If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Caridi may have been the very image of Sonny Corleone down to his toes, but he didn't have the inside view of the casting process that Caan had by then. Caan was part of the core group of four--along with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall--who Francis Coppola wanted from the very start. He met with active resistance to both Brando and Pacino from the studio, and though Caan seemed to have the best chance of all them of getting into the movie, the studio wanted Coppola to consider him for Michael, Pacino's part. "That was the last thing Francis wanted," Caan says now, "because he had it in his mind that Michael was the Sicilian-looking one and Sonny was the Americanized version." (It may be some kind of proof of the genius of this casting idea that, after the movie came out, Caan says that he "won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.") While Caridi was out spending his salary, Coppola made one last hard press for Pacino as Michael, a move that would practically demand that Caan, then officially cast as Michael, be shifted to the role of Sonny because of the difference in height between Pacino and Caridi. Finally, the Paramount chieftain Robert Evans--who looked much more like a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star than Pacino, and who thought that the role demanded a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star type because it was the role he'd have coveted if he were still an actor, relented. "“I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, still,” says Caridi, who at 74 is still a working actor. Coppola must have felt just godawful about all this, because he cast Caridi in small roles in both The Godfather, Part II and, many years later, The Godfather III. Caridi did strike other casting directors as sufficiently mobish that he got to play Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Sam Giancana in Ruby (1992). Whatever happened to all those babies he kissed for luck has not yet been determined.

We've read a lot of articles about the making of The Godfather by now, and if you follow these links the way we tell you to, so have you. The special fascination of Seal's account is the emphasis it places in the actual (ahem) Mafia's role in almost preventing the movie from getting made, in its getting made, and the enthusiasm for it that overtook them once it was finished. Although neither Puzo nor Coppola ever met a real gangster--Coppola recalls that “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”--many people tried to get into the movie by boasting of their real-life organized crime bona fides. Alec Rocco, A.K.A. Moe Greene, wanted everyone to know that he had a past as a bookie and had the butt-ugly mugshot to prove it. Al Martino, the singer who played Johnny Fontaine, let it be known that he had the role coming to him because he was Johnny Fontaine, mob connections and all, which must have given Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted the production shut down because he thought everyone in the world thought that he was supposed to be Johnny Fontaine, mixed feelings. In the end, Martino got the role, despite Coppola's reported preference for Vic Damone, despite the fact that he was so inexperienced an actor that Brando had to resort to throwing an unscripted slap to the face into their big scene together in an effort to startle him enough to get him to come out and play. Bettye McCartt, assistant to producer Al Ruddy, broke her watch on the set one day and was approached by Lenny Montana, the mountainous former wrestler who played the Corleone family emforcer Luca Brasi. McCartt recalls that “He said, ‘What kind of watch would you like?,’ and I said, ‘I’d like an antique watch with diamonds on it, but I’ll get another $15 one.’ A week passes, and Lenny comes and he’s got a Kleenex in his hand wadded up, and he’s looking over his shoulder every step of the way.” He placed the wad of Kleenex on her desk. She opened it, and there was an antique diamond watch inside. “And he says, ‘The boys sent you this. But don’t wear it in Florida.’”

Meanwhile, Joe Colombo, the most "media-savvy" of the leaders of the Five Families, was battling the production through his "civil rights" organization, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had "a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest." Looking to make peace, Al Ruddy invited Colombo to come to his office and examine the screenplay. “So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.” Luckily, Colombo decided to cut to the chase: his only demand was that the word "Mafia" be deleted from the script and never appear in the movie. This, it turned out, was not the most difficult thing he could have asked for: the word appeared in the script exactly once, when the movie studio boss played by John Marley read Duvall's Tom Hagen the riot act, telling him in the most offensive way possible that he has no fear of Italian crime lords. Considering that Marley's diatribe also contained the words "dago", "wop", "greaseball", and "goombahs", the general feeling was that even with the "M"-word removed, the speech would still retain the necessary flavor. In the end, the movie would become a beloved totem among Italian Americans, law-abiding and otherwise, but Colombo himself would not live to see it. He was executed by a gunman, presumed to have been hired by rival gangster Joey Gallo, while appearing at an Italian-American Civil Rights League Unity Day celebration in New York in June 1971, at the same time that part the movie was being filmed a few blocks away. Al Ruddy had declined an offer to sit beside Colombo on the dais.

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”

The Screengrab : joey gallo

If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008