My colleagues here at ThinkProgress are writing about Roger Ebert, the great critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who died today at 70 after many years of surviving cancer, as a liberal, and his voice is undoubtedly a loss to liberalism. His vocal interventions on politics, particularly as he took to Twitter, a medium where he bloomed after losing the use of his voice, seem to have taken some of his readers by surprise, even angered them. But to me, it’s impossible to read Ebert’s writing as a critic and not be struck by his politics, and how his political and aesthetic understandings came together to inform his understanding of what made movies work, what made them brave, and what made them fail.

Ebert’s reviews were always deeply alive to human concerns, rather than exclusively aesthetic ones. Re-reading his review of The Godfather, it’s striking that Ebert praises Francis Ford Coppola’s structural decisions. But he takes time to note a moment when the movie turns away from violence: “Notice how the undertaker is told ‘some day, and that day may never come, I will ask a favor of you,’ and how when the day comes, the favor is not violence (as in a conventional movie),’ but Don Vito’s desire to spare his wife the sight of his son’s maimed body.” And he asks the reader “Now here is a trivia question: What is the name of Vito’s wife?” In the midst of one of the greatest movies ever made about men, it’s critical to him to ask what the treatment of women means for the male characters, and for the movie, which made strategic decisions to eliminate major sections of Mario Puzo’s novel told from the perspective of women.

He could be as attuned to the ideas in movies as he was in their entertainment value, as in his analysis of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, in which he identified a flaw that shifts this movie, long considered a landmark in Hollywood’s treatment of race, away from a discussion of race at all. “What it boils down to, then,” he wrote,”is that the two fathers are overcome by implied attacks on their masculinity. The race question becomes secondary; what Tracy really has to decide is if he feels inadequate as a man. Kramer accomplishes this transition so subtly you hardly notice it. But it is the serious flaw in his plot, I think…Here is a film about interracial marriage that has the audience throwing rice. The women in the audience can usually be counted on to identify with the love story, I suppose. But what about those men? Will love conquer prejudice? I wonder if Kramer isn’t sneaking up on one of the underlying causes of racial prejudice when he implies that the fathers feel their masculinity threatened.”

He wasn’t a litmus-test reviewer, judging movies on single decisions or statements, but balanced different elements of a film in making up his judgements. This kind of thinking was clear in his reading of Gone With The Wind in Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews. Ebert was scathing about the movie’s uncritical use of Margaret Mitchell’s text, which describes the slave-holding South as “a l and of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” writing acidly “One does not have to ask if the slaves saw it the same way.” And he was not kind to the balance of concerns in the film. “The movie sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of forced labor (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the great crimes of slavery).” But he read the film as a film, noting how some elements of it weighed against others, saying “to its major African American characters it does at least grant humanity and complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-sighted person in the entire story.” In that same review he championed the need to depict even “values and assumptions fundamentally different from our own,” because “A politically correct GWTW would not be worth making, and might largely be a lie.” It’s a piece I wish every person who condemned Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty as an endorsement of torture had read before putting fingers to keyboard.
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Having finally seen and fallen in love with The Godfather, I decided I should go back to Mario Puzo’s original novel of the same name, the pulp classic that became a masterpiece. I’d been told that there’s a lot more in the book about Hollywood, which there is, and which remains a relevant critique of that city’s sexual culture today. But I was mostly curious as to whether Puzo had more to say about the women who hover outside of the doors who are shut in their faces by the Corleone men.

