Leave The Gun Take The Cannoli's

I like New York very much. There is a vibrancy and an invitation to discovery woven into it on a profound level. It is a microcosm of humanity and a reflection of the recipe that made America yesterday, today, and tomorrow. On one visit we took a boat out to see the Statue of Liberty and decided to take a brief look at Ellis Island. The Statue was magnificent and awe inspiring, the words first written by Jewish American poet, Emily Lazarus were emboldened at the bottom of that amazing structure,? "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

On our return we stopped at Ellis Island, I did not know what to expect. I had known this series of buildings existed and what its purpose was. As I entered the main hall I was immediately overcome with the feeling that this was a more than sacred place, a place of buoyant hope and incredible promise. I was consumed that so many had moved within this place, gripped with both nervousness and hope. A further deepening is that for the first time we found that my wife’s grandmother had first stepped into America through these doors.? We came away knowing that we had just experienced something that was so much more than a floor, walls, and a ceiling. In many ways this was the Vatican for America, a place of invention and of commitment to a new ideal. A place where the impoverished, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised would take their first steps into a new life. Out of this womb came America.

?I had first seen Ellis Island when I screened the movie Godfather II. Young Vito Andolini, renamed by an immigration agent Vito Corleone would be quarantined and then released into a new world away from the violence inflicted on his family by a Sicilian Mafia Don.? He would later use the threat of violence as a way of launching his rise to power into a new social structure called Costra Nostra or literally interpreted as Our Thing.

?This is the 50th Anniversary of The Godfather, a movie which changed cinema, shaped a new Golden Age of moviegoing and probably rescued a few studios from a certain demise.

?The launch of the first Godfather and then the second gave rise to a new form of cinema, a movement that would bring to the screens of the world Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Phillip Kaufman, Steven Spielberg, Michael Ritchie, John Milius, and Walter Murch. It would be the beginning of the rise of the film school brats who would re-shape and reform Hollywood and then like most things Hollywood touches later get contaminated by it. The machine unfortunately eats everything in its path.

?The first words that are heard in “The Godfather” are “I believe in America”. These words resonate and establish what the movie is truly about, the glory of “The American Dream” and then its corruption and debasing of that dream. When the movie was released the corruption exhibited in Coppola’s opus was reflected in the souls of those protesting the travesty of what was happening in Vietnam.? Watergate was also happening. The Godfather and then Godfather II basically called out the inherent corruption that existed in our society and the violence embedded in that corruption whether it be on the New Jersey turnpike or the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather was somewhat of a Hollywood punchline, having just made a string of box office duds including “You’re A Big Boy Now”, “Finian's Rainbow” and “The Rain People”. He was known as a solid screenwriter having penned? “Patton”. The major criteria for advancing him as the director for “the Godfather” was the fact he was Italian. He knew the subjects of the movies, he knew how they walked and he knew how they talked. He would be able to make Italian Americans and not a pasta infused cartoon. They were right. The Godfather, for a brief time, would hold the box office record and would take home three well deserved Oscars.

?The movie took Hollywood which again was struggling away from a saccharine view of the world to a much darker place. A place where evil was being done in the name of family and of the country. It allowed the audience to say we have problems, deep problems and maybe this movie about family and corruption will allow me to bear honest witness to what is around me.

?The connection between the movie and its audience deepened with the release of Godfather II. In many ways they are really the same movie. The undeniable fact is that this movie spoke to its audience and with its audience. It knew exactly what it was saying and? it knew who it was saying it to. It was intelligent, it did not pander with special effects and it discussed the American experience. It was globally embraced for being an American movie which spoke to American audiences. It was truthful and it was genuine. Something that today's movies cannot claim to be.

?The Godfather made the No. 3 spot on the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time list. It followed Citizen Kane and Casablanca…both movies which have in their own right darkness to them……not bad company. In 1990, it was selected to be placed? in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.” Damn straight.

?The filmmakers showed us a dark side of the dreams of Ellis Island, a result of which are often ignored. The dark view of the 70’s and early 80’s gave rise to a form of materialistically based optimism, an outlook which in its own way can be equally as dark.

?Let me ask you, my patient readers a question, if in the past much of how Americans saw America was through the movies and how the world saw America was through its movies, what happens when Hollywood ceases to make American voiced movies and tries to speak globally and fails….what happens to the perception America has of itself? I think it’s a problem.

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Leave the gun, take the cannoli's.