Memorable Scores part II

.















































.

Memorable Scores and Themes

.







































































































.

Kubrick, Lair Of The White Worm, The Original Transformers Movie, Happiness

The genius of Stanley Kubrick is indesputable, its always there, particularly evident in the 1980 masterpiece The Shining. However, some of his stuff can be a bit hit and miss for me. He's sort of known for this very measured steady cam, but it doesn't always quite suit the subject matter of his films. Full Metal Jacket is a good example of this. I think it's a film which looks dated now because it was already alluding to another film made 50 years earlier, one of my favourite war films, All Quiet on the Western Front. You could say Kubrick's fluid camera style and his reliance on dolly's and tracking shots during the later battle scenes is a sort of homage to the earlier film. Also like All Quiet, FMJ's first segment deals with an army training school and a slightly over zealous instructor, but while in the earlier film the instructor is pompous, foolish, a harmless baffoon, in Kubrick's film this character and the entire segment have a darker edge. Whether this works or not is debatable. Another film that seems, in my opinion, to miss its mark is his adaptation of A Clockwork Orange from the novel by Anthony Burgess. It's not a bad film in my opinion, I don't think he could make one if he tried, but nevertheless the plot seems clunky, pointless. The amazing art design and iconic costumes of Malcom MacDowell's "Droogs" do little to distract from the unconvincing shallowness of the characters. It leaves me cold, but maybe thats the point. Kubrick wiseley used the inventive narration of the novel to carry the story and MacDowells performance is remarkable and iconic, bringing to mind his earlier role in Lindsey Anderson's If.

Stanley Kubrick's best films are well known as some of the greatest ever made. Classics like Paths of Glory, Lolita, Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon are among them. Here are my top Three.



3. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)



2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1978)



1. The Shining (1980)


























Here is the trailer for another classic by a very differnt filmaker, Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm.

I've ordered it from America but I don't know why more film's like this aren't available here.

Another Ken Russell film that looks quite interesting and funny is Whore.


























I Recently re-discovered the film oddity that is the original Transformers movie. Offcourse, it has some of the cynical feeling of the franchise, rather like the Harry Potter films, but nevertheless it is rather entertaining and funny. The plot never lets up and is basically a bizarre childrens adventure about a giant spherical entity, played by Orson Welles (!), who travels through space devouring technology in much the same way the giant whale in a Baron Munchausen story swallows ships. The Transformers flee to Earth after their planet is destroyed by it. Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy also appear. The use of eighties pop rock songs in the soundtrack is fairly innapropriate and random, the film seems to have been knocked together. It's good in the same way as a Jess Franco film, a stylish accident.

































Re-watched Happiness recently, definateley my favourite Todd Solondz film. Its full of scenes like this:

More Trailers, Freak Storm, Caveman Loves Teenage Girl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sbHcm0xED0&playnext_from=TL&videos=yy45tDhkEfI&feature=grec

Recent Discoveries

.




Rolling Thunder was on my list for a while. It was written by Taxi Driver author Paul Schrader and directed by John Flynn. It's a chilling potrait of two ex prisoners of war, played by William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones, who have become detached from normal existence. After Devanes wife and child are killed infront of him it sends them on a murderous rampage.

















Another pretty decent film is The Quiet Earth. It's based on the novel of the same name by Craig Harrison and is one example of the 'last man on earth' sub-genre of films like Omega Man and I Am Legend. I find it far superior to anything else that runs in this vein. It was directed by Geoff Murphy who did a lot of the second unit stuff on Lord of the Rings.





















Would also recommend Park Chan-wook's last thing, Thirst. It's a vampire love story. Maybe it's not quite as amazing as Oldboy but still much better than some other films I saw of his. I enjoyed it.


































The Mechanic is probably the best film Charles Bronson and director Michael Winner made together. They would offcourse team up a few years later to make Death Wish.



Bronson is a legend. He's basically the original tough guy, like a seventies Bruce Willis. Mr Majestyk is another classic in wich he plays a humble melon farmer who is forced to defend himself against the mob.

More Lists

My most underrated directors:






10. Brian De Palma
De Palma is generally thought of as a sort of weakest link from the 70's generation of Neo-Hollywood directors that includes Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg. I think this is a bit unfair, he's made some of the most interesting films of the late 70's and early 80's. Theres truly a different side to his earlier work, nameley the forgotten giallo style classics Sisters, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, and Carrie has to be one of the greatest horror films of all time.




