That show was home to me when I moved down south, the good die young

Quote:Clive James on The Sopranos
Ten years ago, Clive James wrote a brilliant piece on the genius of The Sopranos. We republish it here with a new introduction in which the author pays tribute to its star, James Gandolfini, who has died.

The untimely death of the great, hulking, utterly invulnerable-looking James Gandolfini has robbed us of the chance to see what the rest of his career might have been like. Since the final season of The Sopranos he had been shaping up as an unusually imaginative producer, but now we will have to remember him just as an actor, and mainly, of course in the role of Tony Soprano. In 2004, when there was still another season of The Sopranos to come, I wrote a piece in homage to its accomplishment. Some of the show's fans thought that the final season was a let-down, but my younger daughter and I have just finished watching the whole thing again (four episodes every Saturday) and we are united in the belief that it was great to the end.

And for all the skills of its wonderful cast, the greatest thing about the show was Gandolfini. An actor has come a long way towards monumentality when his merest smile can seem to threaten a room full of grown men with death. What you never really believed, however – even in the last episode, when he was holed up with his guns and waiting for the enemy – was that death could threaten him. I got the sense that he was watching me as I wrote, so I tried hard to get it right; while always trying to remind myself, of course, that he wasn't really a gangster, just an actor. Given time, he would almost certainly have done so many other good things that he would have outgrown the charming but sinister legend he had created on the small screen. The world would have realised that James Gandolfini was even bigger than Tony Soprano. But when I wrote this piece, being as big as Tony seemed plenty big enough.



In the dark night of the soul, it is often three o'clock in the afternoon on the pool terrace of a mobster's house in New Jersey. The rule of law exists only to be flouted; power to be flaunted; any scruple to be parodied. It's appalling. I love it.

Love it more, in fact, than the Godfather movies, which are supposedly the superior cinematic achievement, the fons et origo from which the mere television serial draws and dilutes its inspiration. We shouldn't let the size of the picture fool us. In the little picture, a lot more is going on, and it's a lot more true. David Chase, the writer-producer who made The Sopranos in the same way that Aaron Sorkin made The West Wing, was not involved in the Godfather project. Chase served his apprenticeship as a writer for The Rockford Files and later as a writer-producer for Northern Exposure. His idea of a big movie was Fellini's 8.5; of a crime movie, Cul de sac; superior European stuff.
Related Articles


There is no doubt, however, that the Godfather trilogy was on his mind, because it is on the minds of all the male characters in The Sopranos. Only two of its main actors were ever directed by Francis Ford Coppola: Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior) and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) both played minor roles in Godfather II.


But every Soprano-related male character has a frame of reference drenched with Godfather minutiae. Whether sitting out front at the Pork Store (their idea of the outdoor life) or lurking dimly in the depths of the Bada-Bing combined bar and strip-joint, they conduct long symposia in which Corleone family scenes are alluded to by the line and sometimes recreated almost in full, with sound effects. This is the kind of media-cultural fallout that gives Italian community leaders the hump: Italo-Americans defining themselves as the heirs of gangsterism.

But these characters are gangsters, so why shouldn't they? What other kind of movie memories would they have on the tips of their thick tongues? The Horse Whisperer? The Bridges of Madison County? And the truth is that every American, of Italian extraction or not, knows the Godfather films by heart; and most of the rest of us do, too.

Most of The Sopranos' many directors would probably like to make movies, because movies will make their names: one of the several ways in which the celebrity culture distorts culture. They will never work better than under Chase's guiding hand.

Chase hated working in network television, but he hated it for the way it was sanitised. He has rebelled by making another kind of television, a kind that tells fewer comforting lies. If he had rebelled by making movies, his would probably have been better than most, but the pressure would still have been on to do what the Godfather movies did: clean up the act.

My own candidate for an epic predecessor to The Sopranos would be I, Claudius. If Chase has ever mentioned I, Claudius in an interview, I haven't seen it. My only evidence for a direct borrowing is the name of Tony's dreadful and deadly mother, Livia. But I would be surprised if Chase hadn't taken I, Claudius on board.

I, Claudius: an epic predecessor to The Sopranos (Rex Features)

Should you set out to draw a picture of unfettered violence shaping the destiny of an extended family, you would necessarily end up with something like the Roman Empire after Tiberius consolidated the dubious achievement of Augustus in subordinating all law to the leader's will. The emperors were living in a blood-bath, and so are this bunch.

In the last episode of the fourth season, the reliably psychopathic Ralph (Joe Pantoliano, barking and cackling) has his brains beaten out by Tony in person. The even more psycho Christopher is whistled in as a cleaner, and we get a shot of him holding Ralph's hand. Unfortunately for the viewer's peace of mind, the hand is no longer attached to the rest of Ralph.

