My attention was brought recently to film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2009 article on the first two Godfather films. Originally posted here, I copy and paste the entire thing below. All emphases in original.

This was written quite recently, in December 2008, after Dana Linssen, the editor-in-chief of the independent Dutch film monthly de Filmkrant, sent out a request early that month for contributions to what she called a “Slow Criticism” dossier, to appear in their special English-language newspaper at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in late January.

Dana described what she wanted as follows: “The SLOW CRITICISM dossier is meant to be an explicit refuge for wayward articles that too seldom find their way to print, because they are too philosophical, personal, political, or poetic. Their focus can be diverse, from neglected directors to ponderings on the metaphysics of cinema. At this point we want to be as open as possible for any brain-wave you might have.

“We reckon most of you must have a cri de coeur like that lingering in the back of your heads (and hearts).

“But we are demanding! We are aiming for texts that are urgent and burning. The world will have to stop turning if they’re not published right now. They have to be dragged from the gates of hell (and heaven alike). They should alter our filmic eyes all over again.”

This was a tall order, and I don’t know at all if the following meets it. But I had just reseen the first two parts of The Godfather after having recently purchased the new DVD box set, which is what led me to propose the following. (I had previously written on Part III for the Chicago Reader, and had originally reviewed Part II a mite skeptically for the Summer 1975 issue of Sight and Sound—a review, needless to say, that isn’t available online.) My thanks to Dana for generously allowing me to run the piece here a little in advance of its publication in the Slow Criticism dossier.–J.R.

Although I vastly prefer Citizen Kane (1941) to The Godfather (1972), one facet of both films that gives me some pause—especially because I believe this facet has something to do with the current and unquestioned status of both movies as towering masterworks, not simply superb entertainments—is their worship of power, including their capacity to view corruption from a corrupt vantage point. Both movies are melancholy and wistful about their conviction that corruption is an inescapable part of American life in general and The American Dream in particular, and maybe I wouldn’t mind this attitude quite so much if its metaphysics weren’t so glib and absolute in its defeatism.

After all, accepting gangsterism along with its built-in denial as essential and inescapable parts of our condition has a lot to do what made the gangsterism/ denial of the Bush era so rampant, everyday, and taken for granted, at least until the possibility of overcoming it was implicitly posed by the Obama campaign. In his book GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind—–published the year after The Godather’s release, when some commentators were already touting it as that late 30s blockbuster’s natural successor—Gavin Lambert perhaps said it best: “When the most ruthless level of private enterprise becomes widely taken for granted, a film like The Godfather finds there are no questions left to be asked. Its characters exist in a nightmare which they (and the audience) accept as everyday reality.”

What Citizen Kane has that Orson Welles’ other films lack is the contribution of Herman G. Mankiewicz , whose caustic wit is valued by some for its comforting assurances about the inevitability of corruption. The more innocent and ultimately destabilizing view of corruption shared by Welles’ other films—that is to say, their lack of cynicism—surely has something to do with their failure to be fully assimilated into the American mainstream. For the Pauline Kael who viewed Kane as “kitsch redeemed”, the notion that The Godfather could be viewed as a different kind of kitsch rather than as a noble Shakespearean tragedy is never considered, because there are certain ideological givens about American violence and power, even at their most infantile and unreasoning, that are too serious to be scoffed at, especially when they’re bathed in “Rembrandt” lighting. By contrast, consider all the depictions of violence in such otherwise very different films as Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and Jarmusch’s Dead Man, which refuse the very possibility of violence having any kind of dignity whenever or however it occurs. Mythologies about macho power and the pride of wanton blood-spilling are arguably at the roots of what put George W. Bush twice into office, but this is something we’ve generally allowed ourselves to laugh at only after it’s too late to undo most of the damage. This also helps to explain why American reviewers generally showed themselves to be incapable of stepping beyond the critical framework dictated by the pressbook of Oliver Stone’s Nixon and insisted on employing the word “Shakespearean” in their reviews—thereby glamorizing the film and, more implicitly, Nixon’s own skuzzy exploits. (At least Herman Mankiewicz never tried to position himself as a Shakespeare—–apparently being content to accept the more modest mantle of, say, a bush-league Thackeray.)

