Wilf Avery | David Is Homosexual / 1978

finding friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wilf Avery (director) David Is Homosexual / 1978

 

Shot during the swelteringly hot summer in Britain of 1976 by members of the Lewisham branch of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), David Is Homosexual is not only an important document in Britain’s’ LGBT history, but stands as an early testament to the gradual transformations made by numerous lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transexual individuals during this period that would help to transform LGBTQ politics internationally.

     As always a contextualization of the situation is necessary to fully comprehend the significance of this documentary film’s narrative. It wasn’t until The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 that some criminalization of homosexual acts in Britain were abolished. Although the law maintained general prohibitions on buggery and indecency between men, it did decriminalize homosexual acts if three conditions were met: 1) the act had to be consensual, 2) the act had to take place in private and 3) the act could involve only people that had attained the age of 21. The age, it should be noted, was still higher that sexual acts permitted between heterosexuals, which was 16. Moreover, the issue of what “in private” meant was determined by the courts to mean only 2 people with the acts taking place in a private home. The courts took the law to mean the exclusion of hotel rooms, for example, or even sexual actions in a private home if a third person were present. 

    In 1977 an amendment to the Bill by Lord Arran would have extended the age of consent for homosexual acts to the age of 18, but it was rejected by 146 votes to 25. And the following year such a bill was reintroduced without any legislation being enacted.

      In short, when this documentary film began to be shot, not only were homosexuals of David’s age, in their early 20s cognizant of a very recent time when homosexual activities meant imprisonment and even worse punishments, but they still were criminals if they were to perform their sexual activities outside of a dark bedroom with no one else even in the apartment or home at the time. Moreover, the culture itself as still highly homophobic and parental acceptance was extraordinarily limited.

      Is it any wonder that the central figure of this picture, David (Ray MacLaughlain), who worked in an office and lived at home with his parents was a highly closeted young man who, as the narrator describes him, knew he was gay but at times even kept it secret from himself. When most others of his age were exploring their sexual beings, David and others like him were self-imposes celibates who attended parties, such as the office party to which David is naturally expected to attend, with terror, particularly as he watched the others, as the evening wore on, increasingly moving into sexual situations while he, quite noticeably, sat it out.

     A young man like David could presume that if he were to share the nature of his sexual desires with his office friends, he would have been made to feel even more ostracized and might possibly even lose his job.

     The scenes from his home life also accord with many British (and US) films of the time, when parents, in this case his father Ghishlain were almost violently homophobic. Early on in this documentary we see him watching the makers of this film, CHE, marching for equal age rights in which he grows so furious that he almost literarily growls at his son and wife as he switches the television off. David, like so many young men of the day, simply retreats to his bedroom, even more desolate about the possibility of coming to terms with their sexual urges.

     As Paul Flynn writes in The Guardian, the duo behind this film, Ray Crossley and Wilfred Avery, were a happy couple, Ray being a lawyer, 14 years younger that his companion Wilfred, who was a painter born in 1926. Although their union was totally illegal for a number of years before the partial decriminalization of 1967, they recount that they weren’t terribly bothered about it all. As Crossley explained to Flynn: “Our families were wonderful. There was never any trouble. They were always most welcoming. Even outside the law, we were just living and doing what we felt we had to do, and enjoying it.”

     What they “did,” in this case, was spend their weekends in the summer of 1976 filming the documentary about a newer, fictional member of the organization in which both had come to be deeply involved. The younger of the two, Ray, first became involved particularly after the dismissal of the London Holland Park schoolteacher, John Warburton, for being gay. Wilfred soon after also became active in the Lewisham group, becoming, as Ray suggests, “a kind of father figure to the group.

