Re-viewing The Godfather

[selenak]

merkuria_lyn's post the other day made me recall one of the classic movies I love, The Godfather. These days, it's been so often imitated, parodied, quoted from, paid homage to, etc. in all media (see also: any given episode of The Sopranos; a Batman comic like Jeff Loeb's The Long Halloween; a teenager comedy like The Freshman), that watchers who see it as adults for the first time must feel like they're stumbling on a collection of familiar tropes. Thankfully, I saw it as a teenager, before I stumbling across any of said homages. I had read the novel before, since my father had it. It's an unabashed pulp thriller (Puzo's deliberately ambitious novel was The Pilgrim, which made no cash, and he had gambling debts, so he wrote The Godfather), which interested me and captivated me as long as I read it, but did not awake the urge to re-read.

The film, now, while remarkably faithful to the novel in terms of story structure and even dialogue somehow manages to transcend it. Part of it is undoubtedly the difference of medium; The Godfather (and its sequels) is Coppola at his visual best in terms of imagery, and, being a composer's son, he uses music beautifully throughout the films. Some examples of how this enhances the story in a short while. Also, he had some terrific actors: Brando of course in one of the last roles where he actually bothered to give a performance, James Caan as the tempestuous eldest son, Sonny, Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, Diane Keaton as Kay, Robert de Niro as the young Vito Corleone in the Godfather II flashbacks (which are, btw, based on the novel - there was no room to use Vito's backstory in the first film), and, above all, Al Pacino as Michael Corleone. This was Pacino's breakout performance, and he truly carries the Godfather movies, including the first where the press attention mostly went to Brando. In retrospect, it's also a performance markedly different from the temperamental roles which would form the gist of Pacino's later career. He plays Michael so very low key that the few emotional outbursts are all the more scarring.

It's Coppola's take on Michael, imo, which storywise makes the difference between novel and film. And this without changing dialogue or adding different scenes. As I said, the novel is a thriller. Michael's slow transformation from war hero and outsider who doesn't want to get into the family business to Mafia Don at the end is the red thread throughout, but it's presented as inevitable, without a true sense of choice. The film (and its sequels), however, play the fate of Michael Corleone as a tragedy, and Michael as the tragic hero. He's both contributing to it through his decisions and being driven to it via circumstance, as Aristotle demanded.

Quite how this different emotional subtext is achieved is where the means of film come in. I mentioned the music. The title credit uses the first notes of the most famous theme this film has, nicknamed the Godfather waltz. Then we get to the long wedding sequence, which, constantly cutting between Vito Corleone receiving petitioners in his study and granting favours and the wedding party outside celebrating his daughter's marriage, uses a variety of cheerful Sicilian folk dances and once a pseudo-Sinatra song (appropriately sung by Johnny Fontance, the character inspired by Frank Sinatra). This upbeat music provides a contrast to those violent favours the Don grants. One the last petitioner is heard, Vito Corleone steps outside to dance with his daughter, and this is where we hear the main theme a second, longer time.

The story of the Corleone family is also a tragedy, which, again, is a difference to the feeling you get from Puzo's novel, and it all starts on that wedding. Vito, an exemplary patriarch, wants the best for them, but the man he marries his daughter Connie to on that day will beat her which will lead to the death of her eldest brother. His second son, well-meaning but weak, will commit a fatal betrayal and be killed by his brother. His third son will cement his conversion from "civilian" to ruler of the Corleone empire by killing his sister's husband.

Opening with a wedding, The Godfather concludes with a double baptism, which is an utterly cinematic and inspired choice. (In the novel, Michael becoming the godfather of his sister's child precedes his bloody coronation as the Godfather of the New York families by several weeks.) Again, we constantly cut between the ceremony and celebration on the one hand and the multiple executions on the other; between Michael being asked, as part of the Catholic baptism ceremony in lieu of the child being baptized, whether he rejects the devil and all his works, and the consequences of his lethal commands which secure his power but simultaneously damn him. It is, without a note being sung, an extremely operatic sequence. (And it's not surprising that Coppola finally, in the third, weakest but still interesting of the Godfather films, actually used the performance of an opera for the climax.) The tag scene, with Kay watching her husband being greeted as Don Corleone by the traditional kiss of his hand until the door gets shut in her face, leaves her, and us, in the dark again, which is where this movie starts.

