Narrative Junkie

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Regarding comedies that have had a measurable effect on my worldview, only two handfuls come to mind: Tootsie, Lost in America, Golden Age Woody Allen, This is Spinal Tap,  Modern Times, some Frank Capra... There must be more, but even so it’s a short list in relation to more serious fare. Which is to say, most comedies, I think, have a hard time sneaking into the “relevant" column. So even though writer/star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller have loaded Forgetting Sarah Marshall with laughs galore, recalling affecting moments past the time it takes to write this review is not in the cards.

That's not a knock, per se; this is a movie I liked. Segel plays Peter Bretter, your classic sedentary, ambitionless, movie schlump. When he's not at home eating bowls full of Froot Loops in front of the TV, he's writing the music for a low-rent "CSI"-type show, which his girlfriend Sarah Marshall (perky Kristen Bell) stars in. When she dumps him for a pretentious hyper-sexed Brit rocker (portrayed by Russell Brand with the no-holds-barred brio of the fake music stars in Andy Samberg's SNL shorts), Peter embarks on Operation Fetal Position, crying in bed, weeping at Heidi Klum's elimination of a contestant on "Project Runway," and wallowing in Sinead O’Connor love dirges. He embarks on a would-be rejuvenating trip to Hawaii, only to find Sarah Marshall on vaca there with the new bf. Bwaa bwaa bwaaaa! Luckily, the sexy brunette hotel hostess takes a shine to him, and the rest of the film concerns itself with whether he will re-connect with Sarah Marshall or continue this new romance. And, analagously: Can he get it together long enough to pursue his life’s dream of producing an Avenue Q-like puppet musical about Dracula?

The product coming out of the House of (Judd) Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Bad Boys, Knocked Up, this) occupies a niche I'd call lower-middle brow; not quite puerile, not altogether brainy. Where the Farrelly Brothers have made a mint exploiting reflexive giggling at bodily functions, the Apatow Way more subtly melds the juvenile with the cinematic, so that a lot of gags emanate from a facile use of the medium. It’s not that the movie's above using multiple full-frontal shots of Jason Segel’s naked and comically flaccid body, it’s that these short glimpses are strategically placed for maximum self-conciousness, on the part of the audience. Segel's just-short-of-fat corpulence economically communicates his eminent lack of qualifications for dating a TV hottie, and the gambit of flashing his flabby-guy ding-a-ling pays off in a titillating viewer awareness of never having seen such up-front male nudity at the Cineplex. These visual punchlines, frequently delivered by the editing, help create a riffing comedic tempo. At times the gags are so loose, off-beat, and fresh, you feel they must have been devised on-set, in the manner of the improvised "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The politics of the sexual quadrangle are also more nuanced than usually found in such fare. And, this being a break-up comedy, the lack of a Drew Barrymore presence cannot be overstated. A RomCom with teeth, Sarah Marshall would be an excellent Netflix "It's Friday night my workweek sucked I wish I were dead" pick.

Linkateria:

• More Sarah Marshall reviews
• 10 Sarah Marshall clips (CinemaBlend.com)
• 50 Greatest Comedies of All-Time (Filmsite/Premiere Magazine)

Most dead-on critique of Disney

From SNL TV Funhouse:

Molly makes North by Northwest discovery

Last night Molly and I were watching North by Northwest, and she noticed something I daresay only the most vigilant of Hitchcock scholars may have observed themselves.

After the Saul Bass title sequence, when the last credits are rolling over various crowd scenes, Molly saw the same woman walking out of a building in two different shots. In fact, it's the same shot, only from slightly different angles.

Was this some inside joke of the great director's? Or did his famous penchant for the smallest of ratios of film shot/film used catch him up short, so that he had to double up? And why did he shoot the same thing from such a similar perspective? Or was the difference achieved in the lab?

Can anyone find anything on the Web addressing this?

