 79.
40. Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino, Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian American Women (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2000), 1.
41. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics:
Politics and Culture in American Life (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1972), 272, 271.
42. Al Pacino in DVD, "Coppola's Notebook."
43. Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 272, 271.
44. Returning to an "originary" point is of course impossible because going back is part of the process of constructing a new identity. As Mannino quotes Julia Kristeva about writing, the act is a "`semiotic practice that facilitates the ultimate reorganization of psychic space before a postulated maturity."' Yet Mannino comments, "The Italian/American writer never attains this postulated maturity; she is always rewriting herself," defending "an incestuous love for the nineteenth century peasant culture that their very ability to read and write make it impossible for them to really experience. This incestuous love for the Italy of their grandparents transforms itself into an imaginary identification with it." The result is "`a double language' both loving and despising the Italian peasant culture and the Anglo-American one." Mannino, Revisionary Identities, 65.
45. Alessandro Camon, "The Godfather and the Mythology of Mafia," in Browne, The Godfather Trilogy, 66.
46. The "Soliticzo" scene secured Pacino's role for good. "They kept me after that scene," he commented. From Coppolas Notebook CD, Scene 26: This is one of the most important scenes because it defines Michael's character. As Coppola said, this scene was an important scene for Al Pacino because it was the one that convinced the studio Pacino was right for the part. More than any other scene, this one showed Michael's negotiation of American society.
47. In Nick Browne's words, "The Coppola aesthetic is ultimately one of `mise-en-scene' that is to say of acting, blocking, and delivery of dialog. The narrative of The Godfather possesses the simplicity of linear development by plausible complication following reliable dramatic laws of action and reaction." Browne, The Godfather Trilogy, 2-3.
48. "Coppolas Notebook," DVD.
49. Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 91-92. In her words, "It must be stressed that La Via Vecchia is a Sicilian term ... that has a bearing on the rules of comportment for men, women, and the members of the family. It is through the clash of these ways with the encroachments of American society, then, that this film enacts its major codes of Italianicity." Ibid., 88.
50. Browne, The Godfather Trilogy, 19.
51. Carron, "The Godfather and the Mythology of Mafia," 60. As Carron remarks, individuating and working for self is "a flagrant violation of the organization's ethics.... Collective interest is inseparable from that of the individuals.... Ultimately, the Mafia's `family values' are key to its power." Ibid., 60-62.
52. Johnson, "Francis Ford Coppola," 125.
53. Mann, "Ideology and Genre in the Godfather Films," 122, 124. As Mann remarks, "It achieves this success only through a series of compromises that destroy its integrity. The dangers inherent in capitalist impulse surface in Michael's paranoid vengeance." Ibid., 121.
54. Johnson, "Francis Ford Coppola," 114.
55. The quote is from Norman Podhertz, Commentary, in "Behind the Mystique of the Mafia," Time (13 Mar. 1972): 61.
56. Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 88. As she explains, "La Via Vecchia ... occupies a symbolic central position within the film, dictating the behavior of all its men, and thus defining the limits of masculinity and the limits of culpability as well. The villainous male characters in the film are guilty and punishable to the degree that they deviate from these established codes of honor. In this way, The Godfather diminishes the characters' association with crime and its squalid realities, and instead foregrounds acts made punishable precisely because they are reactions against the breach of an ancient masculine code." Ibid., 89.
57. Mannino, Revisionary Identities, 50-52, 57. As Mannino argues, "Although blatant discrimination against Italian/Americans is illegal, their stereotyped portraits are still current images in popular culture." To be sure, subjectiveness is never without structures of power. The idea of a completely autonomous individual is a fantasy. Thus, recognizing what is possible within the defining features of domination is the problem and the answer for identity construction. The social position of the individual also influences the strategy and negotiating potential in making moves through relations of power. See ibid., 50.
58. Novak, Unmeltable Ethnics.
59. Dika tells us that the term dago derives from the association of Italians with daggers and "feared as a stilettowielding Mafioso." Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 105.
60. Novak, Unmeltable Ethnics, 348.
61. Ibid., 351.
62. Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 776, 777.
63. As Alba's study shows, many of the urban ethnic centers have disappeared since "the outward migration from inner-city ethnic neighborhoods" to the suburbs and the soaring numbers in intermarriages, which complicates choices in lifestyles. Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 254-255.
64. Ibid., 3.
65. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 173.
66. Browne, The Godfather Trilogy, 18.
67. Vera Dika points out, "In intellectual circles, this situation has been touted as `the death of the subject,' the death of individualism as such, and in everyday life it has been experienced as the individual's lessening ability to fully control or understand the world." In Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 97.
68. These films are part of the discursive process that makes the subject though for opposite ends and even reasons.
69. Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 82.