      Both Ray and John Warburton perform in cameo roles in David Is Homosexual at the 1976 Gay Pride event. By this time David, having read a small announcement of CHE activities in a local newspaper, had gotten up the courage to actually speak on the phone to a member of the organization named, without any particular revolutionary intent, after Che Guevara. And already by the time of the march, David has found new friends with whom he feels comfortable for the first time, both lesbians and fellow gay boys whom he has met at the organization’s Monday night gatherings.

 

     David quickly becomes involved, working on the lead banner for the march, a Mardi Gras fundraising event, and finally even serving as an opening speaker to the gathering of friends and even heterosexuals who have gathered to celebrate the organizations activities.

      We watch as David comes out to his parents, his mother Debbie remaining mostly quiet while his father rails against his son, demanding that he rethink his vile behavior. The equanimity with which David faces these trials is remarkable. His answer is to simply escape for the night and hand them a book to read about homosexuality the next morning at breakfast.

      Although his father still refuses to even open the book, it’s clear that Debbie is curious about what it might say. And to give due credit to the couple, they have not tossed their son out into the

streets or violently attacked him for his “appalling” announcement. By the end of the film, David reports that they are gradually “coming around” to comprehending him, particularly since they can watch the positive changes in his own personality as he comes to self-acceptance and sense of greater joy and purpose in his life.

      At the office, the accidental discovery by a fellow worker of his copy of The Gay News is met with her revelation that she is a lesbian, allowing both of them to further reinforce the sense that they are not totally alone even in the workplace. David invites her to the CHE activities.

      And the film ends in a series of rather joyous events including the march, David’s first time going public with his new gay identity, and the Mardi Gras party. One might, in fact, criticize the film for focusing on someone who, once he has decided to involve himself in the CHE organization, moved seemingly quite effortlessly to full self-acceptance. The movie, however, does explain that perhaps David is a kind of special case, noting that there are still hundreds of others unable to even make the first telephone call.

      The film itself is rather amateurishly made with sound that perhaps was never very good but has now seriously deteriorated. Nonetheless, one can sense the film’s importance and the fervor of its creators if one realizes the context and recalls just how difficult it was for some individuals in 1976 to face their homosexuality in such a hostile society.

      It is fascinating, moreover, to read in The Guardian essay that British director Ron Peck found the film, as he reported to its director Avery, “impressive.” Soon after, he begin work on his own film Nighthawks (1978), now perceived as a British LGBTQ classic, which takes us on a painful voyage of a schoolteacher’s nightly visits to gay bars in search of love. After all, Flynn proffers, this was still a time in which most people thought Freddie Mercury and the Village People were straight.

      Crossley insists everyone in the film, including David’s parents and the homophobic men at a bar who later demand David and his friend leave the place, were actually gay.

      They shot the film on 50ft Agfa film cartridges which had to be sent away for processing. And they were particularly worried when any part of the film wasn’t returned. The one gay sex scene in the movie was carefully shot so that it wouldn’t appear to be a “blue movie,” but nonetheless it was never returned from the processers. Avery was quite worried, Crossley reports, commenting “Well, we can’t put a report into Agfa saying it’s a film of guys kissing because they would have raided us and taken the film away, even though it wasn’t blue.”

       As they started to film the scene again, it suddenly showed up in the mail in an old, crumpled envelope, obviously watched by someone many times over and over.

       The final film was briefly aired in May 1978, but then seemingly was lost. Avery died in 2016 at the age of 90. Over the years, he and his companion Crossley had often wondered what had become of their early work.

       Actually, a copy had been kept by the film’s cameraman, Dave Belton, who, having a heart condition, was attempting to contact people who might have been in the film to see if anyone might take the copy for safe keeping.

       About 6 months after Avery’s death Crossley received a call from the official CHE historian, Peter Scott-Prestland, who had passed on the film and materials to the British Film Institute, who had cleaned up the film, digitized it, and catalogued it into their library holdings. Showings of the film followed, people rediscovering this important piece of the vast history of LGBT individuals of the period.