Linkateria:

• North by Northwest title sequence - look at 1:40 and 2:06 to see the shots
  

The Party

When I was a kid, I once stumbled across The Party on TV and stayed up till 3 am watching it. The film seemed to me at the time the height of sophisticated tomfoolery. When I saw it scheduled at The Castro last week, I figured, what the hey? The Castro at 5pm, I'm in a cruddy mood...what could make better sense?

I only half-remembered you have to put all notions of political correctness aside to enjoy this 1968 vehicle for Peter Sellers in which he dresses up in South Asian brown face and affects a heavy Indian accent. I guess in 1968, the year MLK was assassinated, it was considered acceptable for an English comedian to appear in what's essentially a minstrel show as long as the assumed character is of exotic extraction. And outside of Gandhi, who knew any Indians back then? The fact that Sellers' make-up makes him look more like a first-week student in camouflage class than someone from the subcontinent adds to the embarrassment. But the few in attendance at The Castro weren't in the mood for indignation: hearty laughs ensued the first time he opened his mouth and out popped some mock Indian phrasing.

Sellers plays an actor named Hrundi V. Bakshi, imported from India to add authenticity to a Hollywood film about the British occupation or something. The opening joke, in which Sellers' plays a character within a characer -- a bugler (it's a parody of Gunga Din, I think) who takes an interminable amount of time to die, is itself interminable, a perfect example of the fallacy of imitative form. Next up: a gag in which he prematurely blows up a fort while the crew is still setting up. That one's funny enough to have been cooked up by Buster Keaton, and we're off and running for 99 minutes worth of hit-or-miss hijinks.

The rest of the film is set up when a producer, played by pre-Mary Tyler Moore Gavin Macleod, kicks Hrundi V. Bakshi off the set, but a secretary's clerical mistake results in his invitation to a soiree thrown by the head of the studio. There we meet the usual assortment of Hollywood straw men -- windbags, showboats, doyennes, and martinets -- for Sellers to bounce off. In the process, he completely destroys the house, including a particularly funny slapstick scene in the bathroom. The Bakshi character clearly seems an extension of Sellers' Clouseau persona – a bumbler, a klutz, though without the delusional self-regard that characterized the French Inspector. This was director Blake Edwards third go round with Sellers, made before the team’s biggest success with the popular Panther films of the 70s. Some of the scenes in which crowds of people move through various set-pieces puts one in mind of the films of Jacques Tati, though the level of action going on in each frame is much more shallow and less meticulously staged. How much the Sellers/Edwards  team was influenced by Tati’s direction and Mr. Hulot character, I don't know. 

The funny thing is, since few of the jokes are predicated on a clash of cultures (a ridiculous bit with an elephant is one of them), there’s really no reason for the Sellers character to be Indian. He could have easily been a bumbling American, Englishman, anything. This type of broad ethnic humor, relegated to a scene or two, can just wash over an audience in a stream of riffing, but over the course of an entire film, it's hard to sustain. I suppose you could say the film's heart is in the right place, with Sellers winning the love interest (played by Claudine Longet, best known for fatally shooting her boyfriend, skiier Spider Sabich, in real life) and the Hollywood producer suffering the brunt of the humiliation. If you're an insatiable Sellers fan, browse this one up on on Netflix or better yet wait for it to run on TV way late at night when insomnia-induced lightheadedness makes you prone to giggle. Or else just watch it when you're stoned.

Linkateria:

• More Party reviews
• PeterSellers.com
• Senses of Cinema: Blake Edwards

The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. I enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy a movie that takes place largely in a concentration camp. It’s based on the memoirs of Adolph Burger, who worked on Operation Bernhard, the Nazi plan to de-stabilize Britain by counterfeiting millions in Bank of England pound notes. The main character is Salomon Sorowitsch, a Russian born German Jew who is also the world’s greatest counterfeiter. When Sorowitsch is arrested for passing forgeries of the American dollar, he is sent to a concentration camp, where he trades on his by doing portraits of Nazi officers in exchange for food. Thus, the theme of survival versus collaboration is introduced.