This development can perhaps be traced in part back to Pauline Kael’s use of the adjective “Shakespearean” near the end of the first paragraph of her review of The Godfather, Part II. Her second paragraph—– which casually identified its predecessor as “the greatest gangster picture ever made,” immediately after announcing that Part II “enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning” of its predecessor—–marked the lamentable suspension of her Orwellian scoffing at pretension that was perhaps the strongest virtue of her early criticism. In terms of her own unapologetic trash aesthetic, a far better candidate for “greatest gangster picture” would surely be the Hawks-Hecht-Hughes Scarface, no less arty than Coppola’s blockbuster but far more exuberant and irresponsible (and far more honest about its own amorality), and in most respects closer to the starkness of Greek tragedy, incest and all, than to any Shakespearean tragedy or historical melodrama.

It’s a moot point whether Coppola intended this, but the ethical contrast between Vito Corleone (Brando) as an earthy, charismatic gentleman Mafiosi and his cold-blooded son and successor Michael (Pacino), a Machiavellian who winds up engineering the deaths of family members—–a brother-in-law in the first film, a brother in the second–—tends to mystify or at least detract from the degree to which both men are killers. If we’re being asked to brood about the moral and stylistic decline of the Corleones, we’re less likely to be attentive to the continuity of violence between the nostalgically depicted past and the more coarsely perceived near-present.

Both Kane and The Godfather (all three parts) qualify as what Manny Farber called White Elephant Art—– the sort of studio sucker-punch that Kael was usually able to see through, until she capitulated without qualm to this particular brand of it, inviting her more uncritical fans to follow. (I may be alone in finding campy rather than profound the incongruous and multiple recurrences of Nino Rota’s omnipresent Godfather theme in Part II—–performed on a church organ at the communion of Michael Corleone’s son at the beginning, and later sung as a folk ballad with guitar accompaniment in Little Italy almost half a century earlier, just before the Intermission.) If what Kael called “the Promothean spark in [Mario Puzo’s] trash” was really and truly ignited by the movie version, the Stalinist grandiosity and monumentality that made it all possible seemed to fly by her shit-detector without registering so much as a blip. And one possible reason for this, I would submit, is that she bought into its ideological underpinnings, perhaps unconsciously.

Even though Lee Strasberg’s performance as Hyman Roth in Part II represents a triumph of what Farber called Termite Art–—especially in relation to the White Elephant Oscar-mongering of Brando’s cheek-stuffing masquerade, to which Strasberg offers a kind of lesson in Method simplicity and understatement –—I’d still single out the original Godfather as the one worthier of its classic status. Yet it’s still always been tainted for me by the response of the New York audience to the final scene, the first time I saw this movie, at a huge theater just north of Times Square: when Michael Corleone lies to his wife Kay (Diane Keaton) about ordering the killing of his brother-in-law, they applauded and cheered. At the time I thought they were bring crass; today I’m more apt to think that they may have understood the movie better than Kael or perhaps even Coppola did.

Broadly speaking, the first Godfather is a generic gangster film with arthouse trimmings and the second is an arthouse film with generic gangster trimmings, but both blockbusters encompass masterful American adaptations and appropriations of recent Italian cinema. The first and best sequence in the first film, built around a wedding, is indebted to the remarkable, protracted ball in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) while the stylish, nostalgic handling of period décor in the second appears to owe something to Bertolucci’s The Comformist (1971); and both would of course be diminished considerably without the catchy music drawn from Fellini’s habitual composer. The outsized success of both Godfathers helped to mark the eclipse of foreign film distribution in the U.S. for the sake of glossy American art movies, a little bit before Woody Allen’s (and Martin Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s) mining of similar fields started to take hold.