9. Paul Verhoeven
Going on his Hollywood career alone, Verhoeven deserves a place here. His sci-fi trilogy of Total Recall, Starship Troopers and his English language debut, Robocop, are some of the most subversive, and violent, Hollywood movies ever made. He further changed the game with Basic Instinct, a neo-noir sex thriller that would open the floodgates for a slew of inferior, but similar, movies.




8. Pier Paolo Pasolini
One of my favourite Italian directors. He may have a cult following, mostly among film students, but I think he deserves to be as well known as any of his contemporaries of Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s. His cinema ranges from his early, neo-realist inspired films about the Italian underclass (Accattone, Mamma Roma), to mystical films dealing with Greek mythology (Medea, Oedipus Rex), to later movies inspired by erotic literature (The Cantebury Tales, Arabian Nights, Salo), and what are simply classics of European cinema (Theorem, The Gospel According to Matthew).




7. Bernard Rose
Bernard Rose has made a couple of films that I really like. Most notably the horror film Candyman, a biography of Beethoven called Imortal Beloved and a fairly unknown and darkly comic crime thriller called Chicago Joe and the Showgirl which stars Kiefer Sutherland and the amazing Emily Lloyd. I think all three of these are worth buying. Candyman is a fucking masterpiece anyway.




6. Enzo G. Castellari
This guy has made so much stuff in Italy, what I've seen by him is amazing. He's supposed to be like the Italian Sam Pekinpah. I guess the best example I've seen is Keoma, but also Inglorious Bastards and the spaghetti western that this blog is named after. His films are really fun and he just has a great sense of style and a great eye.




5. Richard Stanley
I think Richard Stanley's only made about two feature films but they're both amazing. Hardware is a little known gem of a post apocalyptic horror slasher film. I'd say it's one of my all time favourite sci fi movies. His other feature is Dust Devil, which I can only describe as a kind of horror-western-lovestory-roadmovie-drugtrip-dreamsequence thing. He's also made a few odd little documentaries about things like the Nazi's quest for the Holy Grail and the practice of Voodoo in Haiti.




4. John McTiernan
McTiernan is on this list solely because of Predator and Die Hard, probably the two greatest action films of the 80's. If you're a boy then you must love these movies. They're basically just examples of really high quality film making. The guys a genius.




3. Michael Reeves
Reeves died of a barbiturates overdose in 1969 after directing only three films, all of which are horror classics. The last and most famous was Witchfinder General starring Vincent Price. I also love his first two films: The She Beast with Barbara Steele, and The Sorcerers with the incredible Boris Karlof, which I've mentioned on here before.




2. Don Coscarelli
Coscarelli is the contributor of such incredible examples of film making as the Phantasm series, Bubba Ho-tep and the truly amazing Beastmaster. He writes all these rich stories himself and then directs them with a sort of very dark sense of humour which I think only special people can really apreciate.




1. Lucio Fulci
What can I say about Lucio Fulci that I haven't already said on here at some point? the guy is probably one of the most underrated and missunderstood film makers ever. His best films were also written by him and I think in Italy he was known as a fairly prolific writer of screenplays and books. This guy had some issues to do with women, religion and the establishment in general and it comes out in his films, a lot of which are pretty excessively violent and crazy. He became known as "The Godfather of Gore", but his formidible imagination wasn't simply limited to depicting violence, he made some of the most inteligent thrillers and horror films of the 70's and early 80's.
















Here are some more of my all time favourite films in no particular order:


















33. Mamma Roma (1962)
Pier Paolo Pasolini's subtly beautiful and tragic masterpiece of his early period. Mamma Roma tells the sad tale of an ex prostitute, 'Mamma Roma', played by Anna Magnani. After her pimp, Carmine (played by Pasolini regular Franco Citti) gets married, she decides to rescue her estranged son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo) from the small town he lives in, and start a new life with him in the city, selling fruit and vegetables in a market. Soon Carmine returns demanding money and she is forced to go back to the streets at night. Meanwhile, Ettore meets local girl Bruna (Silvana Corsini) and falls in with a a group of street hoodlums. As the 16 year old Ettore starts to develop feelings for the thoroughly unsuitable Bruna, Mamma Roma's fears that he will become tainted and dragged down by their surroundings are realised in a tragic chain of events. Pasolini's early films, including Mamma Roma and his debut, Accattone, dealt with the forgotten underclass of pimps and prostitutes and small time criminals of post war Italy. They are stylistically rooted in Italian post modernism, and infact Pasolini never abandoned the rough aesthetic of this genre, using non actors and making the improvised, hand held camera style his own, long after many other directors had abandoned it.





