Eventually Sorowitsch is transferred, along with other useful Jewish tradesmen, to Sachsenhausen, where they will work on Operation Bernhard, run by the  policeman-turned SS officer who had arrested Sorowitsch in the first place. This group is separated from the main population and given better food, their own Jewish doctor, and after the success of the Bank of England operation, a ping pong table. This last privilege is the most perverse -- an ironic symbol of Nazi depravity. As if these men, slave labor coping with the deaths of loved ones at the hands of the same captors who treat them marginally better, could be incentivized by such an offering. As they play, they hear the horrors afforded their fellow prisoners on the other side of a wall.

The rest of the film is a good combination of the prison, caper, and, as crass as it sounds, holocaust genres. You get an oblique sense of the horrors of the camps: One of the men comes across his dead wife's passport; another temporarily loses his mind when he's certain they will be gassed in the showers. Still, a certain cinematic artifice obtains. When the Nazis charge the men with replicating the dollar, the character of Burger (the memoirist and co-screenwriter) sabotages the effort because he believes its success will lead to a final Nazi victory. The commandant then chooses five men who will be killed if the group doesn't produce. In this situation, Burger  becomes a stand-in for the idealism of sacrifice in a cause worth dying for, Sorowitsch becomes an unlikely master at threading a moral needle, and the story  gives itself over to the dilemma: Do you participate in an evil cause in order to save yourself?

That's a timeless quandary played out on a smaller scale by all of us every day. But director Stefan Ruzowitzy tries to subdue the theatricality inherent in such a monumental question by shooting the film in semi-documentary style. The screen bristles with shaky hand held shots, quick cuts, tight close-ups, panicky zooms. To show a secret conversation between Sorowitsch and the commander, the camera zooms in from far away, giving an overt impression of spying on something forbidden. In addition to the problem of using anachronistic techniques in a work depicting an historical event, this sort of "you are there" style combines with the film's more classic elements to produce a confused tone. I mean, here we have an ostensibly real-life event occuring during the worst self-created catastrophe mankind has ever faced, but it's communicated to us through the filming of a screenplay based on the writing down of memories. So let's just take as a given that with each successive traduction, we travel further away from the original event's truth. Do we really need the overlay of fake documentary to titillate us into imagining "we are there"?

Issues surrounding memory and the Holocaust aside (way aside), I wonder at the recent over-use of documentary style in almost all forms of visual entertainment. Look around; it's everywhere. From Christopher Guest mockumentaries to "Battlestar Galactica" to  Cloverfield, we're constantly being told, "This is real!" Watch material even as seemingly non-conducive to cinema verite technique as the "John Adams" mini-series on HBO -- yep, there it is, too. When did faking "real" reality overtake the normal methods for creating stylized verisimilitude so enjoyable to consumers of make-believe for the past hundred years? My subjective view of the culture pegs the trend as gathering momentum with the release of This Is Spinal Tap. (But for earlier examples see Medium Cool, Citizen Kane, and Orson Welles's radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds.”) More recently we've seen the confounding of reality with fiction in the re-enacted scenes of Errol Morris documentaries, TV shows like "The Real World" and "Survivor," fake documentaries like “The Office,” and video clips of almost any Bush administration official expounding on Iraq. Whatever happened to the majesty of cinema? Meticulous blocking, obsessive framing? Swooping crane shots, Kubrickian tableaus? Certainly eminent practitioners of the cinematic arts still abound. (Scorsese and PT Anderson: two dazzlers who come to mind.) But as the proliferation of tools puts the means of visual production more and more in the hands of, well, anyone, I wonder: Will technique become sloppier and sloppier, so that quick-and-dirty, on-the-fly visual capturing becomes the norm, and we'll no longer be able to discern who’s a master of emulating amateurs, and who’s just an amateur? And will it be fucked up when we can no longer tell what was the original visual documentation of an event like that depicted in this film, and what's just a simulation of that record?

