Garnets in a Typhoon

All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Mettermich and Guirot, French Radicals and German police-spies.--Frederick Engels, anticipating the National Security Agency, kindle location 1-2.

Conte's role as Barzini is obscure in relation to the actor's past as assimilated yet uneasy with being the good bling material boy, yet age did for Conte what playing off a theatrical force like Jose Ferrer could not. It gave him character, and this necessitates a look again at how the dynamic with Brando plays out the next time the original godfather is available to view. It is not quite falling in lust with anti-matter, as the video images we have of celebrities come and gone is still a representation, more exact than any portraiture, but this does not mean it isn't as close to an alternate universe as is possible beyond the texture of imagination.

Conte was a character matinee idol, why complicate matters? Reviewers charge him with the sin of linear woodenness, and so he was. Playing against Ferrer in Whirlpool there is yet another undercurrent in the body language, coded or not in the script. Conte looks at Jose as a foreign devil, one who has maintained an ethnic identity Conte himself had to scrub clean, and you can see the wheels turning in Conte's head at the bedside of Ferrer's theatrical dominance: "I can't hold the scene against this vaudeville bastard, so the best I can do is exude unease at his disruption of my bourgeoisie achievement."

Range can have its own layers of complexity, and whatever Conte's limits, he makes the most of them in a dialectical tension with our present, a present that is in between periods, unlike Conte's, who defined the post-war immigrant experience. Gene Tierney is also a bit of a tin ear in this wicked bit of classic noir manipulation, but the tragedy of her domestic travail leaps right into the first decade of our 21st century. Tierney tried to commit suicide in substantial fashion in 1958. Why? Guilt. American blue blood hides away the horror of deficient siring, like the Kennedy's Rose.

Daria Cassini died in 2010 at the age of 67. She might have been mute as well as deaf and blind in one eye. Did she have the cognizance to recognize that Mommy was about as A list as it gets since the modern invention of Mary Pickford? Probably not. At best she might have seen herself as least among humans, knew her father hated her, as much as Jose's Korvo hates the caste he deceptively imitates. The projection of Korvo's manical hostility is what gives Whirlpool its place in the historical lexicon, making love to the grave, obsessively.