In reference to Golden Door, the New Republic had this review today
by Stanley Kauffmann:
GOLDEN DOOR--its title taken from the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on
the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty--is a small film that addresses
a gigantic subject without breathing hard. Multiple pictures have
dealt with European immigrants to America, some of which have
contrasted immigrants' past lives with the home- land, but few deal
with the transatlantic crossing in "immigrant" freighters. The best
work I know on this subject is Jan Troell's The Emigrants. Golden
Door, from Italy, is a lesser work, but it is brimful of empathy.
Emanuele Crialese, the writer-director, makes us feel the departure
from Italy, the change of worlds.
Golden Door is set early in the twen- tieth century. It opens with
two men--a father and his grown son--climbing a steep, barren
mountain, each holding a large stone in his mouth. At the top is a
cross where the men kneel and pray. The father, around forty, begs
for a sign from heaven about what to do with his life. Evidently what
they have just done--clawing up this mountain with a stone between
the teeth--was the price paid for the chance to pray here. They get
what they take to be the sign: they and their family will move to
America.
The decision is not taken joyfully by the family. But the father, a
widower, is in charge of this tiny kingdom, so his mother and his two
sons (one of whom is mute) consent. The ship in which they sail is a
huge animal cage, yet with some twists of character surprise. Also on
board, in steerage class with the multitude, is a cultivated young
Englishwoman who hovers around the central family. She soon figures
in the proceedings.
The ship arrives at Ellis Island. (Which is more than one can say of
the ship that brings the Corleone family to New York in The
Godfather: Part II--that ship passes the Statue of Liberty going the
wrong way.) We expect stockyard treatment by officials of the horde
of immigrants, but Crialese underscores the considerable attention
that is paid to each of them.
Not many of the incidents in Golden Door are in themselves telling:
they are mostly instances in a huge history. The film, at its best,
reminds us that passages like these were manifold for many years. One
moment in the film will linger: as the father (grittily played by
Vincenzo Amato) enters New York, he remembers himself and his son
scrabbling up that barren mountain with stones in their mouths,
seeking a sign--the sign that would lead him to this Manhattan.
Dr. Bob Wildblood
711 Rivereview Dr.
Kokomo, IN 46901-7025
765-776-1727
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The time is always right to do what is right."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Benjamin Franklin, 1775
"We are what we pretend to be, so we better be careful what we
pretend to be."
Kurt Vonnegut
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