Linkateria:

• More Counterfeiters reviews
• Operation Bernhard
• The War of the Worlds - Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre scare the hell out of America

In Bruges

I once ate some mussels in Brussels. Rhyme and cobblestoned old world charm aside, the experience was ruined when a cowboy-hatted Louisianan and his posse sat at the table next to us and started filling the centuries-old streets with booming new world anecdotes about the oil industry, football, and other topics of conversation used to ward off old world effeteness. I offered the waiter a look of disgust in solidarity, but he made it clear that he thought all Americans were philistines. New York or New Orleans: That was just splitting cheveux.

Who could have guessed, back in 1987, that European views of this country would actually get worse? The running joke in In Bruges is the hostility Colin Farrell’s Ray feels toward Americans. When he warns an obese man in a Yankees cap that maybe he doesn’t want to climb a tower with particularly narrow stairs, the man takes offense and chases him until he collapses, out of breath. When a dwarf actor (Peter Dinkage) apologizes for being from the States, Ray says, “That’s okay, just don’t say anything loud and crass.” Later, he attacks an obnoxious man in a restaurant who complains about the cigarette Ray's date is puffing on, delivering a final blow with “And that’s for killing John Lennon.” (He later regrets that the man turns out to be Canadian.)

You have to appreciate the anti-Americanism, but my wife noted that playwright McDonagh's first film owes much to the still-contemporary Scorcese/Tarantino trope of putting the inner lives and outward quirks of sociopaths front and center in their narratives. In McDonagh’s version, two hoods are sent to Bruges, in Belgium, to lay low after a hit has gone terribly wrong. One of the men, Brendan Gleeson, is an aesthete. He's a voracious tourist, wowed by the medieval splendor of the town. His cohort, Ray, is  a younger, rougher sort,  yet he is tormented to the point of suicide by the appalling act he has committed . This situation becomes a springboard for the pungent dialogue McDonagh has made such good use of in his plays, most notably The Pillowman. As in a good play, the story works best when it lies in the dynamic between the characters, and the back-and-forth frequently wrings a laugh from the most gruesome of circumstances. The two leads do a fine job of toggling between comedy and pathos, and Ralph Fiennes, playing a role similar to Ben Kingley's Don Logan in Sexy Beast is seamless as their crime boss.

Visually, McDonagh has stacked the deck by shooting in a location that looks like it’s out of a “fairytale,” as is remarked several times in the film. And as one might expect, the best moments come out of the writing and performances, not the direction. But who can doubt this wunderkind will only improve his cinematic technique? Not that I'm dying for that to happen. As nifty a little suspenser as this is, it's really nothing special, and in the last 15 minutes, the film falls apart in an orgy of gore and existential irony. The Pillowman, on the other hand, is a work chock full of original ideas and large themes. There must be at least several thousand film auteurs running around, putting together their little projects and gathering accolades at film festivals. If McDonagh winds up in Hollywood, maybe he'll be an object of scorn by Brussels waiters too, and rightly so.

Linkateria:

• More Bruges reviews
  
• Trailers and clips
  
• A Mind in Connemara (Fintan O’Toole, The New Yorker) - 2006 profile of playwright Martin McDonagh
  
• The Pillowman (Google Books)
  

Best movies I found on hulu

Watch the entire film:

• The Big Lebowski
• Bedazzled
• Some Like It Hot
• Hollywood Shuffle
• The Usual Suspects
• Planet of the Apes
• Sideways
• Mulholland Drive
• Kagemusha

Be Kind Rewind

Be Kind Rewind takes a stand against gentrification, copyright laws, Hollywood, and urban renewal. It's in favor of community, locally-owned business, amateurism, and Fats Waller. Who can argue with that? No one, that's who, without seeming a spoil sport. But the film wears its artificial heart a little too much on its sleeve. Most of the goings on strain credulity, to say the least, and the characters at times exhibit a striking lack of common sense. These elements render the whole enterprise fablesque, which is another way of saying that while the Michael Gondry's production has its moments, it doesn’t really score any direct hits against or for the above-mentioned targets.