Tony and Christopher are both shocked to discover that Ralph has been wearing a wig throughout the series. Neither is shocked by the process of cutting Ralph up. Dilettante viewers of the show who stumble on such scenes are sometimes put off, but it takes some pretty selective stumbling. Scenes of actual violence are rare. What is always present is the threat of violence.

The wise guys work their Thing by intimidating each other from the top of the hierarchy down, and maintain the cash-flow of their Thing by intimidating everybody else. When the soldiers toe the line and the civilians keep up their payments, life can go on peacefully from episode to episode.

But if, God forbid, one of the subordinate wise guys should get ambitious, or some innocent citizen should get the idea that there is a real law beyond the one that the wise guys impose, hell briefly but effectively breaks loose. It hardly ever does, because every member of the crew, whether a made man or not, has proved in his youth that he will go on kicking and hitting until the victim expires.

Murder is the nuke. It spends most of its time not needing to be used. The rubato of the show's physical action depends on this. In that respect, The Sopranos is unsanitised, while the Godfather movies were always as clean as a whistle. Even the most fervent Godfather fan will agree that, in the third movie, the magic fell apart. It was a rush-job, and it showed: most fatally in the script.

Coppola must have been working against the clock when Michael, suffering insulin shock during his visit to the Italian monastery, called for orange juice and candy. A factotum bearing a tray of orange juice and candy rushed straight into frame, as if a tray of juice and candy were always kept ready in an Italian monastery in case a visiting American regime-chief with diabetes should drop by.

What a director can't afford is to be unsure of where the script is going. What is Michael doing being sincere about going legitimate? But sentimentality had set in a lot earlier.

From the beginning of The Godfather, Vito Corleone is a figure of benign wisdom, busy saving helpless Italian civilians from the indifference of American law. It's a comforting notion, but as phoney as the bumps in Marlon Brando's jaw-line.

The Corleone family, we are assured, makes its money from gambling and prostitution: the accepted human vices. At a critical moment for the plot, Vito rules out drug-trafficking as "a dirty business", as if the rest of his business was clean. Protection rackets are scarcely mentioned.

In his new book Cosa Nostra, John Dickie writes about the real nature of The Mafia's modus operandi in Sicily. As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the Sicilian grain fields were worked by peasants whose condition was only a step up from slavery. They were left with a cupful of the grain they reaped: the rest was taken by the gaballoti, the overseers who had been put in by the absentee landlords who were living it up in Palermo.

It would have been nice if the Mafia had gone into battle on behalf of the peasants. Unfortunately, it was common for the gaballoti to be members of the Mafia. Extortion and protection were always the core business of the Sicilian Men of Honour.

The Soprano family, who originated in Naples, are part of this larger context. No matter how large Our Thing got, the petty squeezing of the helpless remained at the heart of it, as a permanent reminder that, in those halcyon Sicilian days, Robin Hood gave nothing to the poor except grief.

Modern Americanised operators, such as Lucky Luciano, thought big. But there is no reason to think that the Mob has ever dealt in big-time stuff. The crime families got big by adding small-time deals together, and the small-time deals have always started with protection and loan-sharking.

Of the gangster movies, GoodFellas and Donnie Brasco probably give the truest picture: an average deal is a couple of slot machines being broken open in the back room, and a big deal is three machines. A Mob boss gets rich from his lion's share of the stolen and extorted money passed up to him by the lower ranks.

Mobsters are opportunist hoodlums, not business geniuses. In The Sopranos, this mean reality is much more realistically portrayed. People can be friends of the family and still be soaked.

Artie, the restaurant owner who is trying to play it straight, foolishly borrows money from Tony to cash in on what looks like a sure-fire Armagnac franchise. Artie's hard-working wife, brighter than he is, is outraged. Tony guesses it's a scam, but he only warns Artie against getting into debt: he doesn't refuse the money.

The moral here is that Artie, who might have got rich slowly, should never have tried to get rich quick. Once he defaults on the debt, his restaurant belongs to Tony. (The wise guys have a name for this: they call it "buying in".)

Artie's grieving face is an emblem for the show. He is still Tony's friend, but now it is no longer a case of doing Tony the occasional favour, such as letting him run up a huge tab. Now, Artie must do nothing but favours: he will never be out of hock.

And this is what Tony can do to a pal. What he can do to a mere acquaintance, let alone to a stranger, happens often enough per episode to remind us that his hulking charm adds an extra meaning to the word "irresistible". Far from helping the little guys, Tony gets the little guys in his power. He does it by terror, or its mere suggestion.

How does he feel about that? Bad enough to need an analyst, the reassuringly husky Dr Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco. Theoretically, she is on the side of the law, but there are complications. In Analyse This, the mobster's shrink was played by Billy Crystal, with hilarious results. Taking over the same situation and spinning it out into a linking theme, Chase transforms a gag into a strange story of perverted love.