 

Los Angeles, May 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Clint Eastwood | Flags of Our Fathers / 2006 || Letters from Iwo Jima / 2006

flags and letters

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Broyles, Jr. and Peter Haggis (screenplay, based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers), Clint Eastwood (director) Flags of Our Fathers / 2006

Iris Yamashita (screenplay), Clint Eastwood (director) Letters from Iwo Jima / 2006

True to my pattern of doing things, I saw Clint Eastwood’s magnificent diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima in early 2007 in the reverse order from which they were released. After seeing Flags of Our Fathers (the second film of my viewing), I observed to my mate, Howard, that had I seen that film first, I might not have been so eager to see its companion. That is not to say that Flags is not a significant film, but simply that without the context of the more coherent and darker second work. it functions in a much more scatter-gun, even disjunctive manner that is simply not as fulfilling to its audience. 

      Actually, I believe Eastwood has made an important statement in the structural differences between the two films. Recognizing these two films as opposing representations of the same series of incidents—the battles at Iwo Jima occurring from February 19 through March 24, 1945—we quickly perceive that the American version, Flags of Our Fathers, is presented from the viewpoint of how Americans in general perceived the event at the time, as part of a grand heroic effort to defeat the Japanese.

    Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s picture of six men hoisting the flag into position atop of Suribachi mountain quickly consolidated the actual battles into an icon of the hallowed values for which American soldiers were fighting.  The three individuals in that picture who survived the Iwo Jima invasion, John “Doc” Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, accordingly, were immediately recognized as representatives of what most Americans sought, living manifestations of the heroism of their young men and women in World War II. Higherups, moreover, recognized these men as the perfect salesmen in the pitch for American War Bonds to raise monies desperately needed to continue the war effort. 

  The truth of these events was quite different. Forgetting for the moment that in a matter of 37 days nearly 30,000 men (6,891 Americans and close to 22,000 Japanese) had been killed and another 18,070 wounded, and focusing only on the famed photograph, there had, in fact, been two flag raisings, the first, a more instinctual act of claiming the island with a smaller flag tied with rope to a shell casing; the second, a military-ordered raising of a larger flag (to be rewarded to an observing congressman) carefully staged for the camera. Moreover, one of the men reported to have helped to raise the second, now iconographic flag, actually helped raise the first, and the name of a marine raising the second flag was omitted in military reports. The men who had survived the ordeal all recognized that there was little “heroism” in raising that second flag (or, for that matter, in raising the first), while the acts of all the soldiers—including their own actions—involved in actual battle represented what might really be thought of as heroic. Of the three survivors, Ira Hayes, of American Indian heritage, wanted nothing at all to do with the wartime pitch; the other two, medic Bradley and Gagnon—the latter presented as a naïve and somewhat dim-witted solider (assigned the position of a “runner”), participated with a sense of increasing disdain and distress for their ballpark reenactments and celebrity status.

    In the American experience of the event there is little coherency. While the three soldiers relived nightmarish scenes from the battle, the public in general saw the battle only through the lens of a split-second photograph. The press conjured up “a truth” out of unrelated events (such as Gagnon’s marriage and Hayes’s apparent alcoholism) before completely dropping their coverage. It mattered little to the military, the press, or the public that these men’s lives had been utterly transformed or that perhaps their real heroism related less to the war than simply withstanding the onslaught of publicity heaped upon them. 

 

    Ultimately, it was left to their sons and daughters to piece together—through interviews and a book publication—any sense of reality of the Iwo Jima battles. Heroism, Bradley’s son suggests, was not a unifying force; it meant fighting with and saving, if possible, the men immediately closest to one in battle, protecting and saving one’s friends. For the individual soldiers, the public displays of nationalism were not what they had fought for. There is a strange (if predictable) homoeroticism to the young soldiers’ oceanside swim soon after the battles that Eastwood presents as the image of friendships behind some of these men’s heroic exploits.