32. Bad Lieutenant (1992)

Abel Ferrara's masterful character study, about an un-named, corrupt New York police detective (Harvey Keitel), follows him on a journey from total abandoned debauchery and corruption to a type or unexpected salvation, surrounding the case of a raped nun. It was co-written with actress Zoe Lund, who appears in the film as the lieutenants heroin dealer. Lund would later die in Paris of a cocaine related heart attack. This film is undoubtedly Ferrara's best and it remains one of the greatest and most thorough character studies in all of cinema.




























31. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

This film is just incredible. It looks great, it's possible to forget how artfully filmed it is, not just a typical slasher. It's definateley my favourite slasher film. Tobe Hoopers other films don't quite work as well, but somehow Chainsaw Massacre just comes together and it's perfect. It's like some sort of amazing fluke. An undisputed classic, the Citizen Kane of horror films.






























30. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

I find this film so terrifying. The story is just really creepy and apparently the novel, from which the film is adapted, is based on a real event. Supposedly, on valentines day 1900, three school girls and one teacher vanished around a volcanic rock formation in south east Australia known locally as Hanging Rock. There were numerous search parties in the months and years after, but not one clue as to what happened was found. Some of the events surrounding the disappearance are just as strange. Peter Weir's film shows the place it self as a sort of antagonist. Theres something just really unsettling about the way its filmed and the atmosphere of evil that seems to permeate the area. The rock is symbolizing the mysterious and malevolent side of nature. A seemingly incomprehensible, primordial force.





























29. Heart of Glass (1976)
Werner Herzog famously hypnotized all the actors in this film, wich is one of his most beautiful and mysterious. I love all Herzog's early films, I think they're amazing, especially Aguirre The Wrath of God, Nosferatu and his follow up to Heart of Glass, Stroszek. Heart of Glass is about a town in Bavaria, sometime in the last century, where the chief glass blower dies taking with him the formula for the special red 'ruby' glass for which the town is known. Much of the dialogue was apparently made up by the hypnotized actors. The only actor that wasn't hypnotised was the lead Josef Bierbichler, who plays Hias, the prophetic shephard who partially narrates the film.






























28. Torso (1973).

One of the best ever giallo's. It's directed by Sergio Martino and is one of the most suspensefull films I've ever seen. I love everything about this film, even the music and just the look of the killer, its another perfect kind of flukey film. In fact I kind of regret not putting it in my top ten, one of the reasons I keep doing more lists is because I keep remembering films like this.





























27. Castle of Blood (1964).

A little while ago I saw a film by Mario Bava called Black Sunday, it stars a British actress called Barbara Steele who is basically an icon for all goths and wannabe vampire women. She made hundreds of films in Italy, including a part in 8 1/2 as the young beatnick girlfriend of a movie producer, but she was most famous for her run of horror films which followed Black Sunday, of which Castle of Blood is one. I think this film is adapted from an Edgar Allan Poe story, which is always a good sign, and I love these 60's horror films with imposing castles and carriages racing through fog. It's a great look. Particularly in black and white, the kind of photography which seems to suit the proto-Mortitia image that Steele had at the time.





























26. Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)

Lucio Fulci's greatest giallo thriller, this film is just so incredible structurally and just the plot is totally amazing. Like a lot of his films, he wrote the screenplay himself. I think Fulci is one of the most underrated film makers. The story is about a series of murders of young boys in a small Italian town, and the plot tackles themes of pagan idolatry and superstition and Catholicism in sort of rural Italy. It's just a great murder mystery with some really interesting scenes.




























25. Tarantula (1955).

The other "King of the Bs", Jack Arnold directed this film just before his other minor masterpiece, The Incredible Shrinking Man. Tarantula is even better in my opinion, everything about this film is just of a certain quality, especially the amazing script, with naturalistic dialogue and this sort of incredible story structure and pace. It reminds me a bit of The Birds. This is even more amazing when you consider the slightly ridiculous premise: a small American town being terrorized by a giant spider. Its simultaneously quite funny without meaning to be, but also really good. The special effects are really well done.





























