ROBUST discussion

Caught The Godfather part one on television in the restored version. It was always a visually rich movie, with set dressers and clothing designers who went the extra mile to make the period details right.

It's one of my favourite movies — some of my best friends are psychopaths! — and I always take away something new from it. Most people who know I'm into engineering think of me mostly as an electronics designer in the high-voltage audio field of single-ended tube amps and horn speakers, but for a couple of decades I was the guru of choice to upmarket hotrodders who turned old Bentleys into sports cars, or built expensive nostalgicars from the ground up on chassis designs by me and others, and recently my Designing and Building Special Cars has enjoyed a revival as the bible of the ultra-light racers who fit Hayabusa motorcycle engines into exiguous Lotus-style road-going track and hillclimb specials. All of that to explain that, though as a conservationist I've been car-free since 1992, I know a little something about automobiles. Among the Italian automobiles I've owned were several styled by Nuccio Bertone, and by Farina before his names were joined as Pininfarina, lightweights by Zagato, and Anglo-American-Italians by Vignale (Jensens, my favourite touring cars).

So this time, watching The Godfather, I checked the cars for authenticity — and was appalled to see the filmmakers destroy valuable period automobiles merely for effect.

Now, I don't care overly much for the humpback styles of the late thirties, so the filmmakers can shoot up as many of those as they like, and I'll be silent. But when they send Sonny Corleone out to be shot up by what seemed a whole platoon of Thompson-wielding button-men, they could have chosen a less elegant car than the Lincoln Continental, which was an American copy of the Bugatti Ventoux style of just before the war, often found on the Types 50 and 57 Bugs. From the B-pillar rearwards the copy is almost exact, right back to the squared-off trunk ever so halfheartedly integrated. The only difference is that the uhr-Ventoux has blank three-quarter panels while the Lincoln has a pair of side-windows.

Sonny Corleone, as written by Mario Puzo, played by James Caan, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, was a worthless, blustering, foul-tempered, abrasive jerk. That he was violent goes without saying; his family, his life, his business was violence. Anyone who didn't see a violent end coming for him must have have had his head in his popcorn. It is difficult to summon up much sympathy, though one feels for the mother when Marlon Brando as the Don tells the undertaker, "I don't want his mother to see him like this."

But for Coppola to wreck a Lincoln Continental is going too far! That hurt.

Meanwhile Michael, the family straight, is hiding out in Sicily after popping a drugs czar and his pet police captain for trying to kill his father. We see the local kingpin arrive like bullfrog in a small pillarless Lancia, a lovely touch. We see Michael, supposedly invisible, driving around in an Alfa-Romeo designed and coachbuilt by Nuccio Bertone. This is clearly dumb, because in the poverty of the countryside in Sicily, where most people walked or at most had a horse-cart, the car would mark him out as someone special, fabulously wealthy by local standards. Not only would the car attract the attention of the authorities (who at the time, just after WW2, were the American military) to him, but then, as now, the second or third main industry of Sicily was kidnapping for ransom, so other criminals would have marked him as a target.

Coppola skates lightly over these realities. Michael falls in love with a local girl, woos her — lovely vignettes of the widows and unmarried aunts enjoying a vicarious romance -- and marries her. He teaches her to drive— in what is essentially a pre-war grand prix car. (I've driven one of those Alfa-Romeo, and I'm no 90-pound littleguy: the clutch is for the lion-thwawed, and the gearbox wasn't made by a jeweler either.) Apollonia is a more simpatico character than Sonny, but we haven't known her very long, and we're already wondering how she will fit in to the life of a sophisticate when Michael returns to the States, and starting to suspect she was tailored to be written out, so when she is blown up in the car, the car-lover's first response is to hope that Coppola had a copy made of the Alfa, and didn't blow up the real thing just for a movie. For instance, blowing up a Lancia Aurelia coupe (the first GT coupe, which created a class that still survives), while still unconscionable, would in time have become more easily forgivable, as there were probably several dozen of the Lancia built for every one of the Alfa-Romeo.

As I say, a different view on The Godfather every time.

***
This brutally insensitive review of a great movie was inspired by conversations with American "liberals" about the genocide of defenseless African women and children directly traceable to their pet ban on the use of DDT to combat malaria. If they can be that careless about hundreds of millions of human lives sacrificed so that no conceivable (or inconceivable) harm should come to plankton, why should anyone care for a few murdered fictional characters — when rare and wonderful real automobiles were destroyed?

Watch this space for my explanation of why rare and wonderful old automobiles are more worthy of our love than plankton.

What?

Toys for boys.

I've never even thought of loving plankton.

For true emotional fulfillment, watch the seaweed grow...
— Andreesh Swami Jute

A great film, although maybe Part 2 just has the edge.

Bizarrely, I've never been tempting by the book. I don't see how it can compare; normally I'm a snob and view these things the other way around...

And here I thought the Swami was an objectivist...