     The Flags version of Iwo Jima, accordingly, presented in disjunctive pieces and viewed from various angles and perceptions—from the viewpoints of individuals, friends, the military, the national public, the families, and history—is a narrative without the possibility of a unifying vision.

 

 

*

 

 

    Contrarily, Letters from Iwo Jima reveals events primarily based on the letters of three soldiers writing their loved ones back home and other unmailed letters later discovered buried on the island, and for that reason presents a much more intimate portrait of military men, many of whom knew they were doomed to die in the battle.

    Unlike the American presentation of the Iwo Jima slaughter, moreover, Letters has at its center two great military leaders, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi (stunningly portrayed by Ken Watanabe), commander of the Empire of Iwo Jima, and Baron Nishi. 

     Nishi, a great horseman, winner of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and celebrity of Japanese culture, knew English and had befriended, before the war, numerous American film actors such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

Kuribayashi, assigned by Hideki Tojo to defend Iwo Jima, had spent part of his education in Canada, and, in 1928-29 served in the United States as a deputy military attaché, traveling throughout the country. Kuribayashi, accordingly, knew well the American state of mind, and through careful study of US military strategy, was able to determine on which shore the Americans would land. As opposed to the standard strategy of entrenching opposition soldiers near the landing point Kuribayashi catacombed the local mountains as a fortress, thus allowing for a longer survival time for his soldiers and a high ground from which to shoot and kill the American enemy.

     Even though he was of samurai and aristocratic descent, and was one of the few soldiers who was granted an audience with Emperor Hirohito, Kuribayashi had opposed the war with the United States from the beginning and had fallen into opposition with numerous colleagues. According to scriptwriter Iris Yamashita and director Eastwood, moreover, he opposed the traditional self-immolation upon failure in battle, arguing that instead of destroying themselves, the troops should move forward or retreat to a place of better advantage.

     One of the most terrifying scenes in both films is the reference to and depiction of the self-destruction of a Japanese platoon as, one by one, they discharge grenades against their heads or torsos. Two soldiers in that group do not choose to “die honorably.” One of the major figures of Letters, Saigo, formerly a student in Japan’s prestigious military school, along with Shimizu save themselves and, ultimately, rejoin Kuribayashi’s forces, only to be threatened with death by a lieutenant of the old school. Saigo’s and Shimizu’s lives are personally spared by Kuribayashi, representing, in Saigo’s case, the second of what will be three of Kuribayashi’s interventions on his behalf.

     Eastwood painfully demonstrates the horrors of war when these two soldiers later determine to surrender. Shimizu escapes and is captured by the Americans, only to be killed by two American soldiers under whose protection he and another man have been assigned. Although there have been many films of the past that revealed the absurdity of war, the brutal killing of this young man by Americans reverberates in a way that can only call up similar shocking events in Viet Nam and our current Iraqi invasion. Americans, we have had to recognize, are not always the “good guys” we like to think they/we are

    In the United States it is amazing that Eastwood’s eloquently sympathetic presentation of enemy combatants has received so little negative reaction. Japan, one must recall, was one of the few countries ever to actually attack Americans on their own soil! Perhaps it is a testament to the director’s honesty and integrity. One wonders, moreover, how this film is being perceived in Japan, where it is still generally believed—although his body was never discovered—that Kuribayashi committed seppuku, the ritual suicide of the samurai. In Eastwood’s version the general dies before he can destroy himself, to be buried by the loyal Saigo, who, recognizing the general’s gun hanging from the belt of a conquering American, springs into his first actual attempt at combat with “the enemy” before he is quelled, to become one of the few Japanese survivors.