24. River's Edge (1986).

This film is really odd, it has an incredible atmosphere. Harmone Korine's Gummo was basically just a rip off of this in a lot of ways and the story is also similar to Larry Clark's Bully. A teenage boy kills his girlfriend for no reason and then his friends try to help him cover it up after he shows them the body. It also features Dennis Hopper as the local drug dealer, Feck. Obviously Hopper co-stared in some other iconic 'youth films', most notably: Rebel Without a Cause and Easy Rider, this fits in with those pretty well. Other actors who are amazing in this film are Crispin Glover and the mysterious child actor, Joshua Miller.































23. Django (1966).

Django. Probably the most iconic spaghetti western ever made, it really is the most quintisential of the westerns made in Europe. Beautifully shot and edited by Sergio Corbucci, it tells the story of the mysterious drifter, Django, who arrives in a frontier town draging a coffin behind him. A coffin with a machine gun inside. This kind of macabre touch is typical of the spaghetti western genre, which this film helped to invent (along with A Fistful of Dollars, a film made a few months earlier with a remarkably similar plot). Corbucci's films tend to be a bit darker than the films of Leone. Django is particularly violent and nihilistic.





























22. Days of Heaven (1978).

Days of Heaven is a classic from famous auteur director Terrence Malick. It has quite a vague plot but its basically just a really beautifully shot melodrama to do with three destitutes, played by Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Linda Manz, as they look for work on the Texas pan handle around the time of the first world war. Sam Shepard plays their dying farm boss. The end is quite mysterious and tragic. It also features another amazing score from Ennio Morricone.

Definitive Rundown Part II

More films, this time in no particular order.



















21. The Thing (1982)
My favourite John Carpenter film. The Thing takes place in an Arctic outpost after the discovery of the frozen remains of an extra terestrial life form. When the alien starts to come back to life and seems to be able to take the form of its victims, the tension and paranoia between the remaining characters begins to mount. Like many of Carpenters films, The Thing is a suspenseful waiting game. In a career of atmospheric movies, it is the most atmospheric. Kurt Russell is memorable as the outposts whiskey drinking hellicopter pilot, MacReady. The special effects are astonishing, and probably represent the zenith of animatronics in cinema.


































20. Battle Royale (2000)

Veteran director Kinji Fukasaku's final masterpiece. The story of Battle Royale is adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by Koushun Takami. Basically, a class of school kids are put on a deserted island and given three days to kill each other using randomly allocated weapons ranging from an uzi to a dustbin lid. The shocking and excessive violence emphasizes the characters emotional turmoil in what is perhaps one of the most unusual of teen dramas. The movie features a subtly chilling performance from 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, the famous film maker and comedian, as the homocidal ex-teacher "Mr Kitano". A uniquely entertaining and violent joyride.


































19. Santa Sangre (1989)
Alejandro Jodorowsky's macabre masterpiece was produced by, and co written with Claudio Argento (brother to the Italian horror master, Dario), who seems to have added atleast a touch of the giallo to the story about a young man who kills in the name of his semi-deified, armless mother. It is infact, a giallo in a Hispanic style, with the baroque tone of the Italian sub-genre replaced by a decidedly surrealist one. The characters in the film are frequently archetypes, almost allegories, representatives of some universal element. The film also seems to borrow stylistically from the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis and José Mojica Marins, but the symbolism and storytelling is altogether more complete. It seems Jodorowsky has taken their work as far as it will go, or atleast to another level. The plot is far too complexed to recount at this point, but suffice it to say that Santa Sangre is a highly symbolic, bloody, sex massacre of the highest calibre.


































18. Goldfinger (1964)
Guy Hamiltons first of many forays into the Bond universe is the most famous and perhaps most consistent of all. In this adventure, Bond is assigned to spy on bullion dealer Auric Goldfinger, and somehow ingratiate himself into the billionaire's company in order to ascertain how he's smuggling gold internationally. In doing so, Bond also uncovers a plan to contaminate the Fort Knox gold reserve with radioactive material, and thereby bankrupt North America while simultaneously sending the price of gold sky-rocketing. What makes this particular Bond movie stand out is, apart from Hamiltons superior directing, a particularly well crafted script by Paul Dehn and Richard Maibaum. The dialogue is excellent, but more importantly the story is well paced and each scene feels as important as the last, which I think is unusual for a Bond film. It seems to be a film heavily grounded in Hollywood classicism, and as such remains a crucial influence on directors like Spielberg and Lucas. Sean Connery is the original and, for me, remains the best incarnation of the Ian Fleming character.


