The very first scene also illustrates one of the differences in tone which allow the film to transcend the novel. Again, the dialogue is mostly word for word from Puzo's novel. But hearing the sentence "I believe in America" being spoken in the dark, which then gets illuminated bit by bit to reveal a man's face, then his surroundings, and only very very late the person he's talking to (Vito Corleone) carries quite a different emotional impact from reading the novel's opening description of this same man waiting in a court for a judgment of his daughter's rapists he doesn't get. This is where The Godfather reveals itself as very much a film of the 70s. (Which is also true for The Godfather II.) "I believe in America" is a motto of not just this particular petitioner, it's the motto of the entire Corleone family. They are devout believers in the American dream, none more than Vito and Michael. It's just that the American dream, as presented by Coppola, does not allow a life without crime.

After about half of the film, when he has already given up on a legit existence for himself, Michael tells Kay that his father simply is a man of power like a Senator. She calls him naïve and points out Senators and other politicians don't kill people. "Now who is naïve?" asks Michael, and he has a point. There is no moral difference between the Mafia (a word which is never spoken throughout The Godfather, though it does get mentioned in the sequels) and the politicians in any of the Godfather movies. Moreover, Puzo makes sure we don't like Vito's and Michael's victims very much. The Hollywood producer who wakes up with a horse's head in his bed has been shown (more explicit in the novel than in the film) as a pedophile preying on a 12-years-old child starlet before. Sollozo, whom Michael shoots, thereby committing his first murder, has tried to kill Michael's father Vito before. The multiple executions at the end of The Godfather all are aimed at people who share responsibility for the death of Sonny Corleone, and the one victim one feels half-sorry for is professional killer Paulie, certainly not wife-beater (but civilian) Carlo.

(Coppola, though, is somewhat more subtle than Puzo. In the present-day action of The Godfather II, which as opposed to the flashbacks is not based on material of the novel anymore, the crucial death at the climax is the one of Fredo, Michael's remaining brother. Fredo betrayed Michael out of weakness, true, but by delaying Michael's response - Michael waits until their mother has died - and showing Fredo playing with Michael's son Anthony and being gentle and regretful, Coppola does not permit the audience to approve of this final death in the way the executions of Part I can be read as approvable. He also shows, unflinching, that this act leaves Michael in a frozen, complete isolation.)

In an ironic reversal of the Henry James cliché and perhaps audience expectations, the one period of innocence The Godfather allows is not in America at all; it's in the section of the film set in Sicily, Michael's temporary exile after his killing of Sollozo. (The fact that Sicily is the origin of the Mafia as well as what drove Michael's father Vito to seek refuge in the US doubles the irony.) It's the one time the film doesn't dwell in shadows and sparely lit rooms but celebrates the beauty of the Sicilian landscape in a way perhaps only a third generation Italo-American like Coppola can, with a longing for a lost paradise. Michael falling in love and marrying Apollonia - whom we never hear talk English - has an unreal fairy tale quality to it as well. The Sicilian section ends in blood, when Apollonia gets killed (by mistake, in Michael's place). Paradise is lost. What did her killer, one of Michael's bodyguards as it turns out, want for his crime? A life in America.

If crime as business and business as crime and politics as both is very much the 70s zeitgeist (can you imagine a box office hit with this central dogma shot during the Reagan period in the 80s?), it's important that The Godfather is actually set in the 40s and early 50s. It starts directly after WWII. This makes it just about believable that Kay says yes when Michael asks her to marry him for a second time after his return but this time adds they will not be able to have the marriage of equals they dreamt about when first dating, before he returned to the family, and that she's never to ask him about his business. If Puzo (or Coppola) had set this story in the 60s and 70s, the acceptance of the unabashed sexism by the female characters simply wouldn't have been believable anymore.

