The opening of Badfellas. [In the background the opening bars of The Rolling Stones "Brown Sugar" is audible]

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a plantation owner. To me, being a slaver was better than being any tyrant President of the United States. Even before I first wandered into an auction lookin' for an after-school job, I knew I wanted to be a part of them. It was there I belonged. To me it meant being somebody in a county full of nobodies. They weren't like anyone else. They did whatever they wanted. They were important. They owned people.

Re: Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?
 

It's one of them. It was the movie in high school that got me to take movies seriously and my first favorite movie. Brando is still my favorite... Coppola said he and Brando (didn't read the book) talked and framed the movie to be a story about America and the system.

I'm no expert on how the real mafia operates, though I did read what Skizzerflake posted about how real mafia members act. Though I really can't say. I'm also not an expert on the lifestyles of the well-to-do plantation owners in the deep south before the Civil War. But I bet experts can find lies about both groups in the two movies.

Yes one can perceive it that way. It can also be perceived as a film about loyalty, power and respect and those are things that people admire and find admirable.

I think people are revolted to see white slave owners as nice, cultured, beautiful people, having a great time with their parties in their fancy mansions. We want to see them be evil, so it fits our world view of slavery and when they aren't evil on the screen it triggers us into repulsion, which I can understand. GWTW shows the plantation owners from their viewpoint and shows what their privileged, gentile life was like. They lived like aristocrats, much like the lords and ladies of 18th century in Jane Austen novels. We might not like that truth but that doesn't make it a lie, just an ugly truth.

From memory I believe Fort Sumter is either referenced by name or indirectly as the opening skirmish in the Civil War in GWTW. Slavery was not abhorrent to the white plantation owners, why should the movie show them finding slavery abhorrent, we know it is, but they didn't probably lose any sleep over it.

I do hold that GWTW does show the negativity of slavery but it doesn't spell it out like a modern audience might like. Nothing shows the gross injustices of slavery as much as this screenshot from the movie does. I find this image very sad when one thinks of the real childhoods loss fanning privileged debutantes napping after stuffing themselves at a party.

I agree and well said.🙂

That's the beautiful balance of the movie. Two totally different peoples can relate to it based on that. They reflected on this a few times in The Offer.

Sure, sure. Long time listener, first time caller. The check is in the mail. Citizen isn't Goodfella. Riiiigggghhhhht......

I wonder about you sometimes, Corax. You may fold under questioning.

Thanks for the thoughtful replies. I think we've both had a good say and aren't in any danger of swaying one another's core views on this. Yeah, I could lob a few "yeah buts" over the fence, but now's a good time to step back and see if anyone else wants to comment.

Although GWTW will never make any of my "best of" lists, in the recently concluded HoF, I put GWTW about two-thirds the way down ballot, even above my own nominee. Despite how it makes me feel, I consider it required viewing for anyone who loves film, as it's impossible to watch it and come away truly indifferent. It's maybe the perfect vehicle for testing your attitudes about what you value in film.

I think a film about criminals committing crimes isn't an inherently bad film. It just depends on how it depicts the criminals and the crimes they commit. Some of them I can't stand because they treat abhorrent individuals as positive people (like Goodfellas) (which I will always hate) (although my list of issues with that film is longer than "Bad people getting away with it.")

One thing for me is I'm not huge on the actiony crime films like Godfather, which I hadn't considered earlier. I'm more of a noir/suspense crime person. I'll still watch Godfather again (I said I would) and I'll keep an open mind, and maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I don't mind enjoying films in genres I don't favor as much as others.

With what you've explained about Godfather it doesn't sound like it glorifies the Mafia nor organized crime nor violent crime, nor et al. It just says, "Here it is," and lets the audience how to interpret it. They are criminals. There's no escaping that. I'm just beginning to think there's more to it than "Me criminal, me commit crime, me better guy now."

Thank you for being courteous & civil, I always appreciate that! I like discussion when people don't have to try and change the other person's mind and as you said that's usually impossible anyway. What I like is learning a bit more why a person thinks or feels the way they do and now I think I understand a bit more why you feel the way you do about GWTW.

Yes, that great under persecuted crime of the ages: Changing people's minds.


