Mattresses, guns and cannoli

Earlier this week I tweeted that the film version of 'The Godfather' is 50 years old this year.

Think about that.

It means that 50 years before  I first saw this seminal movie, the flicks were silent.

Mind. Blown.

I don't see 'The Godfather' as an old movie at all. I don't see any films from the 70s as old, really. But to many, they really are.

I still remember watching it for the first time. It was in the Coliseum Cinema in Glasgow, like many  old picture palaces no longer with us. It was an X certificate in the UK, which I meant I was too young but often that restriction was taken as more a guideline than a rule. 

My mother was unimpressed by it - she thought it slow - but I loved it. I loved Gordon Willis' dark photography (not for nothing was he known as the Prince of Darkness). I loved the languid approach. I loved the rich detail. I loved the bursts of action. 

Did I mention that I loved it?

I still have the commemorative booklet that you could buy in the cinema, for this was an event movie. I bought the soundtrack album and I still have that, too. I bought and devoured the book. And yes, I still have it.

The book fires off in a lot of different directions, with a lot more involving the Hollywood star Johnny Fontaine (a thinly-disguised Frank Sinatra). It ran for less than 450 pages. Think about the epic sweep, the number of characters and incidents and the impact it had, much to author Mario Puzo's relief. Then think about those modern day crime novels that are longer.

What Francis Coppola did was streamline the plot to focus on the family at the story's core and the darkness at the heart of US and international commerce. The first film and its two sequels - yes, I seem to be in the minority regarding the third one in that I like it - are masterclasses in mixing popular storytelling with art.

Of course, he is aided by a superb cast. Pacino, Duvall, Caan, Cazale and, of course, Brando. But let's not forget Diane Keaton who did wonders with what is really a nothing part. And Talia Shire whose arc over the three, in just a few scenes, is brilliant.

And then there's the lines, so wonderfully utilised by the much-missed Nora Ephron in 'You've Got Mail' very much as the secret of life.

Going to the mattresses.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli.

This is business, not personal.

And that offer that cannot be refused.

It wasn't the first mob movie, of course, although in the late 60s Paramount had lost a bundle on the Kirk Douglas starrer 'The Brotherhood'. The original 'Scarface' apart, the gangster flicks of the golden years didn't have Italian-American protagonists in the main. With James Cagney strutting his stuff they were very much of Irish descent.

Later came movies like 'The Black Hand' (1950) with J. Carroll Naish as a fictional version of Joseph Petrosino, the real-life cop who waged war against the forerunner of what became popularly known as the Mafia. Ernest Borgnine played the actual Petrosino on 1960's 'Pay or Die'. In 'The Enforcer' (the 1951 film not the later Clint Eastwood police thriller), Humphrey Bogart took on Murder Inc, although the real-life leader Albert Anastasia became a character called Mendoza.

On TV, of course, there was 'The Untouchables', based on the book by Oscar Fraley and Elliot Ness. The show was a huge hit but drew criticism over its depiction of Italian-Americans. To make up for it, they added an Italian-American to Ness's team. The show ran for five years - success not met by 'The Silent Force' which ran for only 15 episodes in 1970/71.

But it was Coppola's movie that had the greatest impact, spawning the aforementioned sequels, a mini-series in which the three films were edited into chronological order and a host of copy cats, most notable for me being 'The Valachi Papers', the true story of informer Joe Valachi, played in 1972 by Charles Bronson. Valachi was the first member of the Cosa Nostra to admit that it existed - for years J. Edgar Hoover had denied it - and this Italian-French co-production was based on the bestseller by Peter Maas, one of many Mafia-related books that I read post-Godfather. Another was journalist Fred J. Cook's Mafia!, which I read and re-read but lost when it was borrowed and never returned. I wish I could find a new copy. The Valachi movie, which took some liberties with fact, must have been in production when 'The Godfather' was being filmed and released. It's an inferior film, certainly, and in places overly bloody, but interesting. It does look dated though.

Unlike 'The Godfather, which to me looks as fresh and fascinating now as it was back in 1972. 

If only those of us of similar vintage - and older - did the same.