Transference duly occurs and Tony lusts after her. She is suitably revolted. Then she gets raped in a basement car park by a pizza joint's Employee of the Month. The cops are useless. She admits the attraction of Tony's power when she tells her sympathetic but powerless ex-husband what would happen if she tipped off Tony about the rapist: her patient would "squash him like a bug".

Her feelings for Tony's macho strength would give a strict feminist the horrors, but they are surely plausible, and therefore disturbing. She is disturbed enough to seek analysis in her turn, and gets more and more screwed up: a token of the grim fact that any kind of entry into Tony's orbit can have life-threatening results.



As for Tony, his anxiety attacks abate, but he has told her little about the truths that matter most. He has told her what was done to him - violent father, scheming mother - but tells her nothing about what he has done to other people.

A leitmotiv of his reluctant testimony to her is the question of where the ducks go in winter. This reminds us of Holden Caulfield, who wondered the same thing about fish. But Tony is no young intellectual in the making. Mixing bright broads with his usual diet of rudderless goomahs, he is spiritually drawn towards higher thoughts, but profundity can be undone in a moment by news that some idealistic agitator on a construction site needs straightening out with a baseball bat. Tony's clever brain is just another muscle.

The abiding complexity of Tony's character lies in the way he must bring into balance two different considerations. Outside the house, his powers are unlimited. Inside it, he can affect the behaviour of others only to a certain extent, because they know he won't kill them. Vivid as it is, this is a real conflict, genuinely subtle and complicated, continually surprising.

Tony's wife, Carmela, and his children A. J. and Meadow, are for ever cutting down to size the very man who would take a long knife to them if they were not his property.

The supporting characters are developed and deployed, season after season. This is one of the areas in which the advantage of a TV serial over even the biggest movie really shows up. A movie is always short of time. A serial can keep the corners uncut.

Paulie Walnuts isn't just a swept-back hairstyle with a few threatening lines. Paulie has insecurities. His pop-eyed humiliation when a Mob boss from the big city fails to recognise him must rank high among documents of all it means for a proud hoodlum never to make it out of Newark.

It is a crowded field to stand out from, but perhaps Christopher takes the palm. Christopher is a homicidal junkie nut who deludes himself that he might be a writer. Those of us who share the same delusion can be thankful that we grew up in a different neighbourhood. Here is a dreadful reminder that Goebbels was a novelist: evil can have an artistic sensibility.

Christopher dreams of creation while working destruction. The actor who plays him, Michael Imperioli, is clever enough in real life to have written one of the best episodes of the show. But Christopher as a character on screen is hopelessly impulsive: it takes an armful of heroin even to slow him down.

As a future capo, he is still a lot more believable than Sonny in The Godfather. Even Brando, who seldom saw the script before bits of it appeared taped to the scenery, must have been surprised to find himself saying that a mere pimp "could never have outfoxed Santino". Your mother could have outfoxed Santino: up until that point, the movie had been busy proving almost nothing else.

Tony's mother brings us to the women, and one of the show's most enthralling aspects. The women are terrific: some of them in the strictest sense of the word. In The Godfather, even the Corleones' sister, Connie, is a cipher, but The Sopranos hasn't got a single cipher in the line-up.

Like Sian Phillips's Livia in I, Claudius, Nancy Marchand's Livia in The Sopranos is absolute evil made absolutely believable. In the nursing home, Livia retreated into a second childhood while still pushing buttons for the murder of her own son. Was she only pretending to be senile? Her death left a gap, but it was ably filled by Tony's sister Janice.

So off-putting that she reportedly shrank the ratings, Janice is incarnated by Aida Turturro, who has the capacity to freeze your blood with a single facial expression of crazed intensity. Janice's back-story is composed of one dippy extravagance after another. She did time on an ashram. She is still drawing welfare cheques for a supposed carpal tunnel syndrome she acquired while working the steamed-milk machine in a coffee house. Now, she wreaks havoc by fulfilling the kinkier sex fantasies of Tony's subordinates, but her real sexual relationship is with Tony. She would like to fulfil it by getting him killed. An hour alone with her conversation would be enough to kill anyone. Think of your worst nightmares about females you would prefer to avoid. Think of being trapped in an elevator with Donatella Versace. Janice is worse than that.

Carmela, on the other hand, is Tony's perfect wife, until she starts craving a more sensitive male touch. She gets it, or dreams of getting it, from Furio, Tony's trusted enforcer. Where the melting Carmela is concerned, Furio really is a man of honour. Out of respect for Tony, he fights off temptation.

Carmela, marvellously played by Edie Falco, can't bear to be without him. Furio burns alive in the fires of thwarted passion. Their star-crossed love is all the more believable in its tenderness because we know that Carmela's existence depends on a perverse disinclination to figure out where the money comes from, and that if we ourselves owed any of it, Furio is the last man we would want to ring our doorbell.