Let's hope something like that never happens here. From personal experience, whenever I've changed my mind on something it was either done involuntarily by force or I was suddenly tricked into swapping my opinion for an even worse one (and they wouldn't even give me my money back when I complained about it to the manager!).


Oh, right. That has never happened, not once in the four thousand million times I've read something that changed my mind on something. And here I thought it was a good thing all these years. I had no idea my liberty had been taken away from me. But now Im onto them! Never again! How dare someone suggest there might be a better way of looking at something! Keep your hands off my hot takes!

Re: Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?
 

To be honest, I didn't really see the big controversy but then again I'm not black so that's always going to feel different.
While it's told from a Southern point of view I'm not sure if the story supports it, especially when it has its representative in the somewhat caricature Scarlett O'Hara.
But even so, people who had those privileges and believes would obviously experience the end of it as a loss. To show it differently would be smarmy-revisionist as they would do it today (and make the whole story pointless).

The black characters in GWTW are not paricularly bright and I imagine that's how the slave owners wanted it e.g. not supporting any kind of education.
Furthermore, there's a difference between being content with a situation and to make the best of situation, and being the maid in a fancy mansion may not have been the worst option at that time, and the well-being of the master/employer could affect the situation of the slave.
This is very evident in the first part when Mammy is particularly concerned about Scarlett's health, but if she's responsible for the well-being of the three sisters then you can imagine what happens if she fails. That's not the same as "I dedicate my life to the comfort and happiness of my masters because I love them".

But regardless of the black characters and the "evil" yankees I think it showed (almost from the very beginning) that the South had been building castles on quicksand, an unsustainable fantasy. And it also ends with Scarlett's fantasy about going home, restore the glory of Tara and get her husband back.

History is hard to do "right." Largely, this is because we're deeply conflicted about what "right" is or if "rightness" even exists.

If we wrote people of the 19th century as they actually were, it would be very difficult for audiences to accept them. Just about everyone was racist. Abolitionists tended to be paternalistic. Abe Lincoln publicly avowed that Africans were not on a par with whites. People took "race" very seriously as an essentialist category and judged others accordingly. John Adams is the only one of our founding fathers who never owned a slave. Charles Darwin has been criticized for his scientific racism. Even nice people said it and they said it with a hard "R." This makes the past a tough place to visit given our modern blasphemy laws (under which it is worse to be a racist than a murderer).

Inevitably, stories attempt to build a bridge between "now" and "then." Information is presented in a way that allows the audience to learn what people are talking about and how we're supposed to feel about what we're seeing. Master and Commander has an audience surrogate character in the form of Dr. Maturin (he objects with modern sensibilities to the "excesses" of the Royal Navy, a rationalist who recoils from the superstitions of the crew). Maturin is our bridge to understanding and evaluating Aubrey so that we may enjoy swashbuckling with him a bit (and judging him - "Ah, t'was a silly place"). The portrait is simultaneously honorific, but cautionary (e.g., he really believed a crewmember was a Jonah). More often than not, we get anachronistic heroes who have jarringly progressive views about topics. The anachronistic hero is our protective armor. This person reminds us that "we're right" and allows us to imagine how we would "do our best" if we found ourselves living in this world. Fiction frequently tells us that history had imperfect versions of our modern selves (Maturin is an "almost Darwin" on a quest to make naturalistic observations, but sidetracked by his duties on a ship of war - he is our proto-modern rationality, not quite there yet, but growing like a seed in at least "the good ones").

I love the Coen brothers because they tend to be brutal in their history while still inviting us into it. Their Rooster Cogburn violently kicks two Native American children at a general store. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs shows a Native American hung in mid-speech while uttering his last words (every other criminal gets to say their piece). Strange thing is, people didn't recoil from these movies. The films didn't get cancelled. They didn't even bear the scrutiny that Quentin Tarantino faces when he has an exploitational adventure in that century (it seems that we are still culturally conflicted as to whether he get an "N-Pass" - his characters use the word, but his heroes violently kill racists and Sam Jackson says he's OK, hmm....). I wish we had more historical cinema in the style of the Coens, forcing us to adjust to it, warts and all, rather than just cosplaying history as a modern progressive--if I wanted to do that, I'd just go to Comicon.

