HOLLYWOOD -- In the 1972 film ``Play It Again, Sam,'' Woody Allen's nebbish hero was so obsessed with Humphrey Bogart in ``Casablanca'' that he enlisted the ghost of the legendary '40s tough guy to coach him on how to impress girls.
``Casablanca'' and Bogey may have been the role models for Allen's generation, but as director Nora Ephron cleverly illustrates in her latest film, ``You've Got Mail,'' which stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, it's Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning 1972 classic ``The Godfather'' that's become the ultimate guy's movie.
Ephron also used a popular movie in 1993's ``Sleepless in Seattle'' to point out the differences between men and women's tastes. In ``Sleepless,'' women blubber over the 1957 Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr weepy, ``An Affair to Remember.'' Just as the men are clueless about the appeal of that chick flick, Ryan's perky bookstore owner in ``You've Got Mail'' is in the dark about ``The Godfather.''
In ``You've Got Mail,'' Hanks plays Joe Fox, owner of a corporate book chain who is opening a huge new store in New York's Upper West Side. Ryan's Kathleen Kelly owns a small children's bookstore threatened by the opening of Fox Books. However, neither knows that they are e-mail pen pals.
When Kelly discovers Fox's identity after having met him in her store, she tells him she wouldn't have talked to him: ``I didn't know who you were with,'' she says. That, of course, reminds Fox of a line from ``The Godfather.'' He tells her that is what movie producer John Woltz told Corleone ``family attorney'' Tom Hagen when Hagen arrived in Hollywood to persuade him to cast the Godfather's godson, Johnny Fontane.
Fox also gives godfatherly e-mail advice to Kelly to ``go to the mattresses'' to save her business from bankruptcy and go to war against her competitor. When Kelly asks Fox what is it with men and ``The Godfather,'' he informs her that it's the movie equivalent of I Ching -- the epitome of wisdom. If anyone has a problem, the answer can be found in ``The Godfather.''
Ephron, who co-wrote the film with her sister Delia, is quite familiar with the world of mob movies. Her husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi, co-wrote the screenplays of Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks ``GoodFellas'' and ``Casino.'' (Pileggi wrote the books on which the films are based.)
