The Godfather: Peter Corris on revisiting old favourites

Tags: Casablanca/ Chinatown/ Wuthering Heights/ Yes Minister/ Yes Prime Minister

People re-read books. Jean claims that for many years she re-read Wuthering Heights every couple of years and I have no reason to doubt her. I cannot say how many times I’ve re-read Somerset Maugham’s short stories or Hemingway’s story ‘Fifty Grand’ or the first volume of the Flashman Papers. There is a particular pleasure, quite different from the pleasure of encountering something new and interesting, in seeing again how good something you valued really was.

For me, it’s the same with films. Given a sufficient lapse of time I can watch Casablanca, The Magnificent Seven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Get Carter and a few others time after time. I have a selection of them on DVD and when at a loss for something to occupy me, I can always go to Rick’s bar or hear Michael Caine say again, ‘You’re a big man but you’re out of shape. With me, it’s a full time job so, behave yourself.’ I’m told I do a fair impression.

Robert Towne, who wrote the Oscar-winning script of Chinatown, worked as a script doctor on the Marlon Brando scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone confides his anxieties to his son Michael. That crucial scene was probably vital to Brando’s winning the best actor Academy Award – the one he refused to accept as a protest against the treatment of Native Americans in films and in politics, and where he sent an Apache woman to announce his refusal … but I digress.

Towne said The Godfather was a masterpiece and that he’d watched it more than once. He also rated The Sopranos very highly but said he was unlikely to watch it again, implying this was something discerning people didn’t do.

Do you re-watch TV programs? I do – one in particular.

I never tire of the BBC series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. First shown in the 1980s, there were only 38 episodes in all, which avoided the weaknesses of long-lasting TV shows – getting stale and running out of steam.

I fondly imagine the program needs no introduction to readers of this column. Elements of the scripts have passed into common usage. Anyone discussing politics knows what ‘a Sir Humphrey Appleby approach’ or a ‘courageous decision’ means. It would be tedious to go into the details of the episodes but it should be pointed out that, long before ‘spin’, ‘political correctness’ and ‘the 24-hour news cycle’ became stocks in trade of political discourse, Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, the script writers, had them nailed.

The acting is superb, from the major characters to the most minor; the themes treated are as relevant now as then, and the blend of humour and cynicism is precise. The programs are shown regularly on Foxtel and I settle to them (recorded so as to be able to whip through the commercials) with a cup of tea and wait for my favourite snatches of dialogue, which, it so happens, all come from the one episode:

Oxford don: In Arab countries, women who commit adultery get stoned.

Sir Humphrey: Unlike Britain, where they get stoned and commit adultery.

Sir Humphrey on a cleric overdue for promotion to a bishopric: Long time, no see.

Jim Hacker, a bit drunk at an Oxford high table when the question of a an honorary Doctorate of Laws comes up: You don’t want to give your doctorary honourates to judges. Politicians are the ones who make the laws … If it wasn’t for politicians they’d have no laws to judge. There’d be queues of unemployed judges in silly wigs.

Sir Humphrey out-manoeuvres the minister in this episode, but one of the pleasures of the program is that Jim occasionally triumphs.

I was interested to learn from Wikipedia that the series was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite television program. Presumably she considered that she always won her battles with the bureaucrats and her colleagues. Perhaps she did, until the finish, for, as Paul Keating said, ‘In the end, in political life everyone gets carried out.’