Here's the plot: Mos Def plays a clerk in a moribund Passaic, New Jersey video store, which the city has slated for demolition and which is being slowly bled by competition from a Blockbuster-like DVD store anyway. Jack Black, playing an off-the-wall curmudgeonly type (surprise!) , becomes magnetized when he tries to sabotage the local power plant and then somehow demagnetizes all the VHS tapes in the store (owned by Danny Glover.) Black and Mos Def then come up with a plan to re-shoot all the movies using ingenious homemade innovations in place of the films' big budget special effects. Sort of like the plays produced by the precocious impresario Max in Rushmore, but not as good. The ersatz films become so popular, the movie industry sends hatchet woman Sigourney Weaver to put the kibosh on the whole thing and confiscate the moviemakers' entire oeuvre. If one wanted to, one could interpret the film as an homage to all those YouTube do–it-yourselfers, nascent auteurs shooting movies on cell phones and editing them on iBooks, and as a slap at the vacuous big budget junk projected onto screens at a multi-plex near you.

But for a movie whose credo is “movies with heart and soul” (this voiced by Mia Farrow, whose presence graces any project), the home-made films themselves, re-makes of Robo-Cop, Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and others, are curiously uninteresting. They're clever enough in execution, but that's all. They don't have any particular take on the source material, and an opportunity for some prime satire is wasted. Again, I think of the movie-based plays in Rushmore -- deadly earnest affairs made even more absurd by the presence of teenagers playing cops, soldiers, and other familiar action genre figures.

To me, movies like Robo-Cop and Ghostbusters -- they're pretty good to begin with. Do I want to see a grade-Z version of these grade-B guilty pleasures? Even if people I vaguely know are in them? Storywise, it would have made more sense to re-make some real crud, but then nobody would have any frame of reference for the spoofs. The film wants us to see movie-making as a labor-of-love and conducive to community involvement. But anyone who’s shot even a 5-minute class project knows the most conventional cinematic idea can’t be just dashed off in presentable form in a single afternoon, like they are here. And forget about scheduling and organizing your amateur talent working for a couple of free pizza slices at lunchtime. It's just not that easy, and the eagerness of the residents of Passaic to participate in these productions seemed more like a a sign of community-wide despair than a take charge bit of civil disobedience. For me, the atmosphere of depression and decay easily suction off the film's mawkish high spirits that are intended as remedies.

Performance-wise, for once Jack Black, an actor with the most defined comic persona since perhaps Billy Murray, doesn't help. He pretty much phones in his usual imploding maniac bit. A mumbly Mos Def is a lot more interesting as the clerk in search of a father figure in Danny Glover.

I’ll tell ya, the web site is sort of more interesting than the film. Check it out.

Linkateria:

• More Rewind reviews
• Trailers and video clips from the film
• Be Kind Rewind web site
• The Max Fischer Players presents the MTV Movie Awards

Oliver Stone does "W"

• Oliver Stone Casts Parents of "W" (Variety/Huffington Post)

The Godfather -- the movies vs the book

After watching The Godfather and The Godfather Part II for the sixth or seventh time, I decided to read the novel. The book, published in 1969, was a big bestseller and has now sold more than 20 million copies. But I wondered: The Godfather films are classics – does the novel hold up?

Nope. This is one of those rare cases in which the artistry of the film clearly surpasses that of the book. Puzo is an indifferent, even clunky stylist. He also tends to wander from the main story, at one point spending pages describing the events around an operation to shrink the vagina of Sonny’s former mistress. (I'm not joking.) The film does make use of some of the best of the book’s dialogue, but Coppolla (along with Puzo as his co-screenwriter) was shrewd enough to pick out the gems in the midst of the more prosaic back-and-forths. (Plus I couldn't find the canolli line in the book.) And of course the actors must be given credit for not only stimulating those frissons an audience feels at many of the famous lines (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” just doesn’t have the same punch in the book), but also the relationships between the characters that give the story texture. For example, in the book, when Tom Hagen and Sonny discuss the best way to respond to the shooting of Don Corleone, Hagen argues that Sonny is foolish to start an all-out war. In the film, the same lines are delivered by Robert Duvall with impatience and irritation, reinforcing our view of Sonny as a hothead and too immature to replace his father. This resonates later when Michael ousts Hagen as consigliere; as Hagen has shown previously that he may have been more capable than Sonny, there is a sense that Michael has an ulterior motive.

