The other day I got to watch The Godfather yet again (thanks, Louisa May Owen), this time on the big screen. I won't say it was a total revelation, since that movie is pretty well known to me, but there were differences from my experience of the many small-screenings I had done in the past.
The print was less slick, grainier, yet at the same time more immediate and vivid. Its textures and colors made for novel "surface irritations," as Quine called sensory inputs, and this in turn brought out an atmosphere I hadn't noticed when watching DVDs and broadcasts: the almost garish coloring of some of the clothing, especially Kay's (Diane Keaton) bright, WASPish outfits; the puffiness of Vito Corleone's (Marlon Brando) face, an effect that sold his age and identity in a new way; the sere, yellowish groundcover and grey pavement of the causeway where Sonny gets gunned down, which mirrors the vegetation and stone of Sicily during Michael's temporary exile, unifying the movie's universe.
I still found that the character I identified with most was Moe Green. His whacking after he raises his spectacles, almost goofily, to see who has barged in on his massage, the boring of a new eye for this hapless Cyclops—why, it's me all over: "Huh? Hey, what's going on? Oh." Always the last to suspect, as a bubblin' red spills down my face. Only I don't think I would have foolishly browbeaten Michael Corleone in an earlier scene. That's just asking to sleep with the fishes.
Speaking of which, Luca Brasi was simultaneously more frightening and more sympathetic than I'd ever seen him. The big screen almost Disneyfied him. What an imposing, dense (in more ways than one), silly, grouper-like person. The witless Falstaff of his world.
I was impressed by how funny the movie is when it wants to be. There's the scene where Vito mocks Johnny Fontane for crying "like a woman" when he doesn't get his career-saving movie role. And where the aforementioned Luca rehearses his declaration of gratitude to the don, wishing for the bride a "masculine child." Michael telling Apollonia, "It's safer to teach you English [than to drive]!" And Clemenza's, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli," right after he relieves himself at the side of a desolate road as Paulie is getting double-tapped. A man's got to have his priorities straight.
Here's another funny one:
Michael: “My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.”
Kay: “Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed.”
Oh, and another big win for the celluloid version: the horse goo the producer finds himself swimming in, in his own bed, is somehow a lot more visceral-looking (no pun intended) than I had remembered. Whether the horse was real or not, Woltz's immersion is so graphic and so improbable that we don't question for a moment that Johnny is going to get that role—though it's still funny when the fact is referenced in a much later scene.
This viewing makes me want to watch more movies in the theater. My fundamental impression of The Godfather remains the same: it's a captivating depiction of an anomalous subculture in which family and business relations, along with a strict code of "honor" for those within the cosa, legitimize crime and depravity. A feudal pocket in a supposedly civilized world.
The worst part is, I don't think it's an anomaly at all. Why do all these old flicks I've been rewatching lately—The Godfather, The Exorcist, A Few Good Men—suddenly seem more relevant?