I’m certainly not claiming that Godfathers I and II lack moral ambiguity and nuance and that cherished hits necessarily lack such qualities. Lambert made a very good case for those qualities in Gone with the Wind, though I think he went overboard when he claimed—after conceding that “Thirty years will have to pass before we can know if The Godfather’s appeal is momentary or lasting”—–that, unlike its predecessor [Gone with the Wind], “the involvement [that The Godfather] demands never rises above the level of sensation, since its impact lies in showing the organization of violence, painstakingly detailed.” Surely the complex irony milked out of the interfacing of family values, capitalism, and remorseless murder—–a kind of irony shared with the much greater Monsieur Verdoux and Psycho—–also has a great deal to do with the dynamic impact of the first two Godfathers. But I don’t think Chaplin’s film or Hitchcock’s encourages any of the same complacency, which in the case of Coppola’s films amounts to a kind of political defeatism: in both Godfathers, Michael can’t break away from his awful family heritage of obligation, vengeance, and crime, including murder. Presumably neither can we when we accept his resignation. But there’s nothing remotely noble about this resignation, Shakespearean or otherwise; it’s a cowardly form of pathos, and one which Americans have been living with on an intimate basis for the past eight years.

Thanks for posting this article, Mick.

Invariably, critics like to pull down popular icons because they are popular. That's what distinguishes a "critic" from the unwashed masses. There's nothing wrong with great entertainment, for crissakes. Both GF and II, and Kane, have fine performances and more than a few artistic touches (especially Gregg Toland's never-surpassed photography in Kane). But their appeal is still based on being vastly, consistently, watch-a-hundred-times entertaining. If I want ars gratia artis, I'll watch The Conversation or L'avventura, in which art trumps boredom.

For the record, GF is not a gangster movie per se, it's a movie about a family, with the Mafia as the defining milieu. In the same vein, GWTW is not a US Civil War movie per se, it's a movie about a family, with the Civil War as the defining milieu. IMO, the greatest gangster movie ever made is White Heat.

This critic, political agenda, and Paulene Kael agenda aside, is straining at gnats IMHO. He appears to be critical of the notion that evil is glamorized in the GF films as well as in Citizen Kane, but what he fails to understand regarding the GF films is that that we are watching these people as the protagonists. This is not unlike MacBeth, the hapless amoral royal who is pushed on to the throne by his scheming wife, or Richard III who takes the throne by murdering anyone in his way, including children.

By using the voice of villains these works of dramatic art ultimately expose the senselessness of villany and demonstrate that the biblical notion that a man may gain the whole world but lose his own soul. That is what happens to Michael Corleone, MacBeth and Richard III.

I think it's at best debatable whether most people watching the Godfather movies, especially the first one, see the Corleones as villains. I don't, and I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that regard. Of course, whether someone is a villain is often a matter of opinion--Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" is a good example of this.

Additionally, I find it difficult to take movie critics (or critics of any other kind of art) too seriously. What exactly makes their tastes more valid than anyone else's? There are some things on which experts are clearly more qualified to render a judgment than the general population. For example, I would give more credence to a list of the greatest presidents taken from a poll of historians than one from the general public, because evaluating presidents depends on having concrete factual knowledge about what they did, and historians have far more of this than the general population (I still wouldn't automatically accept what the historians say, however, because they can have biases just like anyone else).

But regarding movies, there is far less of a reason to give critics more weight than other people. The only argument I can think of for doing so is that movie critics see more movies than most people do. But that doesn't really make one more qualified to judge any particular film. One doesn't need to listen to hundreds of symphonies to recognize Beethoven's 5th as great. Also I think that because critics are in the habit of analyzing movies or other works of art, they can miss things that others readily appreciate or recognize. The lukewarm response of most critics to "The Shawshank Redemption"--a movie I consider the second best I've ever seen, behind only the first Godfather film, and which has been enormously inspirational to people all over the world--is a good example of this.

Re Rosenbaum's critique..."What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it"

Not necessarily, but an awareness of musical technique and the ability to contextualise it historically and socially is an inherent part of the evaluative process. (It's telling you've used a canonical artist to illustrate the point.)

