This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.
RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience. He was much better in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1949 drama House of Strangers, which, while not strictly speaking a crime movie, has similarities to The Godfather, with its squabbling Italian family balling itself up over questions of loyalty and patriarchal authority.
It soon became clear that film noir was Conte's natural milieu, but by the time he gave his strongest performance in the strongest movie of his career to date, Joseph H. Lewis's intense 1955 low-budget crime picture The Big Combo, film noir had slid down to a B-movie genre. Conte starred in Fritz Lang's The Blue Dahliah and Phil Karlsen's The Brothers Rico, then rid out the 1960s alternating between TV guest shots and opportunities to hang out with Frank Sinatra. (He appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven and then turned up in three other Sinatra movies, Assault on a Queen, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Maybe Sinatra decided that, on Ocean's Eleven, he'd taken one for the team by agreeing to play the character who is required to say the line, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is it the big casino?") Conte was reportedly considered for the role of Don Vito himself, but that was in the early stages, when the studio was thinking of making The Godfather as a cheap little action movie. Its elevation to prestige-epic level automatically took him out of the running for the title role, but by casting him as Don Barzini, the smiling-cobra nemesis of the Corelones who plays toastmaster general at the big meeting of the five families, Francis Ford Coppola was counting on Conte's movie past, with its long-time connection to the world of gangsters and other classic movie toughs (such as Edward G. Robinson, who played Conte's blustery Italian papa in House of Strangers) to give added weight to a character whose brief amount of screen time belies his power and importance in the narrative. Barzini was Conte's last hurrah as a Hollywood actor. He died in 1975 after spending the last three busy years of his life working in Italy and France, where even hacks know enough to be impressed with a long-time professional who has Fritz Lang pictures on his resume.
RICHARD BRIGHT: Was ever an actor more misleadingly named? It's not that Bright was dull, by any means. But he seemed to be allergic to flashiness and determined to never call undue attention to himself. He was very close to being the ideal example of a hard-working, serious character actor who finds his place in the overall pattern of whatever movie or play he's in, selflessly executes it with an unfussy mastery, and then recedes into the background until he's needed again. In 1965, he did his part for free expression and the counterculture by playing Billy the Kid (to his co-star Billie Dixon's Jean Harlow) in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which ended with a scene in which Dixon delivered a closing monologue while Bright simulated cunnilingus on her; the play so impressed the authorities that every night, the police came around after the performance to take Bright and Dixon down to the station house so that their eager fans there could have their fingerprints. In 1971, Bright appeared in The Panic in Needle Park, a young-junkies-in-love movie that marked Al Pacino's starring debut. The next year, he found the role for him as Al Neri, the most durable and colorlessly loyal of Corleone underlings in The Godfather. He would reprise the role of Al in Part II, and Part III, made fifteen years and set twenty-odd years later, found him still faithfully plugging away. He can also be seen in The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Rancho Deluxe, Mararthon Man, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Citizens Band, Once Upon a Time in America, and a great many other films. In 2002, he contributed a brief but memorable cameo to an episode of The Sopranos, playing the leader of a low-rent murder-for-hire crew, who negotiates a contract between puffs on an oxygen inhaler stuffed up his nose. Four years later, he was accidentally and fatally struck by a New York City bus.
AL LETTIERI: Lettieri kicked around in TV and movie bit parts for a decade or so before starting to get real supporting roles in such movies as The Bobo with Peter Sellers and The Night of the Following Day, a godforsaken kidnapping-plot movie starring a peroxided Marlon Brando. His performance as Solozzo the Turk is not the most subtle and nuanced element of The Godfather--Lettieri's performance was never the most subtle and nuanced element in any of his movies, not even the ones that starred Charles Bronson--but he had energy and the distinctive presence of a man who'd decided to act as if looking like a warthog in spats was really working for him. The Godfather established Lettieri as a good man to hire if you were making a movie whose heroes were killers and thieves and you needed a clearly contrasting type to make it clear why these other killers and thieves were the good guys. If sheer, unadorned vicious meanness is what floats your boat, it's hard to think of a riper example than Lettieri's bad guy in the 1972 The Getaway, who enlivens his pursuit of the movie's ostensible hero and heroine by abducting a husband and wife (played by Archie Bunker's little girl, Sally Struthers, and Jack Dodson, formerly Howard Sprague on The Andy Griffith Show) and indulges in an infantile, trashy affair with the wife while the husband is forced to watch from the back seat. Off camera, Lettieri seems to have been one of those uncontainable, life of the party types who other character actors tell stories about until they turn into legendary figures. He is said to have arrived on the set of the Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk in a car full of hookers he'd thoughtfully brought along to service the crew, which definitely puts those gift baskets that Jay Leno sends out into perspective. Once there, he persisted in addressing his co-star, who played a melon rancher in dutch with the mob, as "my melon-Chollie baby," something that all the witnesses agree seemed to strike Bronson as the single least amusing thing in the world. Sadly, Lettieri would have no more time to feel around for the location of Charles Bronson's funny bone. He died of a heart attack in 1975, at 47.