My friends and I have found ourselves fixated recently on classic
gangster movies. We’ve been working our
way down the list: Goodfellas, The
Score, Casino, The Departed, Snatch, RocknRolla (still counts), and, last and
definitely not least, The Godfather series.
Talk about classic. I am in no
way a movie critic or gangster movie connoisseur, and will not attempt to be
here, but The Godfather Part 1 it is widely regarded as the best gangster movie ever made,
one of the best movies in general ever made, with one of the best performances
ever given, and so on and so forth. I mean, it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The
general consensus is: if you haven’t seen it, watch it; if you have seen it,
you should probably watch it again.
After watching the film, we looked up Marlon Brando (the
actor who plays the main character, Don Vito Corleone). For the purpose of this blog posting, I am
considering Wikipedia a reliable source.
We found that critics have raved since the release of the film about the
success of the character of Vito Corleone.
He is considered the fourth greatest male character in the history of
cinema. The wiki page also quotes Brando
on his approach to the character. I’ve attached
a clip from the very beginning of the movie (so that there are no spoilers)
that I think embodies much of the Don’s personality.
Although this is cinema, which deals in the visual compared
to the linguistic as with literature, I still feel that the authenticity and
purpose which the actor and director had with creating the character can relate
back to our writing. We are currently
exploring how to create a character that is significant, interesting,
purposeful, and worthwhile, all of which are traits that could be applied to
Vito Corleone. I believe we can see in
this clip how the dialogue, actions (vs. movements), appearance, and setting combine to create a vivid character, even in only the first ten minutes (this
clip is a few minutes into the beginning of the movie). I think that valuable insight can come from
studying others’ successful characters, both in literature and in cinema.
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