Word: puzo
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...GODFATHER PAPERS AND OTHER CONFESSIONS by Mario Puzo. 252 pages. Putnam...
...Mario Puzo, author of the original best-selling hunk of heave and cheeseburger, states that he only wrote the book for money, and that he took the stories entirely from the memories of friends and family. His intentions and sources show. His Sicilian Don Tommasino is a type from Italian folklore, the local patrician who rules his regime with warm tongue and hard hand, and guards the locals from threatening outsiders...
Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay, probably felt the grudge of conscience more than Puzo. If he cuts a key line--"A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns"--he compresses most of Puzo's legends until their grain of truth is revealed. All that remains in his Sicilian scenes, for instance, is the animal vitality of the settings and natives, and the treachery which kills Mike's Sicilian bride in a sabotaged auto...
...Coppola has done much more than cover Puzo's sloppier tracks. He has managed to pick up the loose stitches and thread together an epic family chronicle, expressing its conflicts with an immediacy and a love for detail of location and character that can only come from the deepest rapport with the subject matter. Comparisons have been made with Gone With the Wind, and snots have sniffed at the melodrama which can't be separated from the tenets of the retold crimes. No matter. There's heart to the work, and it starts to beat when the Don says...
...their own mystique but share in it. They have a good time, as Gay Talese reports, yukking it up over TV reruns of The Untouchables. They give high marks for verisimilitude and general elan to films like Bullitt, in which they admire Steve McQueen's resilient cool. Authors Puzo and Talese are esteemed for their portraits of Mafiosi as "men of respect" (although Mafiosi feel that Talese, especially, was taken in by his sources). The alltime Mafia favorite, however, is the movie The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Basil Rathbone, who plays the villainous Sir Guy Gisbourne, is hissed...