Fever-Thoughts on the Great Crime Films
I very recently recovered from a pretty awful illness. Among others, one of my symptoms was a very high fever which put me into quite a confusing headspace and filled my mind with delusional thoughts.
One such delusion, which I believe was inspired by the only thing that can give me any pleasure when I become that sick — a steady diet of violent crime movies — was the notion that there is anything at all that hasn’t been said about greatest-movie-list-toppers like The Godfather and Goodfellas.
The second major delusion was the idea that if there was anything left to say, I could be the one to say it. A bizarre thought, because I’m no cinema buff. I wouldn’t even consider movies one of my major hobbies. When I do watch them, my favorite movies are Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally — romantic comedies with cynical undertones.
Yet, while I sat on my couch watching Donnie Brasco with a 102-degree fever, a can of ginger ale in my hand and a cold washcloth draped over my forehead, a thought began to form in my mind. I gave up trying to calculate the calories in a whole bag of cough drops long enough to let the grossly misled idea that had been incubating deep in the unconscious recesses of my virus-addled brain emerge: I should write a blog post about mob movies. That would be appropriate.
If nothing else, it’s proof that my school assignments live deep in my brain, unable to be restrained even by the highest fever I’ve had this decade. My professors should be proud.
Regardless, I’m unqualified to write about this as I’m not even a huge fan of crime films and I’m by no means an expert. But I’m doing it anyway, because who’s gonna stop me? In keeping with the overall disorganized vibe of my life, I’ve structured this post as a series of thoughts I’ve had accompanied by rambling explanations.
The Godfather Part II is not better than Part I
The Godfather films are among the only series in which many believe the sequel to be superior to the original. I prefer the Godfather Part I, but I’m willing to say that they are both exceptional movies that are equally great. I also heard that there’s a third one, and I have to say that the odds of me ever seeing it are slim to none.
I will not accept, though, the common notion that The Godfather Part II is better than the first. Maybe it’s because I watched the original so many times when I was young, and only watched the sequel once, recently, when I had a fever that altered my perception of time and space.
Maybe it’s because the notion of the sequel being better is one I’ve simply heard too many times: it was an opinion pontificated by far too many mouth-breathing know-it-all high-school boys at my lunch table. These were the same people who tried to get me to watch Citizen Kane.
But come on, what kind of 15-year-old likes Citizen Kane? At that age, the brain is too underdeveloped to pick up on all the subtle qualities of the film that we’re supposed to pretend to understand and appreciate.
I digress. Part I has Marlon Brando in it — that’s something you can’t say about Part II. It also has one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, in which Michael Corleone — played, obviously, by Al Pacino — retrieves a planted gun from a restaurant bathroom and kills an enemy drug baron and a corrupt police captain.
On the topic of Michael Corleone: his character develops in a far more interesting and thought-provoking way in Part I. He starts the film uninterested in his family’s criminal ways, and by the end becomes a high-level criminal. We get to watch his transformation and can even empathize with his gradual corruption.
In the second movie, Michael is distant from us: he is driven only by greed and revenge. They’re both great movies, but Part I is more humanely relatable. Part II is larger in scope and expertly intertwines two storylines separated by a generation, but few movies will ever impact me like the first Godfather film.
It’s not all violence without substance
As I said, I don’t watch many movies. When I have free time — which I don’t — I like to read dense, depressing Russian novels with religious themes and lots of characters with difficult-to-pronounce names. I promise I’m more fun at parties than you’d think.
An old assumption of mine, which was fitting for a pretentious young man such as myself, was that these types of movies were purely violent for the sake of violence. Nothing could compare to my previous novels.
I, of course, could not have been more wrong about this: I already talked about the fantastic character development in The Godfather, but now I’d like to turn attention to two movies directed by Martin Scorcese: Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.
So much has been said about Taxi Driver that I’ll limit my commentary to this: Robert De Niro’s character Travis Bickle is worthy of a Dostoyevsky novel. He’s my favorite writer, and I couldn’t help but think of his short novel Notes From Underground when I watched Taxi Driver. They’re both works that explore the psyche of a lonely, unsuccessful, and self-conscious man who simultaneously has delusions of grandeur. They both inspire frightening self-reflection.
Mean Streets is a great, and, dare I say it — underrated — movie, also featuring Robert De Niro. His character Johnny is a loose-cannon dramatic foil to Harvey Keitel’s Charlie, whose Catholic faith fills him with guilt and an obligation to suffer. Perhaps it’s only because I was raised Catholic and am also filled with massive guilt about everything for no reason, but I found this aspect of his personality viscerally relatable. It’s the same with Dostoevsky.
The point is that these movies are far more literary in tone than I would have expected them to be, and they are just as thought-provoking as any novel I’ve read.
Casino is just as good as Goodfellas
Warning: more Scorsese talk incoming. People love to hate on Casino as a Goodfellas ripoff. Sure, they both have a similar cast, feature extensive voiceover narration by the characters, and are pretty violent. Sure, Martin Scorcese directed them both within five years of each other. If your criticism is that it re-treads the same ground, then you might be right from a purely cinematic perspective.
But I consider Casino to be an elaboration of the style that Martin Scorcese supposedly perfected with Goodfellas. But there’s a duality in Casio that makes it more interesting to watch — it’s more glamorous but also darker. It’s broader in scope, but also has more fascinating relationships between characters. Both films essentially tell rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags stories, but Casino’s plot has more structure.
It’s a bigger story, there are more moving parts, and most importantly for me, it seems to take itself a little more seriously than Goodfellas. If I’m watching a crime or mob movie, I frankly don’t want it to be so lighthearted. Goodfellas is almost too much fun — it’s always been strange to me to see it compared to the Godfather movies since they have such fundamentally different tones.
A little grimness goes a long way, and Casino strikes the perfect balance between darkness and lightheartedness. I’ll say that it’s just as good, but if you asked me to choose a favorite I’m going with Casino.
There’s no conclusion or grand here, besides that I like these movies. They’re not without their flaws by any means: there’s a notable lack of interesting female characters, which isn’t even true of Dostoevsky, who preceded these movies by a century.
Seeing Diane Keaton in The Godfather made me realize that Woody Allen — you know, the writer, director, and alleged sexual predator — could write more nuanced female characters than Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, some of the most beloved writers directors in cinema.
Regardless, in these movies, I’ve discovered something I’m more interested in than I thought I’d be. What I didn’t need, though, is another thing to distract me from my studies. At least I have something to look forward to after I make a dent in the huge workload that’s currently staring me in the face.