The camera pushes in on our hero the first time he sees him, and it’s easy to see why: the man sitting behind the desk, bathed in a little spotlight, in the Old World Social Club on Hester Street, is, unmistakably, a doppelganger for…
“I know what you’re thinking – the resemblance, right?” nudges the man who brought him there. “He’s the real thing, the original merchandise. When they saw him, they based the movie.” The use of such non-specifics as “the resemblance” and “the movie” isn’t just a filmmaker being coy (or avoiding copyright infringement); when Andrew Bergman’s “The Freshman” was released thirty years ago, in the summer of 1990, “The Godfather” was only 18 years old – and it was back in the spotlight, thanks to the long-awaited third installment, due in theaters that winter. And no one had to say that the man behind the desk was a spitting image of Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone because Brando was himself the co-star of “The Freshman,” sending up his most iconic performance.
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The story around the character concerns Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick), a young man from Vermont who heads off to New York to begins his studies at NYU film school. Walking through Grand Central circa 1990 carting a suitcase, he’s a mark if there ever was one, and predictably enough, he gets taken – by Victor (Bruno Kirby), a fast-talking hustler who offers him car service to the campus and takes off with his bags. “I had been in New York for 19 minutes, 11 seconds,” muses Clark, in voice-over, “and I was already ruined.”
Luckily, a few days later, Clark crosses paths with Victor again, who offers him (in lieu of the return of his luggage and, more importantly, the money inside them) an employment opportunity. He can get him a job working for his uncle Carmine – “a great man!” – which is how they end up down on Hester Street, meeting this Don Corleone lookalike. (We also get a nice snapshot of Little Italy circa 1990, a rather sharp contrast to something like “The Godfather Part II,” which also co-starred Bruno Kirby. Look at how deep these connections run!)
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Unlike Vito Corleone, Victor insists, Carmine Sabatini is not in the mob – he’s “a local businessman, an importer.” Sabatini’s daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller) maintains this fiction; her father is “an extremely powerful importer. There are such people!” But when Clark takes on this part-time employment, under just a dab of intimidation, he can’t help but feel like he’s in too deep, and in no small part because of the cultural baggage this heavyset, whispering Italian carries.
But what’s wonderful about “The Freshman” is that it’s not just some one-gag gimmick comedy, a “Godfather” parody that falls apart without the in-joke casting of Brando as Carmine. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine a version of the movie in which Brando declined to participate (and it’s hard to imagine writer/director Bergman didn’t pen it with this possibility in mind), and the character is merely a generic, though presumably Corleone-influenced, mobster type. It wouldn’t require much of a rewrite, because there’s much more to the picture, namely its clever (and gradually revealed) plot, which involves a ring of absurdly rich socialites who get their kicks by dining on endangered species, via a movable feast called “the fabulous Gourmet Club.”
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Bergman, after all, is no slouch; his screenwriting credits include “Blazing Saddles,” “The In-Laws,” and “Fletch.”So we have entire sequences here that have nothing to do with “The Godfather” at all, such as Broderick and Frank Whaley picking up the endangered Komodo Dragon, and engaging in uproarious, “Bringing Up Baby” – style exotic animal slapstick. We have the little jabs at film school culture, including the egomaniacal professor (the pitch-perfect Paul Benedict) who uses his own books as the required texts and refers to himself in the third person. There’s the terrific running gag about how no one can remember where Clark is from, so they all introduce him as a native of Kansas, or Iowa, or Montana. And then there’s the scene where he visits Carmine’s house, marvels at the copy of the “Mona Lisa” over the mantle, and is assured by Tina, “Oh, this isn’t a copy, this is it.”
It’s all good stuff, further sold by the ace supporting cast. Kirby may well be the MVP, with a gloriously peculiar gloss on a very specific type – the family ne’er-do-well, gratuitously ingratiating, inserting himself into Clark and Carmine’s meeting with unnecessary translations and unrequested opinions. Penelope Ann Miller (who never achieved the stardom she deserved, but that’s another talk for another time) is a firecracker here, brassy and boisterous. And though Broderick had, by this time, begun to age out of these roles (this was the last of his youthful innocents), he plays it with a welcome dose, via the voice-overs, of wry, dry humor.
But the draw here truly is Brando. He had, by this point, aged into the role; only 47 when “The Godfather” was released, he was now in his sixties, older and wiser and heavier, and he didn’t have to reach for the rasp in his voice quite as much. But the genius of this beautifully tuned comic performance is that Brando, the consummate actor, plays it straight. He’s not winking or mugging (like he did in some of his earlier, less successful attempts at comedy). He seems to genuinely see Carmine Sabitini as an extension of Vito Corleone, not a burlesque on him, and he treats him with no less respect (and expects no less in return). He simply plays the character and lets the laughs come to him
And, to be clear, they come; if you’ve ever wanted to hear Don Corleone chewing out his financial advisor, you’ll get your wish (“I had another broker, and he bought stocks for me that went down. And it got very unpleasant, Charlie. Very unpleasant”). But he also plays the character’s warmth and charisma, to great effect. “I have such good feelings about you,” he tells Clark, after their first meeting. “I’m filled with emotion. I never had a son.” He also shines in a wonderful scene where he shows up unexpectedly at Clark’s dorm room door for a heart to heart; the actor and the director seem aware of the inherent comedy of the incongruity of the figure and the setting and let it pass mostly unremarked. (He does depart with a chuckling “So this is college. I didn’t miss nothin’!”) Though the actor, who frequently indulged in acts of self-sabotage, gave a bizarrely hostile interview downing the film during its production, he’s never less than fully committed, moving through the film with grace and confidence – most memorably in a brief ice skating sequence, which at first prompts the question of “Why?” and then answers it with another question: “Why not?”
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Brando would appear in six more feature films before his death fourteen years later, and while his work in them was occasionally memorable, the films frequently were not. (And in some, like the notorious “Island of Dr. Moreau” and the ill-advised “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery,” he’s no better than anyone else.) So perhaps it’s appropriate that his last great performance in a great movie came in this one, which could’ve been a lark and was instead much more, and which treated him with such affection and respect. Those qualities are especially striking its closing image, a wonderful Chaplin-esque walkway silhouette, in which Brando pads off into the sunset with the Komodo Dragon on a leash, and issues a warning echoing another of his best-known roles: “If it weren’t for me, you coulda been a handbag.”