Or to spin that notion, they can also expose as problematic certain elements in a work that many 'readily recognise' but don't really investigate further.

It's interesting you mention Shawshank and its being 'enormously inspirational'. I'm having a brief discussion on another board about it at the moment. I'd argue that the film is quite impeccable within the confines it happily sets itself, but those very confines are quite limiting: as a wrong-man-prison-escape fantasy with little if any regard to social reality, it's a well-paced and -measured film. But because of its genre confines, any sort of 'inspirational' 'message' it might contain can only ever be allegorical, can only ever be very vague. It doesn't deal with any sort of reality at all. It's a well made film but it's hardly profound. Not unless you relate to its highly improbable plot, or find in it some vague allegorical worth.

To return to the concept of 'critics' and 'criticism', though, you could argue that everyone is a critic. That in consuming art - whether passively or actively - you're constantly undergoing an evaluative process by which you comment, consciously or not, on the art work; in the crudest sense, you're trying to decide whether you like it or not, whether it's 'good' or 'not'.

Professional critics - that is, essentially, those who are critics by profession - must go further than passive consumption because by the very nature of the profession they are also historians in some way, are thus able to see connections and points of reference between works, across genres, and so on. They will in one way or another be more invested in the social and industrial contexts in which films are made - the technological processes involved and how these are always changing and affecting how films themselves are produced; the material conditions under which and in response to which films are made - which allows the critic to interrogate themes in the work, drawing from their awareness of the authors' previous works (director, cinematographer, script writer, actors and so on) as well as of the country in which it was made and its politics, its way of working; how these things manifested in the work.

You claim that the plot of Shawshank would be "highly improbable." Well, highly improbable things do sometimes happen in the real world. During a test screening for the movie "Apollo 13," one person wrote on their evaluation card that the movie was typical Hollywood, and that in real life the space crew "would never have survived"--not knowing that the story was true!

But that analogy falls completely flat as soon as you consider the two films.

How exactly does it "fall completely flat"? Apollo 13, unlike Shawshank, really happened, but that doesn't make the analogy invalid.

I think, especially Vito in the "The Godfather" is glamorized not because he's a protagonist, but because by the way he's shown. In the book it's even less subtle. "one of his many virtues".
Mafia business is shown as a business that has to be done. Extreme violence a necessariy evil.

Well for starters Apollo 13 is very much grounded in historical fact, regardless of its patriotic veneer and unquestioning sentimentality.

You used Apollo 13 to illustrate that 'highly improbable things do sometimes happen in the real world', but that doesn't in any way legitimise The Shawshank Redemption.

Why? Because it isn't just narrative implausibility that drives that film, but the whimsical, fantastical way in which the narrative unfolds. It's 'set in the past' so as to be nostalgic, and is deliberately removed from any sort of concrete social reality; everything in the film is explicitly designed so as to have an emotional pay-off at the end (the film is rightly remembered for that crane shot of Andy in the rain after crawling through the tunnel).

In Shawshank, the villains are villains and the goodies are goodies; it's an extremely simple film even as far as prison dramas go. If you buy into it from the outset - or if it doesn't win you over through sheer kitschy force - it'll be an absorbing film and might even endure multiple viewings.

As such, it's a very uplifting film (as a triumph-over-adversity drama, I prefer John Flynn's Lock Up) but it can only ever be so in a vague, quite abstract way.

Vague and abstract because it says nothing about social and human relationships; its period setting is merely to shirk any artistic obligation to resemble reality. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is how Red's ethnicity is never even touched upon let alone investigated.

I don't dislike the film; as I said, it's pretty impeccable within the necessary limits it sets itself.

I've never been sure if that reference was purely tongue-in cheek or not. In the King novella, the character was Irish, and obviously white. I think Darabont was just going for a laugh by leaving the line intact: "Maybe it's 'cause I'm Irish."

I thought this was a step forward in film-making. Released just a bit earlier than "Shawshank" (also one of my favorite films, if for nothing more than the excellent chemistry between Freeman and Robbins) was "The Pelican Brief". Although not in the same class, the films do have something in common. Both had lead characters that were written as white men and portrayed by African-Americans.

