Monday, October 13, 2008

TODAY'S TWD: OF GUNS AND CANNOLI

When Catherine Willows and Nick Stokes were searching Warrick's car for evidence after he was shot on the ninth seasoner opener of 'CSI' ("For Warrick"), Catherine found a .25 just lying on the floor on the passenger side. Knowing that Warrick's gun was still locked up as evidence from earlier, Nick recognized this as the classic scenario for a hit.

"Leave the gun. Take the cannolis." he said, quoting from "The Godfather".

Here's the quick (7 seconds!) clip of
the key scene from the movie.
As a pop culture moment, Clemenza's line has inspired some interesting thoughts on the subject.......

Baron S. Cameron, in his blog "Hey, Dumbass", describes the line this way:

"Leave the gun; take the cannoli” is possibly the greatest throwaway line ever. Delivered beautifully by Richard S. Castellano, as the affable but deadly Peter Clemenza in "The Godfather", I consider it to be one of the best lines in the history of American Cinema. When Paulie, Vito Corleone’s ex-driver, is murdered, Clemenza and his cohorts don’t dwell on it. Paulie is never mentioned again except when Clemenza lets Sonny know that the job is done: “Paulie? You ain’t going to see him no more.” Essentially, the dirty work is behind them; they move on. The gun is the awfulness of the immediate past. The cannoli is the anticipation of a sweet future.

An excerpt from:

Take the Canoli
Stories From the New World
By SARAH VOWELL

My favorite scene in the film takes place on a deserted highway with the Statue of Liberty off in the distance. The don's henchman Clemenza is on the road with two of his men. He's under orders that only one of them is supposed to make the ride back. Clemenza tells the driver to pull over. "I gotta take a leak," he says. As Clemenza empties his bladder, the man in the backseat empties his gun into the driver's skull. There are three shots. The grisly, back-of-the-head murder of a rat fink associate is all in a day's work. But Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."

I loved Clemenza's command because of its total lack of ambiguity. I yearned for certainty. I'd been born into rock-solid Christianity, and every year that went by, my faith eroded a little more, so that by the time I got to college I was a recent, and therefore shaky, atheist. Like a lot of once devout people who have lost religion, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and my heart. Once, I had had a god, commandments, faith, the promise of redemption, and a bible, The Bible, which offered an explanation of everything from creation on through to the end of the world. I had slowly but surely replaced the old-fashioned exclamation points of hallelujahs with the question marks of modern life. God was dead and I had whacked him.
BCnU!
Toby O'B

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