      The letters, intimate communications between wives, sons, and others, create a coherency not to found in the American version of war. While the Japanese Kuribayashi goes to his death knowing that he has attempted to communicate with his beloved son Taro, for the American soldier Bradley, up until the last moments of his death, there is a feeling of having been dissociated from his own son, of having so buried the war within his own being that he has remained at a distance from one so loved. It appears, Eastwood suggests, that a culture that prefers flags to letters, a culture which offers up symbols as opposed to simple human expression—the culture of my own father—is doomed to estrangement.*

 

* One must recognize that Japanese culture is also highly involved in and enchanted by symbols, a point Eastwood brings up in his film. As a young military student, Shimizu is commanded to enforce the rule that all houses display the Japanese flag, an incident which, when he also is commanded to destroy the family’s dog—an order he disobeys—results in his dismissal from military college and in his being posted to Iwo Jima. It is particularly notable, therefore, that the three major figures of Letters from Iwo Jima spend their last days in epistolary communication.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2007

Reprinted from Nth Position [England], February 2007.

Gary Halvorson and Bartlett Sher | Otello [The Metropolitan Opera live-HD production]

living in a glass house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (composer), Arrigo Boito (libretto, from Shakespeare’s play as translated by Giulio Carcano and Victor Hugo), Bartlett Sher (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Otello / 2015 [The Metropolitan Opera live-HD production]

 

Life in late 19th-century Cyprus is truly a communal affair—at least as imagined by director Bartlett Sher and set designer Es Devlin in the MET’s recent production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. The opera begins with a grand community event, the island’s citizens gathered, apparently in a heavy rain, to watch the return of their governor and general of the Venetian fleet as it attempts to find its way into safe harbor in a tempestuous storm. Despite temporary fears that the ship has been ripped apart, the Moor Otello (performed sans blackface in this production by Aleksanders Anntonenko) steers his vessel into port, announcing that he and his soldiers have been victorious in their fight against the Muslim Turks.

     In his absence, the young Venetian Roderigo (Chad Shelton) has arrived in Cyprus, and promptly fallen in love with Otello’s new wife, Desdemona (Sonya Yoncheva), who has also joined the awaiting crowd for Otello’s return.

    Also in that gathering is Otello’s ensign, Iago (Želijo Lučić), envious of Cassio, who Otello has promoted to head officer instead of choosing him. When Roderigo confesses to Iago about his love of Desdemona (Sonya Yoncheva), Iago pretends to befriend him, plotting a way to get back at Cassio by getting him drunk—a weakness that everyone seems to be aware of, including Cassio himself, who at first declines to drink—before egging on Roderigo to fight him. The fight and accidental wounding of a bystander and the former governor, Montano, who attempts to stop the fight, draws the newly returned hero from his home, who in anger, dismisses Cassio for his actions and demands that all return to their homes.

    So begins the long series of downward-spiraling incidents, triggered by Iago’s intimations and outright lies, ending in Otello's killing of the Desdemona.      

      I have always been puzzled, even when reading Shakespeare, why Otello relies so heavily on Iago’s insinuations in a world in which he might have consulted with numerous others for the truth about events. Or, as my opera-going companion, Thérèse Bachand asked after the performance, “Why does Otello trudge dutifully into the darkness?” Particularly in this production, wherein the governor and his people appear to be living in a massive, although constantly shifting, glass palace (the idea for this set came evidently from librettist Arrigo Boito’s comment to Verdi that they had put their hero into a “glass prison”) where nearly all behavior is transparent, it seems even stranger that Otello would choose to believe a man whom he, himself, apparently, did not chose to entrust as his head soldier.

      Iago, we know even from his own lips, is simply evil, a man who believes in the basest values of all men, and with that knowledge we readily perceive him—unlike Otello—as a kind of Satan. But why can’t Otello see through him? Almost from the first moment that Iago hints that something is going on between Cassio and Desdemona, Otello is overwhelmed with jealousy and, from that moment on—despite his demand for evidence—goes along with Iago’s presentation of an alternate universe, a world into which one needs help to see clearly.