The character of Gray Grantham was written by Grisham as white. He was played by Denzel Washington. I felt that the best actor got the job because the character's ethnicity was not important to the plot. Same for Red.

But placing a Black man in Grisham's milieu is quite different to placing a Black man inside a prison set at the time at which Shawshank Redemption is set, no?

And then to not investigate in any way that character's ethnicity and the no-doubt appalling treatment he'd be subjected to?

That's not progressive film-making, it's dishonest film-making.

I think you're being a little hard on Shawshank. A filmmaker is not obliged deal with every social issue that might cross his path; he cannot realistically do so.

I've always felt that the ratio of black to white prisoners seemed accurate. Red is hardly the only black prisoner. They look to be a minority in the prison but probably a much larger minority than they were in 1940's Maine. Which, I would guess, is relatively true-to-life.

Incidentally, northern New England was considered among the friendlist places for African-Americans in the post-WWII era, so his treatment may not have been as "appalling" as you may think, at least on a relative basis. And greater emphasis of social factors would detract from the redemption of Red, which, to me, was the central theme of the film (and what the title referes to).

Back on-topic, it's not surprising that the article you post wouldn't have a particularly welcome reception on these boards, but I think he makes some good points.

The moral context of the films is somewhat troubling. The Mafia members are portrayed as regular guys with regular - somewhat cool - jobs who sometimes kill people. "This is the business we've chosen." As he points out, Vito is contrasted to Michael; the fact that both are murderous bastards is subjugated to the differences between their management styles.

I think this relaxed moral code works against Coppola in GFII. I believe that Copolla was attempting to show Michael as reduced to almost sub-human coldness, especially after the killing of Fredo, who is presented as child-like. But, as we've seen on these boards, many viewers defend this action of Michael's as justified within the context of the Mafia (as presented by Coppola). Certainly, to those viewers, the conclusion was less impactful than (in my mind) Coppola intended.

However, I think Rosenbaum misses the boat at the end of the article, when he talks about Michael's "resignation." Michael can be called many things, but resigned is not among them. He was hardly a passive agent in determining his fate, and to dismiss his outcome as defeatist is not valid, IMHO.

Sure he can; and artists do. But whatever.

Yeah. And the film is very romantic in many ways; much of this comes from the irresistible dialogue lifted from the novel, and the ways in which it's delivered.

I hadn't thought about Brando's acting until reading this article; it's interesting in contrast to Strasberg's subtler 'acting lesson'. But Brando's acting also adds to the romanticism, I think.

How far do you think Coppola's moral perspective has point-of-view on its side? The fact that the Corleones' 'power struggle' is against more decrepit characters?

Sticking with Michael, do you find it somewhat inconsistent that Michael should become involved in the family so quick, without more external factors taking part?

Would you say the same about the novel?

I don't quite agree with your definition. The crime is not just the milieu through which the family story is told. The story of this family cannot stand alone without the crime aspect. The two go hand-in-hand, or don't go at all.

It is therefore, IMO, a novel/movie about a crime family.

Is it a mob movie? yes it is. We feel uncomfortable saying it because it offers more layers than most mob films, but it is an excellent mob film, and excellent crime drama, crime family drama.

Is Star Wars a movie about a family, with space-opera as a defining milieu?

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Capo - what's your definition of honest film-making?

I agree. The movie is about a crime family. It is so because its members regularly utilize transgression of the law as a legitimate means to resolve problems and challenges. In fact, they plan to transgress the law to generate personal and business family revenue; they plan common family functions (such as christenings) around their illegal activities; they endanger their families as a function of their illegal activities. To them, family is an accoutrement.

It's a mob movie with family, loyalty and betrayal as major themes.

Something along the lines of showing the world how it is, how it works, without any convenient contrivances that allow the makers to skirt real issues, real life; or if it's not these things, which is no evil thing, then it doesn't present itself as something other than what it is.