17. Alien (1979) Ridley Scott's astonishing sci-fi horror classic manages to incorporate the most intriguing elements of both genres. In the future, the crew of the commercial towing spaceship Nostromo are awakened from their hypersleep (a technologically induced coma) by Mother, the spaceships computer, which has detected a mysterious signal emanating from a nearby planet. It appears they are contractually obliged, by the nameless corporate entity they work for, to investigate the phenomena. The crew reluctantly alter course and eventually land on the seemingly un-inhabitable planetoid. They learn that the signal is coming from another craft, a derelict of alien and seemingly ancient origin. The dark, stormy environment of the planet, and the presence of a 'ghost ship', as a device representing the protagonists possible fate, are both classic staples of horror storytelling and aesthetics. Add to this a genuinely terrifying alien antagonist, who's appearance, famously designed by H. R. Giger, seems to suggest both in its head shape and protruding second mouth, an erect phalice, and what we have is something very far away from a traditional sci-fi movie. The aliens phallic appearance gives it emphasis as an aggressive intruder, a sort of rape nightmare made flesh. In the films open ending, the only surviving crew member, warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), along with the ships cat, is left drifting on a lifeboat, returning to hypersleep in the hope that someone, somewhere, will find them.


































16. Black Sabbath (1963)
One of Mario Bava's greatest horror films is a classic example of the horror tryptich, a film made up of multiple segmented stories. Black Sabbath, like most tryptich's, is divided into three stories, with an introduction to each one featuring horror legend Boris Karloff. The first story, The Telephone, is set in the modern day. A woman returns home from a night out to find her phone ringing. She answers it  but hears only a heavy breathing. She puts the receiver down and gets ready for bed, but then the phone rings again. And again. And again. The Telephone is perfect in its simplicity. A story about modern day paranoia. The second story is called The Wurdulak and also stars Boris Karloff as the patriarch of a family harbouring a dark secret in rural, 19th century Russia. The third and final part, entitled The Drop of Water, sees a nurse in Victorian London racked with guilt after stealing a ring from the hand of a deceased, elderly lady, who turns out to have been a famous medium. As always, with ex-cinematographer Bava, the film is beautifully shot, with deep black shadows punctuating the lurid primary colours. Red with green, purple and yellow.


































15. Enter The Dragon (1973)
Bruce Lee's most iconic moment and undoubtedly the best film of a career so unfortunately cut short, Enter The Dragon is a Bond style, 70's, martial arts extravaganza. Lee plays a martial artist proficient in Kung Fu, who is invited to take part in a martial arts tournament which is held every three years on an island close to Hong Kong that is owned by the reclusive and mysterious Han, who is suspected by British authorities of being behind a large scale prostitution and heroin trafficking empire. Lee is recruited by British intelligence to enter the tournament in order to basically assassinate Han, who has banned guns from his island. Also competing are two Americans. Roper, a bankrupt playboy (played by John Saxon) hoping to pay his mob debts, and Williams (played by real life Karate champion Jim Kelly), a black political activist on the run after defending himself against two racist, white policemen. The three of them become loose allies in an environment thick with corruption and oppression. Lee's final showdown with Han in a mirrored labyrinth has to be one of the most iconic scenes in 70s action cinema.


































14. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
John Huston's adaptation of a story by Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King is, to me, one of the greatest adventure movies and features two stand out performances from Michael Caine and Sean Connery. In turn of the century British India, Rudyard Kipling (played by Christopher Plummer) is confronted by an elderly beggar while working late at the headquarters of the Northern Star newspaper. The beggar reveals that he is infact 'Peachy' Carnehan, the well dressed man Kipling met just three years earlier on the first class carriage of a train. Originally, Carnehan (Caine) had introduced himself in order to return a gold watch he had infact stolen from Kipling at the train station moments earlier. Carnehan, an ex-non-commissioned officer in the Indian Army and general adventurer and rogue, reveals himself as a fellow Freemason, and that he was forced to return the watch after finding the emblem of Freemasonry carved into the back. He takes the opportunity to ask Kipling to deliver a message to his friend, Daniel Dravot (Connery), another roguish, de-mobbed officer, who should be travelling that way in a few days time. Kipling delivers the message, and eventually forgets about these two eccentric, seemingly quintessentially British characters. One day soon after, the pair show up at Kipling's Northern Star office, explaing that they need him to witness a contract. They pledge to abstain from drink and women until such time as they find the semi mythical kingdom called Kafiristan, which lies beyond the Kyber Pass. Once there, they plan to use their knowledge of tactical warfare to take control of the region, that they have heard is filled with primitive warring tribes, and return as rich men. Classically directed, the movie was hailed by many as Huston's best film since The African Queen. It remains one of my favourites since childhood.





