 

    What Verdi’s opera seems to suggest is that although Otello is a glorious military figure (in her last act Desdemona even sings that her husband’s destiny is to be a figure of “glory,” while she a figure doomed by “love”), the governor is not a particularly good leader—which may also to be the opinion of the Venetian representative who recalls Otello home to Venice, and plans to put Cassio in charge of Cyprus.

     Clearly, the great battler is unable to perceive the true natures of those people closest to him. In his glass world where nearly everything is openly shared and seen by all, Otello chooses instead to stare into the darkness that Iago creates for him. And in that inexplicable fact it is clear that Otello is not just blind to reality as he becomes consumed by the many-headed hydra jealousy, but that he lives in a world apart from those around him, locked away in a selfish mania that is inconsistent with what everyone else (including the audience) perceives.

     Increasingly, as Otello slips into madness and Iago’s accusations against Desdemona become more and more absurd, his relationship with the evil being seems more and more perverse. Instead of turning to the being of honesty and truth whom he has married, Otello would rather marry (in its meaning of “uniting with” or “joining”) with Iago, where small signs and tokens (the sight of Cassio laughing about a woman, the appearance of a handkerchief) matter more than observing what is evident.

     Iago himself has long been perceived by some readers and performers as having a homosexual attraction to Otello and perhaps even to Cassio, with whom he describes having slept. Laurence Olivier and David Sachet, in their interpretations of Othello and Iago, explored just these concerns in Shakespeare’s original play. But even Sher, who as a director has certainly not been afraid to explore homosexuality in his theatrical productions, does not fully embrace that possibility in this production.

      If the transparently innocent Desdemona is willfully destroyed in the process, the equally innocent Cassio claims his right to rule by killing Roderigo, restoring the light to which Otello has been blind.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2015

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2015).

 

Francis Ford Coppola | Godfather II / 1974

being strong

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo (screenplay, based on the book by Mario Puzo), Francis Ford Coppola (director) Godfather II / 1974

 

There is a painful moment early in The Godfather II when Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) young son, Anthony, celebrating the day of his first mass—and after being almost literally swallowed up in the festive events by people he does not even know—is kissed goodbye by his mostly inattentive father. A conversation between the two follows:

 

                          Michael Corleone: Anthony, I’m going to be leaving very

                                  early tomorrow.

                          Anthony: Will you take me?

                          Michael: No. I can’t

                          Anthony: Why do you have to go?

                          Michael: Because I have to do business.

                          Anthony: I could help you.

    Although Michael suggests that someday the child will help him, echoing as it does with Michael’s earlier statement to his father, “I’m with you now,” by film’s end we know that no one can “help” Michael. Although Anthony remains living at the end of The Godfather II, his father has ostracized him from his mother, Kay (Diane Keaton), murdered his favorite uncle, Fredo (John Cazale), broken with his grandfather’s gangland friends from New York, and done in one of the giants of the Miami-Las Vegas underworld, Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). Anthony's grandmother, Carmela (Morgana King) has died, and his aunt, Connie (Talia) has had her life destroyed by her brother’s various interventions (“Michael, I hated you for so many years. I think that I did things to myself, to hurt myself so that you’d know—that I could hurt you.”). The adopted uncle, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) has been painfully, for him, demoted in the family operation. The bigoted and sleazy Nevada Senator Pat Geary, who utterly slandered the family at Anthony’s event (“I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.”) has been brought under Corleone control through a bloody murder of a whore Geary has been seeing, while federal government investigators have gone on the attack.

      Despite Hyman Roth’s boastful statement that he, the Corleones, and others together are now bigger in wealth that U.S. Steel, Michael sits silently brooding at the end of this film as one of the loneliest men ever portrayed in a moving picture. In his office at the empty boat house, he is quite certainly sailing alone, with no one left to love him or whom he might embrace.

