Good morning 🐣

This week’s newsletter is a little weird. It starts with “The Godfather” and ends with Clint Eastwood losing a limb after having a threesome.

I swear it’s all connected!

So what’s there really to say about “The Godfather?” Some call it the greatest movie ever made. Its sequel is of equal or greater quality. The entire trilogy was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who could have rested on those laurels alone, but went on to make many other classics like “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now.”

He’s also just a single branch on the massive Coppola family tree, one of the formidable dynasties in Hollywood history:

• his sister Talia Shire (Adrian in “Rocky”);
• her son Jason Schwartzman (in like a bajillion Wes Anderson movies);
• and our own national treasure, Nicolas Cage (born Nicolas Coppola);
• among many, many others.

But this week I want to focus on Sofia Coppola, the writer and director of several films, including “The Virgin Suicides,” “Lost in Translation,” and “Marie Antoinette.” The weight of a giant like Francis Ford Coppola on your shoulders can be hard to handle. Nicolas Cage changed his name! But Sofia Coppola has been able to successfully carve out her own career and artistic vision in spite of.

In celebration of her filmography, writer Hannah Strong has a new book out this week titled “Sofia Coppola: Forever Young.” With illustrations by the British movie magazine Little White Lies, it includes critical essays about Coppola’s filmography alongside interviews with some of her closest collaborators. You can listen to an interview with the author discussing the book in a recent episode of the Cinematologists podcast.

And it got me thinking about one of her most recent works — “The Beguiled” (Netflix and on demand). It premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where Coppola won Best Director, becoming only the second woman to do so, and is based on the 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan. But it’s most importantly, for our purposes, a remake of 1971’s “The Beguiled” (available on demand), or rather another adaptation of the source material. Pick your poison.

Wait, what’s that, you say?

That’s right, baby; it’s our first double feature!

A “Beguiled” v. “Beguiled” standoff.

The basic plot in both versions is this:

It’s the height of the U.S. Civil War. Somewhere deep in the south is the nearly abandoned Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies, inhabited by just a handful of stragglers and their headmistress, Martha Farnsworth. One day the youngest girl, Amy, is out in the woods picking mushrooms and stumbles upon John McBurney, a gravely injured Union soldier. She gets him back to the seminary, where the rest of the young women tend to him, equally afraid of him and lusting after him.

It’s a pulpy premise and it’s really interesting how differently these two films treat it.

In the 1971 original, which stars Clint Eastwood as McBurney, Confederate soldiers are riding by when Amy first discovers him and he asks her how old she is.

Amy: “Twelve. Thirteen in September!”

McBurney: “Shh. Old enough for kisses.”

And Clint Eastwood — Republican icon Clint Eastwood — kisses the 11-year-old actress Pamelyn Ferdin on the lips to shut her up while the enemy soldiers ride by.

That’s one way to start a movie.

I did an honest to god double take. It was the ’70s I guess.

So after Clint Eastwood kisses an underage girl, we see him beguile and get beguiled by the girls as he tries to recuperate and stay alive, while they try to deal with having a man within a five-mile radius for the first time in years. He takes particular interest in Edwina (played by Elizabeth Hartman), but needs to balance the attentions of headmistress Miss Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) and the seductive Carol (Jo Ann Harris).

It’s baroque melodrama at its pulpiest. Director Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”) was taking part in a total sea change in American film — rejecting the repressive codes and norms that had defined the industry and American culture for decades, though sometimes just verging on a different form of misogyny. It was a new era of shocking sex and violence.

In Coppola’s 2017 version, Colin Farrell plays McBurney, Nicole Kidman is the headmistress, and Kirsten Dunst is Edwina. There is mercifully zero underage kissing. Her film is much less focused on rejecting those repressive codes, opting instead to observe and bathe in them.

In an interview with Guy Lodge for The Guardian, Coppola says:

It’s a story about strong women, and I wanted to look at these characters in more depth, where in the 1971 film, they’re more kind of crazy, or just caricatures. You don’t really know as much about them.

I just thought a story about this enemy soldier coming into this southern girls’ environment was so interesting, and that I’d love to kind of flip it: to tell the same story but from the women’s point of view, what it must have been like for them.

The south is always very exotic to me: I wanted the film to represent an exaggerated version of all the ways women were traditionally raised there just to be lovely and cater to men — the manners of that whole world, and how they change when the men go away.

It’s an interesting shift in perspective, but oddly the girls in the original seemed to have more recognizable character traits. The ’71 film also used a lot of voiceovers for interior monologues, which is eschewed entirely by Coppola’s version. Voiceovers and flashbacks aren’t always a wise choice in filmmaking, but in this case they spell out exactly how everyone is actually beguiling one another:

• when Amy first discovers Clint Eastwood, we hear her thinking about how her dad died the same way and that it was probably a Yank like Eastwood’s McBurney that did the deed, yet she acts concerned for him and helps him to safety;
• while assuring the young women of his harmlessness, McBurney claims to be a Quaker that carries bandages, not weapons, but as he’s speaking we flash to the reality of him firing a gun in the war;
• or similarly he talks about how much he respects the land, as we cut to him setting Southern crops on fire.

And that’s not even getting into Miss Farnsworth’s incestuous romantic backstory with her now deceased brother, a detail entirely left out by Coppola’s film. Instead Coppola relies on more subtle reveals of character. One thing she does especially better is establishing Kirsten Dunst’s Edwina as being capable of falling in love with Colin Farrell’s McBurney.

Both films play with dichotomies and contradictions: “The enemy as an individual is not what we believe.” Do we pray for the enemy or not? The characters purport to be such devout Christians, yet conspire to murder. Both versions come at the same ideas with different tones and intents. One isn’t better than the other; they’re just different. But Coppola’s movie is, to put it plainly, a lot less horny. Let me lay it out like this — the climax of the 1971 film involves:

1. a psychedelic dream sequence of McBurney having a threesome with Edwina and Miss Farnsworth, culminating in them posed in a Christlike pietà, similar to a religious painting hanging on the headmistress’s wall;
2. all three of them waking up simultaneously in their separate bedrooms and McBurney heading instead to Carol’s room; and finally
3. Carol’s bare butt covering the entire screen, only to pull away to reveal Edwina in the doorway.

It’s a wild sequence of events. It’s silly and sexy and I can’t imagine anything being made like this today. The only thing remaining in the 2017 version is Edwina walking in on McBurney and Carol, but it’s so hard to see because like most modern movies it’s too dark to make out anything on the screen!

And then, in a fit of rage and jealousy, Edwina throws McBurney down a flight of stairs, popping a bone out of his leg. The camera pans away during the amputation scene in the original film, but we can hear the sound, as if they’re sawing through wood. It’s nasty and visceral, just like the rest of the movie.

Naturally Coppola’s film only alludes to the amputation, but at this point, after watching these films back-to-back, it all feels like a fever dream.

Until next time! 👋

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