Tony's daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn DiScala), has been growing up on screen. By a plausible reaction to her home circumstances, she wants to be a lawyer, bringing justice to the deprived. She might do for Tony in the end, if he isn't done for by my favourite woman in the show, Adriana (Drea de Matteo).

Adriana is the paradigm of the young knockout forced into a walking coma by the steadily dawning realisation that she has nothing going for her but her looks. Being married to Christopher doesn't help. She is just bright enough to know he is a maniac, but not quite bright enough to see that her insatiable taste for luxury depends on him.

And Adrianna is an easy mark for the Feds. From her, they might get the evidence they need to lock Tony away. If we find ourselves wishing that the law won't nail him, it is because he is us. Michael Corleone is us, too, but only when we dream of omnipotence.

Tony Soprano takes us back to the primeval forest; to instincts, not dreams. It's a different kind of holiday from the everyday drag. If you want to know just how exciting life would be if there were no law, here it is

shit ain't looking too good for Mandela...

he spent a couple hours the other day on the side of the road in South Africa with his guts rottin. Must be rough.

Someone posted this on my FB feed about our Prime Minister. Truth.

Quote:Mandela will die soon. Today, tomorrow, this week, next week. It wont be long.

Remember this, he out-lived Thatcher. When Cameron latches on the Mandela bandwagon this week remember that in 1985 he was a top member of the Federation of Conservative Students, who produced the "hang Mandela" posters.

In 1989 Cameron worked in the Tory Policy Unit at Central Office and went on a anti-sanctions fact finding mission to South Africa with pro-apartheid Lobby Firm that was sponsored by Botha.

Remember this when he tells the world he was inspired by Madiba.

Damn thats pretty shitty.

Afro-master Jim Kelly 67

''Bullshit Mr Han-Man!''

Quote:Michael Jai White On The Passing Of Jim Kelly

People around the world are still coming to grips with the shocking news today of the all-too-soon passing of martial arts film star and legend Jim Kelly.

As I said in my previous post, when I was informed of the news this morning, I absolutely did not believe it at first. Maybe there is some other Jim Kelly who died, I thought; but not THE Jim Kelly. A true pioneer and inspiration to so many people with a genuinely magnetic presence on the screen.

It's even more tragic when you consider that this coming August marks, believe it or not, the 40th anniversary of the first U.S. release of the martial arts classic, Enter the Dragon, with the magnificent Bruce Lee (who died just a month before the film's release) and Kelly.

But among those stunned by the news was actor and martial artist Michael Jai White (Black Dynamite), who, of course, throughout his career, was compared to Kelly.

And that is why I thought White's words upon hearing about the passing of Kelly today were uniquely poignant:

“My world stopped this morning when I learned of the passing of Jim Kelly. He was a pioneer, our first black representation of what a black martial artist is to this world. His look, swagger, martial arts prowess has been an inspiration myself as well as countless others. In Black Dynamite I copied his monochromatic fashion since, his afro, as well has his patented kiai (yell) SUUUEEYY! I am inspired to continue honoring him as I forge forward in this industry.

I've met the man upon occasion and have empathized with his wounds that were afflicted by Hollywood. We first met at Good Earth Restaurant in "97" when I went over to his table an introduced myself as Mike.

He didn't know who I was but he shared his views on the industry and was deeply troubled with how blacks were being treated in Hollywood. In the 70's Black Alpha Males were embraced in movies as logical leads and representations of who we were and currently our media blueprint was that of a buffoonish nature.

We exchanged information and I'd contact him from time to time. I was Mike, the guy from Good Earth and I worried he might feel betrayed when he learned of how much more our paths were similar and that I was, in many ways, seen as "The New Him."

I tried to get him to do cameos in films but the "Hollywounds" were too deep. For now I will train just a little bit harder and focus a little deeper. I, as well as my generation was inspired by Jim Kelly and I have to accept that I may inspire the next. I am saddened that this hero was defeated, by himself or the system and I resolve not to do the same. I accept this baton on behalf of you Master Kelly and Mike from Good Earth's gonna fight on with the swagger and pride he borrows from you!”

Swagger

70s sparring

SUUUEEYY!

R.I.P. player...

Never really like Mandelas ideas. I hear there was a large disparity between rich and poor before he was president, and now everyone is just poor.

I think was onto something with his "African people should be treated as equal citizens in Africa" thing.

Also; everyone is not poor in South Africa. There's a gigantic rift now. There are ultra rich there. Its worse than Rio.

one more thing; you seem to be insinuating that South Africa was better under apartheid rule. 1948 to 1994 was the GOLDEN AGE for South Africa?