He does, but The Godfather remains an odd book when it comes to women, and is odd in a number of different ways. The size of Sonny Corleone’s penis comes up more often than his mother’s actual first name. Apollonia, Michael’s first, Italian wife is an utter blank, an expanse of “satiny skin” for Michael to consume, and to imprint with English and driving lessons. It remains utterly inexplicable to me why Kay Adams ultimately decides to take Michael Corleone back, much less to marry him, after he not only disappears on her without notice, but after he returns, as Mama Corleone puts it, for six months “He no call you up? He no see you?” Her decision to follow consigliere Tom Hagen in abandoning her own ethnic and class background to become a compliant Italian wife, quashing her concerns about Michael’s affairs and saying Masses for his souls every morning, is a compelling counter to the assimilation the Don hoped his son would achieve: Michael doesn’t just fail to break away from his Italianness, he brings Kay back with him. But there’s a fundamental gap in her story. And Connie Corleone never gets to be anything other than a shrew, until the moment at the end of the novel, as well as the film, when in her hysteria, she accuses Michael of murdering her husband Carlo, and gets dismissed as crazed by grief even though she’s absolutely correct.

The one woman who does make it out—or at least, who finds a way to live in the Corleone family orbit without being compromised by it—is Lucy Mancini, whose story is essentially a massive red herring, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Johnny Fatone’s Vocal Cord Surgery. Puzo does precisely no work to grow real thematic connective tissue between Lucy’s story and the rest of the novel, which is strange, because after Kay, she’s the woman on which the novel spends the most introspective time. And she’s also, frankly, a character with an arc I’m surprised Puzo dreamed up, given the treatment of the other women in the novel, and their position as profoundly mysterious creatures, particularly when it comes to sexual desire.

Lucy enters the novel as Connie’s maid of honor at her wedding, a position that’s given Lucy the opportunity to seduce Connie’s older brother, Sonny. He’s attractive to her in part because of what she’s been told about her body and its lack of desirability: “In her two college love affairs she had felt nothing and neither of them lasted more than a week. Quarreling, her second lover had mumbled something about her being ‘too big down there.’ Lucy had understood and for the rest of the school term had refused to go out on any dates.” Sonny, because he’s well-endowed, doesn’t treat Lucy like she’s sexually inadequate. And alone among the women in The Godfather, Lucy’s opened up to the possibility of an affair that’s solely about her own sexual fulfillment, without being treated like a slut, either by Sonny, or anyone else in the Corleone orbit. When Sonny dies, “her dreams were not the insipid dreams of a schoolgirl, her longings not the longings of a devoted wife. She was not rendered desolate by the loss of her ‘life’s companion,’ or miss him because of his stalwart character. She held no fond remembrances of sentimental gifts, of girlish hero worship, his smile, the amused glint of his eyes when she said something endearing or witty. No. She missed him for the more important reason that he had been the only man in the world who could make her body achieve the act of love.”
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There are a lot of pop culture landmarks that I missed as a result of growing up largely without a television and with a cultural worldview that was obsessively centered on books for the first eighteen years of my life to the exclusion of almost everything else. As longtime readers of this blog will know, that’s something that I try to make up for, mixing in classics with a firehose-like stream of new movies, television shows, books, and movies. And over the winter break, I knocked one of the titans off the list when I finally sat down to watch The Godfather. It’s a tremendous movie, and watching it made me want to revisit an unexpected but surprisingly logical companion piece: the 1994 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

If The Godfather is about Michael Corleone’s inability to escape his father’s business, and about men’s desire to become their fathers, Little Women is about the ways women help their daughters transcend their own experiences. Just as women are nearly invisible figures in The Godfather, from the passivity of Vito’s wife to the movie’s relatively slim treatment of Kay’s motivations for accepting Michael’s proposal after his return, men are relatively secondary figures in Little Women. The girls’ father and Marmee’s husband is absent for almost the entire first half of the novel and the movie, Mr. Lawrence, their wealthy next-door neighbor is a kindly but distant patriarch, his son Laurie is an interloper, if a beloved one, and Mr. Brooke and Professor Bhaer are suitors rather than fully-developed characters.

