The Great Movies III

So Part-[[ is finally a sad film, a lament for loss, certainly. It is a contrast with the earlier film, in which Don Corleone is seen defending old values against modern hungers. Young Vito was a murderer, too, as we more fully see in the Sicily and New York scenes of Part II. But he had grown wise and diplomatic, and when he dies beside the tomato patch, yes, we feel regret. An age has closed. We feel no regret at Michael's decline.' he crucial difference between the two films is that Vito is sympathetic, and Michael becomes a villain. That is not a criticism but an observation.

The "best films" balloting on IMDb.com lacks credibility because popularity is the primary criteria. But hundreds of thousands do indeed vote, and as I write, the top four films, in order, are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, The Dark Knight, and The Godfather: Part 11. Of all of the reviews I have ever written, my three-star review of Part II has stirred the most disagreement. Sometimes it is simply cited as proof of my worthlessness. I've been told by many that Part II is a rare sequel that is better than the original. Have I changed my mind? No. I have read my review of Part II and would not change a word.

Then why is it a "great movie"? Because it must be seen as a piece with the unqualified greatness of The Godfather. The two can hardly be considered apart (Part III is another matter). When the characters in a film take on a virtual reality for us, when a character in another film made thirty years later can say The Godfather contains all the lessons in life you need to know, when an audience understands why that statement could be made, a film has become a cultural bedrock. No doubt not all of the gospels are equally "good," but we would not do without any of them.

The Godfather: Part II then becomes a film that everyone who values movies at all should see. And as I write this, it can be seen in astonishingly good prints.' he Godfather trilogy has been painstakingly digitally restored by Robert Harris, a master in his field. I have seen the restored Godfather in the new 35mm print and PartII in the new Blu-ray DVD. Having first seen both at their world premieres, I would argue that they have never looked better. For films of such visual richness, that is a reason to rejoice.

And now I come back to the music. More than ever, I am convinced it is instrumental to the power and emotional effect of the films. I cannot imagine them without their Nino Rota scores. Against all our objective reason, they instruct us how to feel about the films. Now listen very carefully to the first notes as the big car drives into Miami. You will hear an evocative echo of Bernard Hermann's score for Citizen Kane, another film about a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it.

n 1938, the world's most famous movie star began to prepare a film about the monster of the twentieth century. Charlie Chaplin looked a little like Adolf Hitler, in part because Hitler had chosen the same toothbrush moustache as the Little Tramp. Exploiting that resemblance, Chaplin devised a satire in which the dictator and a Jewish barber from the ghetto would be mistaken for each other. The result, released in 1940, was The Great Dictator, Chaplin's first talking picture and the highest-grossing of his career, although it would cause him great difficulties and indirectly lead to his long exile from the United States.

In 1938, Hitler was not yet recognized in all quarters as the embodiment of evil. Powerful isolationist forces in America preached a policy of nonintervention in the troubles of Europe, and rumors of Hitler's policy to exterminate the Jews were welcomed by anti-Semitic groups. Some of Hitler's earliest opponents, including anti-Franco American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, were later seen as "premature antifascists"; by fighting against fascism when Hitler was still considered an ally, they raised suspicion that they might be communists. The Great Dictator ended with a long speech denouncing dictatorships and extolling democracy and individual freedoms.' his sounded to the left like bedrock American values, but to some on the right, it sounded pinko.

If Chaplin had not been "premature," however, it is unlikely he would have made the film at all. Once the horrors of the Holocaust began to be known, Hitler was no longer funny, not at all. The Marx Brothers, ahead of the curve, made Duck Soup in 1933, with Groucho playing the dictator Rufus T. Firefly in a comedy that had ominous undertones about what was already underway in Europe. And as late as 1942, the German exile Ernst Lubitsch made To Be or Not to Be, with Jack Benny as an actor who becomes embroiled in the Nazi occupation of Poland.