      One of the reasons that Coppola’s second Godfather film is so powerful is because he is a study in differences or changes of generation. No matter how horrifying is the Sicilian world from which the Corleone family (whose real name was Andolini) had escaped—Vito’s father, brother and mother being brutally killed by the local Don Ciccio—no matter how lonely and isolated were Vito’s early years in the New World—the first few months waited out in a hard bed on Ellis Island—Vito, Michael’s father, was a man of love, a man who gradually surrounded himself with family and friends who were willing to do anything for him, as he would for them. That begat the nefarious world in which Vito ultimately created, but at its heart, his world was always filled with community. In the early scenes of lower Manhattan Italian life, the streets are teaming with people, filled with the energy of young and old, good and evil, clandestine robberies and public performances, selling/buying and cheating—all rubbing up against each other.

      Many of these parallels are quite obvious. I have already mentioned the previous film’s beginning wedding, filled with joyous life, and the quite lifeless affair of Anthony’s coming of age, where the Senator hypocritically welcomes the Corleones (without once attempting to properly pronounce their name) to Nevada, the band cannot even imagine a song like “Luna mezz’ o mare,” whose rhythms can only suggest “Pop Goes the Weasel,” where instead of a bounteous banquet are served, as Frankie Pantangeli describes it, “steamed fish on Ritz crackers,” and during which the Don, like his father, meets with people—in this case to most deny them their pleas rather than accept.

      While Vito Corleone’s world was centered, for most of his life, in New York, Michael’s central focuses are now Las Vegas (a city never even shown in this movie) and a rebel-pocked Cuba which is about to explode and close itself away from mafia activities. New York, his father’s former friends, Clemenza and, particularly in this work, Pentangeli, have been abandoned. The beautiful, if modest home of Vito, reminds Michael only of what his father taught him: “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Despite the gated estate of Lake Tahoe in which he now lives, Michael and his family are attacked and their lives threatened, something almost unthinkable in the old Corleone home.

     Perhaps the most terrifying difference between Vito’s world and Michael’s is connected with Hyman Roth, and the film suggests that descent into the netherworld from the moment Michael leaves his estate to visit the older man through Nino Rota’s descending chords and slightly sickening melody.

     Roth is portrayed as a childless man, living in a quite ordinary bungalow in Miami, watching, like any elderly retiree might, a baseball game (“I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919.”). About his darkly lit rooms (utterly different from any scene in the Corleone’s New York home), flutters his wife, attired a bit like Mamie Eisenhower, in fluted ruffles; Roth turns up the television and closes the door to maintain his privacy. Here love and loyalty are expressed in phrases of passivity, as he recounts his long-time friendship with Moe Green, whom Michael killed in the first installment of Coppola’s trilogy: “When I heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen.” Passionless, Roth has clearly made a pact with the devil, living long beyond the age one might have expected; as Michael quips earlier: “He’s been dying from the same heart attack for the last twenty years.” Even Michael’s attempt to have him strangled in Cuba does not kill him. Later, when Roth is homeless and unwanted by every country, Michael suggests a hit on Roth when he attempts to return to the US:

 

                       Tom Hagen: It would be like trying to kill the President; there’s

                              no way we can get to him.

                        Michael Corleone: Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in

                              life is certain—if history has taught us anything—it’s that you

                              can kill anybody.

 

Such a philosophy might almost represent Roth’s own. But this time Michael succeeds, destroying even the film’s Faust.

      Perhaps, as Connie suggests, Michael has just been attempting all along to “be strong,” but in his involvement finally with a man like Roth, he has taken the “family” as far away from the light—an essential symbol of home and hearth Coppola has used throughout his great works—as he possibly could. Despite all the evils that may have existed in Vito’s home, it is impossible to imagine him brooding in the dark; and, as we recall, Vito Corleone died joyfully chasing his young grandson around the garden in a children’s game. The frozen present Don could never have bent his body in that way toward his son. No, Anthony, there is nothing you can do for your father; he already one of the living-dead. Crime may have financially paid-off, but there is no one there to collect.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2012).