70. John Hess, "Godfather II: A Deal Coppola Couldn't Refuse," Jump Cut, A Review of Contemporary Cinema 7 (May-July 1975): 11.
71. Ibid., 10.
72. Philip Deloria says American Indians were "ethnic gifts for a pluralistic American whole" by the late twentieth century. While Native American and immigrant history carry their clear racial and class differences, the 1970s multiculturalism ties them to the same dynamic over consuming and constructing identities. Not the degree but the means of making identities popular and legitimate worked in similar ways. Deloria, Playing Indian, 175.
73. Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 96-97.
74. The Godfather Script, 23A.
75. Mannino, Revisionary Identities, 18. Anthony Tam- burri remarks that the women's social roles were passed on generationally. It was expected that daughters would live the lives of mothers and housewives. Anthony Tamburri, A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In Recognition of the Italian/American Writer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 57, 143, 158.
76. Lester D. Friedman, "Celluloid Palimpsets: An Overview of Ethnicity and the American Film," in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1991), 29, 30. Friedman's take is that Jewish filmmakers wished to "create a new country- an empire of their own ... its myths and values" through film. Film's expansiveness offered a powerful route in which to control the narrative and images in "an overwhelming endorsement of a melting-pot mentality, one that ignores crucial differences in ethnic identities and blends cultural oppositions into a bland conception of Americannness." Ibid., 29, 25. See ibid., 29 for filmmakers Friedman includes.
77. Ethnic resurgence presented the challenge of reessentializing identity while claiming authenticity, since saying who is more ethnic raises questions of authority and value judgment. Philip Deloria explains the unique difficulty in American popular culture and native societies for the resurgence of Indian identity. "Playing Indian ... has been an intercultural meeting ground upon which Indians and non-Indians have created new identities, not only for white Americans, but for Indians themselves." Deloria, Playing Indian, 187.
78. Paul Lyons, New Left, New Right and the Legacy of the Sixties (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 133. Lyons argues that one of the problems with diversity is that it risked denying a "shared politics, a belief in a potentially common, American interest." For that goal to be recovered, he believed that the middle class had to figure into the equation of multiculturalism. The Godfather in a sense supplies a shared politics for middle-class audiences by making ethnicity a vibrant attribute in a traditional drama.
79. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998). Jacobson objects to Michael Novak's sense that discrimination against ethnics has taken away their dignity based on his grouping of Europeans in the same category of oppression as others. He writes, "`Chicanos, [and] Blacks' ... appear unproblematically in a list of aggrieved Poles, Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and French, as though these latter groups' becoming Caucasian meant nothing in the American milieu. As though, by virtue of their non-WASPness, these groups all occupied the same terrain in American political life." Ibid., 279. Some saw seventies' ethnicity as another form of "pan-white supremacism," a Europeanness based on white privilege. If ethnics negotiated a new distinction of worthiness, founded on a history of oppression then, as Jacobson noted, "Only where whiteness has been rejected out of hand as an insignificant detail can grievances reduce to a matter of `unworthiness."' Ibid., 278-279. Yet, Jacobson also argues that "the problem [of race] is not merely how races are comprehended, but how they are seen." The problem of perception describes as much the value of ethnic revival in Coppolds films. Ibid., 9.
80. The same contradiction rests in the popular television serial, Archie Bunker, and its theme of "those were the days." An Irish ethnic yearning for the good old days would require a selective memory if he is to emerge as the voice of white authority. Part of the position from which he speaks must include the history of discrimination.
81. Novak, The Unmeltable Ethnics, 22, 402.
82. Friedman, "Celluloid Palimpsets," 29, 30.
83. Dika, "The Representation of Ethnicity," 85.
84. The Pacino/DeNiro addition creates a subject-position for Italians. The images of Italians in Hollywood have provided objectified Italians and although film does not offer the socializing tools for regeneration of ethnicity, it does contribute to the meaning of the culture on display. As sociologist Richard D. Alba argues, "Because of the erosion of the structural foundations of ethnicity and the porousness of ethnic boundaries, solidarity is possible only if ethnic identities are socially recognized." Pacino's popularity therefore was key not to the formation of ethnic identity but to the social legitimacy of his look. Alba, Ethnic Identity, 26.
85. After The Godfather's successful second run, "NBC- TV paid the highest price ever for an exclusive single showing of the film on network television." Paramount owned over 84 percent of the picture. Lewis, "If History Has Taught Us Anything," 30-35.
86. Andrew Sarris' comment about Coppola in the early days in Andrew Sarris, TheAmerican Cinema: Directors and Directions (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1968), 210.
87. Johnson, "Francis Ford Coppola," Forward.
88. See Lewis, "If History has Taught Us Anything," 37-38 for an account of Paramount's Frank Yablans who brought Coppola, Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin under "studio superstructure" by forming the Director's Company (3 Jan. 1973), a "production unit" gave contract and "creative autonomy" at the same time. Yablans optimistically assumed the company would produce a "New" Hollywood but turning power over to the artists was not so easy and the company dissolved. During its lifetime it produced The Conversation (Coppola), Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich), and Daisy Miller (Bogdanovich).