Instead, the main drama is between the sisters themselves, and in the question of their mother’s hopes for them. Where Vito Corleone dreams that his son Michael will become not just legitimate, but a legitimate leader in society, Marmee harbors more modest aspirations, governed by both gender and time period, for her little women. She hopes that her daughters will be able to marry for love, that they’ll have the opportunity to see something of the world beyond Concord. All of Vito’s dreams are frustrated, his son Sonny is gunned down while doing the family’s work, his adopted son Tom enters the family business even though his ethnicity might have excluded him from it, his great hope Michael kills a police officer and a Mafia rival and ends up becoming the next Don Corleone, and his son Fredo ends up dead on Michael’s orders.

But in their own ways, Marmee’s daughters fulfill her aspirations. Meg, her oldest, marries modestly, but for true love, and for a husband who is more present in her life than Marmee’s husband was in hers, and who, unlike Meg’s father, doesn’t impose difficulties on the family in pursuit of his political ideals. Beth dies young, a fate no mother would choose for her daughter, but she leaves the world in a perfect and brave communion with her family’s Christian ideals. Amy, her youngest, marries both well and for love, gaining security for her whole family without compromising her ideals. And Jo, her second-oldest daughter, travels furthest beyond the bounds of the role proscribed of her as a woman, tasting modest literary success and finding a husband who eventually helps her found a school where she educates the scions of wealthy families in a way that comports with Marmee’s ideals and also gives poorer children an opportunity for social promotion and intellectual advancement.

In a way, and certainly not intentionally, these very disparate works have ended up capturing the dynamics of masculinity and feminism that we live in today. Women have, through very difficult work, carved out new paths for ourselves and passed them down to the generations of women that have followed after us. Men keep getting handed down the same old archetypes of how to be a man, the same demands to avenge violence done against their families, to provide, to take responsibility that isn’t theirs, to pass judgement, to provide strength. We’ve got a lot of culture that argues that this is a tragedy in and of itself and that it can lead to dreadful ends, that the diversion of Michael’s considerable talents from the sphere where they were supposed to be useful—American public life—to another one where they’re applicable—organized crime—is a terrible waste, that the rechanneling of Walter White’s talents from science and teaching to meth production results in monstrosity. But we don’t have enough triumphs and new models, enough stories of boys growing beyond their fathers in a way that produces incredible joy for both parties. It’s no mistake that Louisa May Alcott, who gave us Little Women gave us her Little Men, the story of a woman who, having transcended the limits laid out for her, raises surrogate sons who are allowed to be more than angry, more than greedy, more than merely brave.

A critic friend pointed me to Molly Haskell’s 1997 essay on the cognitive dissonance of The Godfather, which I in turn wanted to pass along to all of you. It’s an amazing meditation on the movie and the environment in which it was released, and I think it’s directly relevant to the conversations we have about culture as provider of comfort and repressive nostalgia in a time of great social change. She writes:

If we had a split screen we would show opposing images: On one side, the sun shines and the music plays on the veranda during Connie’s lavishly traditional family wedding in 1945, while in the darkness of Don Corleone’s study, petitioners and those who pay homage file through and the Don (Marlon Brando) dispenses favors and justice. Fathers arrange marriages for their daughters, revenge on their enemies. Hulking in the shadows of the house, Luca Brasi, one of Corleone’s enforcers, practices the tribute he will pay when he gains an audience with the Don: ”May their first child be a masculine child.”

On the other screen: In 1970, the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, a commemorative march down Fifth Avenue, with 50,000 women pouring out of office buildings in spontaneous support. Also in 1970, Kate Millett publishes ”Sexual Politics” and her portrait, by Alice Neel, is on the cover of Time. In 1971, the year-end issue of New York Magazine announces the birth of Ms. magazine, whose first issue will appear in July 1972. The Supreme Court legalizes abortion in 1973.

I’m trying to think what the modern equivalent is: the superhero as acclaimed protector? the slacker dudes claiming their manhood? Either way, it’s a striking piece, and a critical reminder that our fantasies don’t always move us forward.