A-Z GUIDE TO MOVIES AND TV SHOWS PARODIED BY MAD, CRACKED, CRAZY, ETC. UP TO 1996. THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. SPOILERS AND OTHER NON-SEQUITURS, TOO. SOMETIMES THESE THINGS HAVE WORDS OR SITUATIONS WE DON'T USE ANYMORE. YOU KNOW, 'CAUSE THEY'RE OLD.
Updated daily. There's posts besides this one archived in the sidebar on the right, you clods!
if you're at a laptop or desktop, right-click and open link on pages and they'll be clearer and legible in a new window.
Sunday, November 14, 2021
THE ODDFATHER, PART ONE, part 1
THE GODFATHER (1972)
dir: Francis Ford Coppola
THE ODDFATHER
MAD #155, December 1972
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
Too many pages for me to put in one post, so I'll break it in two. The rest will be tomorrow. And of course the two sequels. I guess you could say this is Godfather week. Godfather half-week, really. Let's get to it.
The movie starts with the wedding of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando)'s daughter (Talia Shire) in 1945. Here we meet the family while Don Vito is inside meeting "clients". At his side is Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the family consiglieri, a kid of lawyer/fixer for them.
In the big panel on the bottom is Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana), rehearsing how he will talk to Don Corleone.
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has just left the war and has no plans to go into organized crime, like his brothers Sonny (James Caan) and Fredo (John Cazale). He aspires to be a Senator or Governor. He comes to the wedding with his fiancee Kay Adams (Diane Keaton). Inside, Don Corleone does a favor for a Mr. Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) but first must get the proper respect.
Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino) is said to be a stand-in for Frank Sinatra. He's a lounge singer and teen idol whose career has been made by the mob and has come to entertain at the wedding. Later, he asks the Don a favor. He wants a part in a movie but the producer Jack Woltz (John Marley) won't budge. Corleone has Tom fly out to Hollywood to pay Mr. Woltz a visit. Jack gives a tour of his property, including a stable with his prize racehorse, but still refuses to give Johnny Fontaine the part. In one of the most talked about scenes, he wakes up to find his horse's severed head in his bed.
I always found it weird that he's a big Hollywood producer and almost as unethical but he sleeps alone.
Don Corleone has refused to bribe judges and policemen and help fund the heroin operation for his rival Sollozzo of the Tattaglia family, so is subsequently gunned down and hospitalized. Michael, though not part of the mob is still family, and visits him in the hospital.
Not shown: Michael is shocked to find his father unprotected and has him moved to another room before there's a hit on him by the Tattaglia gang, the ones who attempted to murder him in the first place. As he leaves he's roughed up by cops who are the ones that cleared the hospital since they're on the take from the Tattaglias. In the movie, it's Michael who decides to avenge his father with hesitance from the family, not the other way around. They eventually agree to help him. The family, along with Clemenza (Richard Castellano) and Tessio (Abe Vigoda) help him with a plan to get back at Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and his crooked cop associate McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) by having dinner with them, ostensibly for business, and shooting them with a gun that's hidden in the bathroom.
They also left out a large part where Michael hides in Sicily until the heat is off him, he gets married there, and his wife dies in a car bomb that was meant for him. The original version had no subtitles, something they could have had fun with.
The Don returns from the hospital, Sonny gets a call from Connie in New Jersey that her husband Carlo (Gianni Russo) is beating her and rushes there to beat him, after having warned him before.
This was a set-up by Carlo to lure Sonny there. As Sonny rushes to his sister's house, he's killed by a rival gang at a toll booth. Don Corleone has had enough of this rivalry with the crime families all killing each other and calls for a meeting of the Five Families to guarantee Michael can come back to the U. S. safely, and in return Don Vito promises to let his politicians help with the Tattaglias' drug racket.
They leave out how Michael returns after a few years and goes back to Kay. Although he wanted no part of the crime business eventually he's ended up going back on that promise and Kay agrees to marry him with the promise she doesn't know what he does. As Vito is dying Michael becomes the new Godfather and moves the operations to Las Vegas, abandoning businesses in New York and getting into gambling, going "legitimate". He has all the rival gangs killed to eliminate competition, and has it done while attending his sister's child's baptism so he'll have an alibi.
The father dying plays out like it does in the movie, except Fredo's already in Vegas running the casinos. I guess MAD wanted to get him in there.
The Swedish edition had their own cover for this.
from New Musicals Based on Big Movies, written by Frank Jacobs in MAD #182, April 1976.
After the movie came out, there was a parody published of Puzo's original novel, also called The Oddfather. It was written by Sol Weinstein and Howard Albrecht, both prolific comedy writers; Weinstein even had a few pieces in Mad, in 1965 & '66. They wrote a whole bunch of parodies of best-selling novels, including the Exorcist (The Exerciser) and the James Bond series (Israel Bond, Agent Oy Oy Seven).
After the movie came out, there was a parody published of Puzo's original novel, also called The Oddfather. It was written by Sol Weinstein and Howard Albrecht, both prolific comedy writers; Weinstein even had a few pieces in Mad, in 1965 & '66. They wrote a whole bunch of parodies of best-selling novels, including the Exorcist (The Exerciser) and the James Bond series (Israel Bond, Agent Oy Oy Seven).
ReplyDelete