Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Film of Value
- Part I Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
- Interlude
- 5 Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting
- 6 On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas
- 7 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni
- Part II Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment
- Bibliography of Related Criticism
- Index
- Plate section
6 - On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas
from Interlude
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Film of Value
- Part I Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
- Interlude
- 5 Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting
- 6 On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas
- 7 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni
- Part II Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment
- Bibliography of Related Criticism
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
The Coppolas, Francis Ford and his daughter, Sophia, both have the same artistic problem: neither is a thinker. The father has always been short on thought; indeed, he stumbles when he thinks, when he thinks he's thinking. The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990) was strongest in its execution – also its executions – not in its adolescent implications of analogy between the Mafia and corporate capitalism (an analogy that ignores, among other things, the origins of the Mafia and its blood bonds of loyalty, which have nothing to do with capitalism). The Conversation (1974) faltered in its Orwellian ideological structure. And in Apocalypse Now (1979), the attempts to dramatize private moral agony and general moral abyss during the Vietnam War were disjointed, assumptive, weak, for all of Vittorio Storaro's aptly hallucinogenic color cinematography.
Even Coppola's scripts for others have suffered from woolly thinking: his screenplay for Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby (1974), for example, turned Fitzgerald's supple suggestiveness into mindless blatancy; and his scenario for Franklin Schaffner's Patton (1970) presented the glaringly contradictory nature of this famous general as praiseworthy, even fathomless, complexity. That's the top of the heap. From there, we head down to Coppola's blotchy script for René Clément's Is Paris Burning? (1966), a rambling, pseudo-documentary recreation of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Screen WritingsGenres, Classics, and Aesthetics, pp. 87 - 102Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010