13. Army of Darkness (1992)
The culmination of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead Trilogy, Army of Darkness is an extraordinary example of horror-comedy script writing, and a cult classic. Bruce Campbell reprises his role of zombie killer Ash Williams, who as a result of being pulled into a time portal at the end of Evil Dead 2, finds himself in Britain in the year 1300. The source of all his problems in the previous films was the Necronomicon, a book bound in human skin and written in blood that has the power to awaken malevolent spirits that apparently inhabit the world around us. These spirits have already possessed his fiance, forcing him to kill her, horribly, and infected his hand, forcing him to cut it off and replace it with a chainsaw. After falling through the time portal, he is taken prisoner by some knights and taken back to their castle to be sacrificed by being thrown into a pit that houses one of the possessed. It seems that the Necronomicon also holds sway over this time and place. After defeating the evil 'Deadite' with his 'Boom Stick', Ash is celebrated as a hero. Eventually he learns that to return home he must retrieve the Necronomicon, BUT he can only remove it safely from its resting place after reciting the words "Klaatu verata nicto". Unfortunately, Ash fails to remember the words and, after taking the book anyway, ends up reviving an army of Deadites who descend on the castle. The script, written by Raimi and his brother Ivan, is pretty much a stream of classic, endlessly quotable one liners. For me, one of the defining movies of the 90s.




































12. The Birds (1963)
For me truly one of Alfred Hitchcock's most enjoyable and complexed movies. Adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds basic premise is of a small coastal town being suddenly attacked by flocks of birds of varying species, who seem to be acting in unison. The story concerns wealthy socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) who after meeting journalist Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco pet shop, decides to continue the strange flirtation and follow him back to the coastal town where he lives. Eventually a relationship seems to blossom and Melanie meets his mother, young sister and ex-girlfriend, who is the local school teacher. The birds of the title, and their unexplained behavior, seem to be caused by, or at least symbolic of, a kind of underlying tension between Melanie and the other women. Her sudden appearance in the town, and subsequently Mitch's life, seem to correspond with the birds first attacks, and she seems to be singled out by them on at least one occasion. Another possible cause, symbolic or otherwise, seems to be the sexual tension between Mitch and Melanie, which is exacerbated in the beginning by their almost excessive flirting and teasing of each other. However you analyse the story, the visual motif of a flock of birds silently congregating, with malicious intent, around a small town is truly chilling, an image that seems to haunt popular culture.






































11. The Godfather part 1 (1972)
Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling epic about the ascension of the young heir of an Italian-American mafia dynasty, is a true classic of Hollywood cinema. Al Pacino plays Michael, the youngest son of mob Don, Vitto Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) who presides over a racketeering empire on the east coast of America in 1945. In contrast to his older brothers Sonny (James Caan) and Fredo (John Cazale), Michael initially has no desire to join the family business, instead he goes to college and serves in World War 2, eventually returning as a war hero. In spite of all this, or most likely because of it, he is his fathers favourite. He becomes engaged to a young teacher, Kay (Dianne Keaton), but eventually his plans for a normal life are put into jeopardy when his father is gunned down one day and falls into a coma. Michael can't help but become involved when he finds himself largely alone in the hospital where his father is, after the police expel all the men who where meant to be guarding him. It soon becomes apparent that a corrupt police chief was responsible for this, and is siding with their enemies. After saving his fathers life by moving him to a different room and fending off potential assassins, Michael agrees to act as bait to draw the police chief and the man responsible for his fathers attempted murder out again by agreeing to a sham meeting, where he will infact assassinate both of them. After, he is sent to Sicily to hide out and visits his fathers home town. Returning from Italy, he appears to have changed, he seems to be re-tracing his fathers footsteps, and eventually becomes the Don himself after the death of his older brother Sonny. Aside from the rich content of the story and characters, the beautiful, film-noir inspired cinematography by Gordon Willis and Nino Rota's iconic score make the film also an aesthetic masterpiece. Essentially, The Godfather part 1 is about a man who, by chance and misshap, becomes his father. A fairly universal theme for one of the most famous genre movies ever made.