To watch the films then read the book is to understand the difference between merely a good idea and its artistic execution. Puzo’s rendering of Don Corleone’s death:

"Quite suddenly it felt as if the sun had come down very close to his head. The air filled with dancing golden specks. Michael’s oldest boy came running through the garden toward where the Don knelt and the boy was enveloped by a yellow shield of blinding light. But the Don was not to be tricked, he was too old a hand. Death hid  behind that flaming yellow shield ready to pounce out on him and the Don with a wave of his hand warned the boy away from his presence. Just in time. The sledgehammer blow inside his chest made him choke for air. The Don pitched forward into the earth."

Now picture Marlon Brando chasing his toddler grandson among the tomato plants, collapsing, his corpse undergoing the indignity of being sprayed with a fumigator by the unknowing child.

A similar difference exists between the book and movie versions of the scene in which Michael’s minions gather around him in obeisance, a tribute to his new status as Corleone family head. It’s Coppolla who adds the touch of the door slamming shut on the prying Kay, underscoring her marginalization from this part of her husband’s life.

The Godfather has always been accused of romanticizing the Mafia. But in this area the film doesn't even come close to the novel. Puzo portrays the Corleones upholding a culture and credo that the sociopaths in The Sopranos only pay lip service to while acting on their worst narcissistic impulses. In this speech, Michael explains to Kay why the Corleones aren't morally culpable for acting outside the law:

“You’ve got the wrong idea of my father and the Corleone family. l’ll make a final explanation and this one will be really final. My father is a businessman trying to provide for his wife and children and those friends he might need somed ay in a time of trouble. He doesn’t accept the rules of the society we live in because those rules would have condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force and character. What you have to understand is that he considers himself the equal of all those great men like Presidents and Prime Ministers and Supreme Court Justices and Governors of the States. He refuses to live by rules set up by others, rules which condemn him to a defeated life. But his ultimate aim is to enter that society with a certain power since society doesn’t really protect its members who do not have their own individual power. In the meantime he operates on a code of ethics he considers far superior to the legal structures of society.” 

One reason I read the book is the niggling narrative gaps I frequently perceive when I watch the movies.  Some of these are filled in by watching “The Godfather: A Novel for Television," in which Coppola re-edited the two films to tell the story chronologically, starting with II’s kid-Vito-in-Sicily sequence, and added scenes cut from the originals. A more likely source is The Godfather Collection, a boxed set of all three films that includes the additional material as an extra. One of the scenes even includes the characters of Carmine and Augustino Coppola, the director’s father and grandfather. My favorite: an early meeting between Robert DeNiro Vito and a teenage Hyman Roth.

From these scenes and from reading the book, I managed to sooth all the little pinpricks of incompletion I experience when watching the theatrical releases. To wit:

-The Corleones frequently make reference to Genco, Don Corleone’s longtime consigliere whom their olive oil company is named after. When Sonny and Tom Hagen butt heads over the strategy necessary to win the gang war, Sonny hostilely laments about and to Tom, “Pop had Genco, look what I got.” So I've always wondered, who exactly is Genco, and if he was such a hotshot, why doesn't he appear in the film?

Turns out the answer appears in a scene from the book that was deleted from the final cut of the film, in which Don Corleone and sons visit the moribund Genco Abbandando at the hospital. It’s not a great scene: The consigliere asks Don Corleone to pull some strings for him to get him off the hook with Death,  rather overstating the point that those in the Don’s sphere ascribe to him mystical powers of control. Another point cleared up: I was never sure if Robert DeNiro Vito’s companion at the Italian comic operetta in II (his employer’s son) was Genco or not, because we never actually see that character consorting with young Vito, young Clemenza, and young unbelievably-handsomer-than-Abe-Vigoda- even-at-that-age Tessio. And I've never caught anyone calling him by name. Answer: He is. In a deleted scene, Vito actually refers to the character as Genco.

