“Francis Ford Coppola: The King of 1970s Cinema” (Video)

Re-posted by N..S.

For once, the title is accurate. Francis Ford Coppola dominated the 1970s as no previous director had since Frank Capra in the 1930s: The Godfather (1972); The Godfather, Part II (1974); The Conversation (1974); and Apocalypse Now (1979).

GI and GII are tied for third on my list of the greatest movie masterpieces, after The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Citizen Kane (1941), while The Conversation is somewhere in the nineties. I don’t consider Apocalypse Now a masterpiece, but it’s darned close to one, and prior to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), I considered the battle scene accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” far and away the greatest battle scene ever put on film. (And I’m not sure Spielberg’s scene was better.)

One goof: The narrator says that The Bum won the Oscar for “Best Supporting Actor.” That was for Best Actor.

An interesting aspect was hearing Coppola claim that he began writing the screenplay for The Conversation in 1966. That could only be true if he had seen Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which was released in 1966, that year. Recall that Coppola had also said The Conversation was inspired by Watergate burglar James McCord (circa 1973).

Coppola tells great stories, but he’s always changing ‘em!

I wished the fellas, “Hals und Beinbruch!,” which is German, by way of Yiddish, for “Break your neck and your leg!,” or, simply, “Good luck.”

During my university days in West Germany (1980-1985), I heard that saying numerous times, but wouldn’t learn that it had originally came from Yiddish until many years after I’d come back home.