becomes bright again once Mr. Scratch has been sent back to the underworld and Jabez has been released from his bond. Evil is dark and frightening, and it is always present--Mr. Scratch appears in the barn as if passing by. He hears his name spoken and there he is--he is always watching and listening, waiting to answer the call. He is deceitful. His world is a world of weariness and pain, as can be seen from the faces of the terrible group he summons to be his jury. The imagery in the film is often Catholic in origin, and the film has a Catholic sense of sin. The family unit is supposed to be strong and sacrosanct, but it decays in this film until brother kills brother and until the present patriarch of the clan is left alone, a shell of his former self, and increasingly facing a hostile world without any family support. The enormity of the sin and how it relates directly to the disintegration of the family is apparent as a religious service is balanced against a series of killings, an image that was used in the first Godfather as well for much the same purpose. The clear hypocrisy of the family patriarch is evident here, but more than this the image emphasizes the constant struggle between good and evil for the souls of weak human beings. Coppola evokes history in the shape of the film, the locations, and the progression of change in the underworld. Among the historical references of import are the Cuban revolution of 1959-1960, showing first the wide-open hedonism and gambling of the Batista era followed by the beginning of the revolution. The mobs smashing gambling equipment in the streets is an image of the end of one era and the beginning of another. Much of the imagery in the film contrasts with the image we have in our minds from countless earlier movies of the nature of organized crime, which appears in th |
