Word: godson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GODSON...
Despite all this, The Godson's elegiac mood and spacious sense of style reveal undeniably adept direction. Except for his Doulous - The Finger Man, an atmospheric thriller that appeared in 1964, Jean-Pierre Melville's work has been little seen in this country. He himself popped up in Godard's Breathless, where he played a celebrated film maker giving an interview to Jean Seberg. In France, in deed, he is celebrated for melancholy Gallic exercises in gangsterism, American style...
...Samurai-The Godson, Alain Delon appears as a French gangster with the unlikely name of Jeff Costello, an icy and dogged professional who kills the manager of a Paris night club and then is set upon by the people who hired him. The flics, too, pursue Costello. He tries to work his way out of his classic quandary with characteristic efficiency, by dodging the cops even as he hunts down the men who are hunting...
...until it is just so. The hat, unfortunately, looks like a felt pie pan, and Delon moves mechanically through the action. Melville means to pay sober hom age to all the Hollywood films that did all this but better. It is a pity that for all its virtues, The Godson's patina of high seriousness renders every scene forced and selfconscious...
...going back, he recently explained, because "Growing older changes one's life. Suppose I had a coronary? Here [his Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan] I could lie helpless for days. In Oxford I shall be part of a community." Appropriately, much of Epistle to a Godson is devoted to growing old. One poem is called "Old People's Home." Two are written to doctors, dead or retiring, both part of the vanishing breed who know their patients personally and realize that medicine is an art, not a science...