Regrettably, our future "Old West" is one which will preach the evils of environmental predation and maltreatment of the gender non-conforming. The past is no longer present, because the present is increasingly seeping into our past. I think this is part of the reason why older people tune out of new media. It's obvious that the tune has changed and they prefer the comforts of the old anachronisms with which they were raised (e.g., virtuous white hat cowboys, seedy Spaghetti Western cowboys, post-modern cowboys who subvert the violent themes they portray, but all strong, white, male, and straight).

It would be nice if we got to a point that people could watch and enjoy a film like Gone With the Wind, without being accused of being soft or indifferent or straight up supporting of its racism. Because they aren't. At least not always.


And it would also be nice for people to be able to criticize the kind of past that Gone With the Wind shows (both in the time it was depicting as well as the time the movie was made) without people endlessly whining about virtue signalling, or believing this always means they themselves are being accused of being racists themselves. Because they're not. At least not always.


The idiot streak goes pretty hard in both directions on this one, and because those people are always the loudest and most confident in their beliefs, they've ended up souring actual discussion for everyone.

Just a few comments I have.Yes, educating slaves was a crime. They were not allowed to learn to read and write and a white person who tried to teach them 'book learning' would be committing a punishable crime. As a result the slaves might appear to have poor verbal skills. But in actuality they would be speaking their own unique form of English which would include some African words and slang words they used.

Also the Stockholm syndrome, but only much more pronounced as you have people being born into slavery for generations and 'brain washed' by the slave owners as to this is how things are. Slavery became an institution, even the churches in the South supported the idea that slavery was ordained by God as the way of things, sick I know but it's the sad truth.

Plus, the fear of being whipped or beat if a slave dared raised their voice to a white person. And that's why some of the black slave characters in GWTW seem subservient, they had to be to survive.

I think GWTW does a good job at giving the black actors especially Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) and Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) developed characters, even a lot of the white actors don't have much depth or character development like Gerald O'Hara (Thomas Mitchell) who plays Scarlet's father. The antebellum period in the south was doomed the day the northern American colonies, agreed to let the south keep slavery in order to get the southern colonies to join the Declaration of Independence from England. That act was a boiling pot bound to explode sometime down the road.

Re: Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?
 

The film should be remade by Spike Lee. Give him 300 million dollars and tell him to show us the South as he believes it really was. Rhett Butler whips a family dressed at the height of rustic genteel fashion. We meet Col. Sal, the sympathetic plantation owner who is big on meritocracy and the Protestant work ethic, etc. We meet a Northern dilletante named Quentin who insists that he is blacker than the slaves he wishes to free and can't understand why his plans (detailed in his stage plays) for bloody slave revolts never pan out. An AI recreation of Paul Mooney narrates.

Re: Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?
 

If you're going to tell the whole story of slavery or even a piece of it, you need a bunch of movies set in different times and places plus a monster budget. I never thought of GWTW as being about slavery as much as about Scarlet, set in a time and place where slavery happened. It would be a very different story set in any of the other times and places, even just in the US, where slavery happened. That's a complex story too, not just that movie version of south-slavery-north-no slavery that was over when Grant marched to the sea.

The same thing happened with not just the first GF movie but the sequels. As a piece of historically-set fiction, it's set in that time, place and family. The same thing is true of the whole GF franchise. Organized crime in the US was never just the province of Italian-Americans in one time span and area. Different times, different cultures and ethnicities have all been part of that never ending saga that goes way back and continues today. As long as there's money to be had from illegal activities, it will happen. If someone suggested that the ONLY mob was Italian or that many Italians were gangsters, that would not work at all.

More than anything, the GF reminds me of a lot of operas I've seen....full of fantasized characters and not-believable plot lines.

Nah. You just tell a small story, personal. Compact. The whole reflected in the part.

I recently rewatched the old mini series Roots. I'd say that's a good start to explore slavery in the old southern states via movies.

Actually, I'd start here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8soyuW0nrlg

Re: Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?
 

Gangsters, slave owners, nazis, serial killer cannibals....we have a fascination with monsters and it's as simple as that.
If they are presented as the protagonists I can root for these characters within the context of the fantasy. The only other option is: kill them all because they deserve it, but that also means that the story ends before it begins and I don't have a film to watch. And that's boring.