And while we're at it, the treatment of Connie Corleone in book and films is first subtly, then majorly different. Even when I was still a teenager, Puzo's description of Connie as a woman who sees regular sex with her husband as more important than the fact he beats her and who gets over the traumatic end of her marriage with lightning speed by marrying another stud irritated me beyond belief. Coppola, who cast his sister Talia Shire as Connie, never implies she sees great sex as compensation for the beatings. He also leaves us in The Godfather with Connie accusing Michael of murder, not, as Puzo does, with Connie retracting that accusation after being given a second husband. In The Godfather II Connie is married again (and in the process of getting divorced), but even before she says so, it's pretty clear her marriages and affairs are an attempt to get even with her brother. At the end of II, she finds peace by forgiving him and staying with him when everyone else leaves, not in a delusionary way but aware of how they both messed up their lives. Film critic Pauline Kael, who loved the first two Godfathers, hated the third but Connie was one of the few elements which she enjoyed. Middle-aged Connie in III has become Michael's sole confidante, and the de facto consigliere. She's far more clear-sighted about old and new enemies than he is. (Partly because Connie doesn't believe in legitimacy or the American dream.) The exasperated, affectionate tone in which she talks to him helps making this sibling relationship ring true, and the scene where Coppola shows them sitting together is one of the few peaceful moments. At the end, she's the sole survivor of the original Corleone family we met at the start of The Godfather.

Trivia Sidenotes:
- as mentioned before, many lines of The Godfather made it into pop culture, notably "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse", "It's business. Nothing personal" and "sleeping with the fish"
- in a deleted scene of Godfather II, Coppola had young Vito Corleone meet his (i.e. Coppola's) Grandfather; you've got to be in awe at the grand-scale Mary Suing that idea implies
- equally deleted but restored in a special edition which arranges the first two Godfather movies with their scenes in chronological order, i.e. starting with child Vito and ending with the death of Fredo, is the scene which concludes Puzo's novel, of Kay lightning candles for her (living) husband's soul. I can understand the deletion; the scene of Kay watching Michael being greeted as Don Corleone and getting the door shut into her face is emotionally more powerful and more fit for the basic tragedy
- enough critics have complained about Sofia Coppola playing Michael's daughter Mary in Godfather III for this fact to be known, but less known is that she's also the baby getting baptized at the end of The Godfather (why hire someone else's if you've got your own, Coppola must have thought)
- on a note of "how did get Coppola that past the censors?": during the wedding Sonny's wife Sandra describes the size of her husband's penis to her girlfriends - we don't hear her say it, but the gestures are definite enough even if you haven't read Puzo's novel
- Coppola spent all the money he had earned with Godfather when shooting Apocalypse Now.

Comments

[kathyh]

Wonderful review as always.

watchers who see it as adults for the first time must feel like they're stumbling on a collection of familiar tropes.

Yes, that's always been my problem with it. J, who saw it as a teenager, raved about it for years but I just couldn't see what he was on about until my very recent watching of it when suddenly the light dawned and I saw it for the masterpiece it is. I don't think that it's entirely coincidental that this was the first time I've seen it in widescreen which can't duplicate seeing it in the cinema but does give a better impression than the ordinary TV pan and scan.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Alas, I never saw it in the cinema, either, but as I said, did see it before seeing any of the quotes/homages/rip-offs/parodies. Besides, it's one of those films which wins the more often you watch it, because you're always discovering additional subtleties.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I was actually surprised by how fresh the movie seemed when I first saw it. despite all the sendups and such. this review makes me want to see the first 2 again, and maybe actually watch the 3rd. I think I'd particularly undersold Connie as a character. Sonny is and always will be my favorite part of the first film -- but then, that's James Caan.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

The third, flawed as it is, definitely is worth watching. BTW, my big complaint about it wouldn't be the Sofia/Mary scenes but Michael and Kay as an amiable divorced couple. Sure, two decades or so have passed, but still, that was the part I found unbelievable.