89. Original Dramatic Score went to Carmine Coppola, the director's father. He and Nino Rota composed the music.
90. Corman, "The Godfather and The Godfather Part II," 32.
Conclusion
1. Martin Quigley, Jr., Films in America: 1929-1969 (New York: Golden Press, 1970), 347.
2. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bull: How the SexDrugs-and-Rock 'N'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 22, 255.
3. "The Art that Matters" is the title of the film section in Saturday Review, 27 Dec. 1969.
4. Christopher Faulkner, "Teaching French National Cinema," Cinema journal 38.4 (Summer 1999): 88, 89. Although Hollywood is different from official national cinema, Faulkner's concepts about French film apply to the most dominant entertainment industry in America.
5. Jack Hamilton, "Where, Oh Where Are the Beautiful Girls?" Look 3 (Nov. 1970), 62-71.
6. Diane Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance (London, Brunswick, and New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1977), 12, 14.
7. Fletcher Knebel, "Hollywood: Broke - and Getting Richer," Look 3 (Nov. 1970), 41, 46, 52.
8. "Fiction and Film: A 'Search for New Sources," Saturday Review 52 (27 Dec. 1969): 13.
9. Knebel, "Hollywood: Broke," 51.
10. Jeanine Basinger, American Cinema: One Hundred Years ofFilmmaking (New York: Rizzoli Books, 1994), 289.
11. Douglas Gomery, Movie History: A Survey (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991), 424, 433.
12. Gregory D. Black, The Catholic CrusadeAgainst the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3.
13. Faulkner, "Teaching French National Cinema," 89, 90.
14. Richard Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of WhiteAmerica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
15. Lester D. Friedman, "Celluloid Palimpsets: An Overview of Ethnicity and the American Film," in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema,
ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 30.
16. Faulkner, "Teaching French National Cinema," 89.
17. Anthony Schillaci, "The Now Movie," Saturday Review (28 Dec_ 1968): 10.
18. David L. Westby Clouded Vision: The StudentMove- ment in the United States in the 1960s (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1976), 17.
19. Richard Maltby, "`Nobody Know Everything:' PostClassical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 33, 32.
20. Faulkner, "Teaching French National Cinema," 90, 89.
21. Speaking about race by opposing Hollywood's rendition of blacks caught the attention of Lawrence Turman (The Graduate) and Martin Ritt (Hud). The Great White Hope (1970) visualized a new relationship between white and black with James Earl Jones as heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and Jane Alexander as his lover. The film addresses the superficial nature of the promises in a multicultural society. Since it made only 20 percent of the production costs in box office revenues, it is safe to say viewers were to connected to other offering such as M*A*S*H and Patton in the same year.
22. Historians Robert Sklar and Charles Musser in Resisting Images, a collection of essays about films "that resist" or are "resistant to hegemonic cinema," argues film's agency lies in the act of opposition. Resistance, they claim, "implies exertion, force, effort." It "means that people have the possibility to act on their own behalf, as opposed to being completely shaped by dominant classes and ideologies." Films that resist "overcome the ideological intentions of conventional texts and criticism." The concept of resistant viewing and filmmaking is an important and necessary one when holding the films in this study next to other narratives dealing with problematic issues such as race. From the lens of race, Hollywood's whiteness even during multiculturalism was still pretty blinding. Robert Sklar and Charles Musser, eds., Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema andHistory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 5.
23. Stanley Kramer and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? in 1965 made the question about civil rights and interracial marriages a foremost topic for the mainstream screen. In the Heat of the Night with Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier won Best Picture for 1967 and Sounder was nominated for 1971.
24. While it is not clear how much a film subverts dominant power in everyday life, changes were made and audiences did get heard during the years that bookend this study. All ten films considered, to varying degrees, were perceived as defiant within their historical context. As Teresa de Lauretis has argued, "The cinematic contract that binds each individual spectator to the social technology of cinema is more complex than an exchange of money for pleasure or entertainment. For it produces, as a surplus, certain effects of meaning which are central to the construction of gender and subjectivity." Changing a viewer's "self-representation" explains much of the agency in this body of films if seen through the categories of generation, gender, and ethnicity. Not just a ripe marketing tool for co-opting audiences, film, whether a commercial success or not, was a place of cultural exchange. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 96.
25. Basinger, American Cinema, 281.
26. Gomery, Movie History: A Survey, 433.
27. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 279, 278, 279; Richard Zanuck quoted in ibid., 278.
28. Frederic Jameson, Signatures ofthe Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 27. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won Best Picture.