-In the opening scene of The Godfather, Connie’s wedding, a brief shot shows Sonny’s wife sitting among  giggling girlfriends while she makes the “big penis” gesture with her hands, holding them parallel in front of her chest about six inches apart and then spreading them farther. I always wondered: Is she saying Sonny has a big dick, or is she expressing her wish for a man who can fulfill her, since it’s already been implied that Sonny cheats on her? The definite answer from the book: the former.

-I’ve always felt that Luca Brazzi’s story seems to be missing, being that such an imposing character is sent to bed with the fishes a quarter of the way through the movie. At one point, after Solozzo has had the Godfather shot and he has taken Tom Hagen hostage, trying to scare him into brokering a deal over the drug issue with the Don, Hagen says, “Even the Don won’t be able to call off Luca Brasi.” Meaning Luca is so loyal to the Godfather that his shooting will render him as uncontrollable as a mad dog. The book explains Luca’s relationship to the Corleones – that he was their number one enforcer, psychopathically brutal, and one of the pillars of Don Corleone’s empire. Luca's just a killing machine, and an indispensable asset. That’s why in the film, when Sonny can’t get in touch with Luca, he comments that if the hitman has turned traitor, they’re all in big trouble. I think what's missing in the film is a scene in which Luca kills somebody in inimitable fashion, so we actually see how powerful he was.

-After the meeting with all the dons in which the Godfather sues for peace after the murder of Santino, he realizes that it’s Barzini who’s been behind the current troubles, only using the Tattaglias as a front.  The Don says, “Tattaglia never could have outfought Santino.” I have always found this a curious statement, since Sonny up till then had been viewed mostly as a hothead who leapt before he looked. In the book, however, it’s explained that Sonny, though quick to the trigger, knows how to martial his resources when it's time to go to the mattresses. (Sonny mentions this himself in one of the deleted scenes.)

-I never really understood why Michael removed Tom Hagen as consigliore. Even though it was mentioned twice that Hagen was not a “wartime consigliore,” if he was good enough for the Don, who is described as having unerring judgment, why won’t he do for Michael, who puts a premium on family? (It’s true Hagen isn’t related by blood, but he was brought up as a son by Vito Corleone.) Part of the answer to this lies in the excision of the Genco death scene. That scene makes it clear that Tom has been promoted to fill the gap created when Genco took ill. The book addresses the issue in greater detail: Because Hagen isn't Sicilian, let alone Italian, this subjects the Corleones to a certain amount of ridicule. (They're called by the other families “the Irish mob.”) Because only a Sicilian carries inside him the devious, crafty, and vengeful qualities that allows him to strategize correctly in a gangland brouhaha.  “No Irishman could hope to equal a Sicilian for cunning,” Puzo summarizes.

Other differences between the movies and the book:

-The missing years between the Robert DeNiro Vito and the Marlon Brando Vito are filled in, with a long step-by-step section on  how the Don built his empire. But the whole Nevada storyline from Godfather II appears in the film only.

-The book features long (and boring) sections on singer Johnny Fontaine, a more minor character in the films.

-In the book, Lucy Mancini, the bridesmaid that Sonny sneaks off to hump at Connie’s wedding, and whose son appears in The Godfather III in the person of Andy Garcia, is a much bigger character. (She's also the one with the capacious vagina.)

-In the book, and in a deleted scene from II, Michael has the Sicilian bodyguard whose betrayal led to the death of his Italian bride, Apollonia, tracked down in America and killed.

-Mama Corleone, a minor presence in the films, gets a bit more attention in the book, though not much. However, one interesting aspect is that she subtly disrespects hubby Vito when he’s not around.

-Albert Neri, Michael’s number one henchman and a shadowy figure in both I and II, is fleshed out in the book. In the famous sequence cross-cutting between the baptism and the vengeance killing at the end of the first film, Neri poses as a policeman to get close enough to Barzini to shoot him on the courthouse steps. Turns out in the book he’s an ex-cop who got ousted from the force because he beat up a rapist and found his true calling in the Corleone family. Clemenza calls Neri “The new Luca Brasi.”