On the bright side, you have my absolutely favourite scene, in which Michael, who is originally just intending to do business with a Cardinal in Sicily, ends up in making his confession. It's outstandingly played by Pacino and very well written, because the gist of the tragedy is that he still doesn't think he would have done anything, including killing Fredo, differently if he could go back. And so can there be true repentance?

Also, excllent Connie, as I said, and I do like Andy Garcia as Sonny's illegitimate son. (Yes, in the novel Lucy the bridesmaid has an abortion after Sonny's death, but since that part never made it to the screen, Coppola could declare the kid born and thus Garcia-shaped in part III.)

Still, the first two are of course the undisputed, all-time classics.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

David Thomson's Suspects (written before the third film was made) has a suggestion for Michael and Kay's future that redefines the term "darkfic"...

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I think I've read that one. Where Anthony ends up ordering his bodyguards to rape his mother? If that's the one, I thought it was going too far in the other direction.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the one.

[buffyannotater.livejournal.com]

Interesting what you say about Michael and Kay. I haven't seen Part 3 for a long time, and only saw it all the way through once, as opposed to the at least ten times I've seen the first two films, but my recollection is that my opinion of the Michael/Kay relationship in the film is close to Roger Ebert's: "There is also Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton), of course, still the woman Michael loves, and the mother of his children. He wants their son, Anthony, to join the family business. She defends his ambition to be an opera singer. They face each other like skilled opponents. Perhaps she even still loves him, too, or would if she did not know him so well. She is the only person who can tell Michael what she really thinks, and in one of those dark, gloomy rooms, she lets him know that it doesn't matter what grand order he is invested in by the church, he is at heart still a gangster. The best scenes in "Godfather III" are between these two, Michael and Kay, Pacino and Keaton, fiercely locked in a battle that began too many years ago, at that wedding feast where Michael told Kay he was not part of his family business."

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Ah, but here's my problem (despite the fact I like Diane Keaton and Al Pacino on the screen together):

1) We're asked to believe that he returned the children to her to raise pretty soon after the end of II. Given how Michael and Kay parted in II, that seems unlikely to me.

2) The "conflict" about Anthony's choice of profession isn't really one. Michael basically gives in as soon as she starts.

3) The whole "let me show you Sicily" scenes are lovely if taken by themselves. In context with the entire saga, I just couldn't believe them for this particular couple.

You have inspired me...

[buffyannotater.livejournal.com]

...to rewatch the trilogy again. I watch the first two approximately once a year, but this time I'm going to go all the way through, and take your thoughts under consideration. My primary dissatisfaction with the third film wasn't Sofia Coppola's acting, but the fact that it focused on these new, younger characters, while I was interested in the ones from the first two films, who I felt were too marginalized. Because of this, I was never that strongly enticed to watch it repeatedly. One of the few things I remember enjoying was Michael and Kay, but that is because I always found their relationship in the first two so fascinating, and I kind of held on to that in order to enjoy the last one. I'll try as hard as I can to watch the last one with a more patient eye.

Off to watch Part 1!

Re: You have inspired me...

[selenak.livejournal.com]

These films are always worth rewatching. Enjoy!

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I've not read Puzo's novel, so hearing you analyze it as well as the movies is interesting to me. Sounds like I won't be reading the novel, as just *hearing* about Puzo's take on Connie Corleone is making me gnash my teeth. If I read it, I'd likely need dental work.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

It may be heresy for me as a book reader, but if you have watched the movie, you do not need to have read the novel. The one character it does add depth to is Johnny Fontane, but that's not worth the Connie characterisation.

[whiter.livejournal.com]

Brilliant review of the most superb movie I've ever seen.

I always regard the 3 movies as a single big one. People often tend to say they saw 1, then went on with 2 and didn't like it anymore so stopped halfway. My reply uses to be "that's because you didn't see part 3." Ofcourse you need to finish part 2 to go on with 3, but that's not the point. When I first saw The Godfather I sat down and watched all 9 hours in a row. Then when I saw the final ending It gave me such a tremendous emotional burst inside... I just had to see it all over again.
And so I did. I sat down for another 9 hours.

The fact that it's all just 1 big movie is also displayed in the fact that they chose to film the movie in 'real time'. The third movie takes place 16 years after the second. So they shot that part exactly 16 years later. With the same actors, properly aged. So ofcourse Sofia Coppola had to be in there again, she was 18 years older as in the first movie now, and was part of the cast.
One hell of a brilliant movie project.

~ leave the gun, take the canoli ;-)

Thank you, and...

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Yes. Michael, at the end... such a profound tragedy, and so richly layered for all the characters concerned.

[fiorediloto.livejournal.com]

This was definitely good to read. I think it was in your Runaways (but correct me if I'm wrong) I read that Arthur Petrelli didn't let his sons watch The Godfather because it was filled with stereotypes about Italian people. I have to say, I am Italian (Sicilian, if we really want to be strict), and I love it. I watched it when I was already rather old (18 or 19) and read the novel too, after that.

I really appreciated this meta, and I think I agree with all your thoughts about the movie.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

It's mentioned in Runaways but I wrote about Arthur's (and Nathan's) reactions to The Godfather somewhat more extensively in Movie Buffs. The real reason for Arthur's hostility has of course nothing to do with stereotypes; he sees too much truth in the film and that's what he can't bear, but he'd never be able to admit that.

(I was sort of inspired re: Arthur's probable reaction by the first season of The Sopranos, in which Dr. Melfi's family and friends have an ongoing rant about The Godfather and complain about stereotypes, and of course the narrative irony is that Dr. Melfi is treating an Italian-American mobster - whose nephew adores the film - at the same time.)

(Nathan's reaction I imagine as somewhat more complicated, for similar and additional reasons. Angela and Peter don't have Godfather issues, they have other films they obsess about. See story.)

[mimesh.livejournal.com]

This was Pacino's breakout performance, and he truly carries the Godfather movies, including the first where the press attention mostly went to Brando. In retrospect, it's also a performance markedly different from the temperamental roles which would form the gist of Pacino's later career. He plays Michael so very low key that the few emotional outbursts are all the more scarring.

This is so very true. When Michael was first introduced to the story I didn't even recognize Pacino (I missed the credit sequence) and that was partly due to his youthful face and probably even more for playing so much against the screen persona I have come to associate him with. I was very impressed how he managed to convey this mix of vulnerability, initial idealism and the increasing hard, dangerous, unpredictable edge underneath. Mature Pacino looks dangerous but this youthful Pacino doesn't with his smooth face and yet he radiated a dignified danger.

If Puzo (or Coppola) had set this story in the 60s and 70s, the acceptance of the unabashed sexism by the female characters simply wouldn't have been believable anymore.

Hah. Agreed. Do you know when Puzo wrote the novel?

Even when I was still a teenager, Puzo's description of Connie as a woman who sees regular sex with her husband as more important than the fact he beats her and who gets over the traumatic end of her marriage with lightning speed by marrying another stud irritated me beyond belief. Coppola, who cast his sister Talia Shire as Connie, never implies she sees great sex as compensation for the beatings.

Oh, that's interesting. Connie's willingness to put up with Carlo despite the beatings never made sense to me but I brushed it off as some usual sexist stereotype where women are portrayed as generally masochistic (there is a similar situation in Scorsese's Raging Bull).

- equally deleted but restored in a special edition which arranges the first two Godfather movies with their scenes in chronological order, i.e. starting with child Vito and ending with the death of Fredo, is the scene which concludes Puzo's novel, of Kay lightning candles for her (living) husband's soul.

I remember seeing that scene with Kay. But after finding out that the TV cut I saw is so fundamentally different from the original movie versions I'm disappointed and a bit angry that my first encounter with the saga was an altered one. I wish I had seen the original versions. The structure and composition you described above sound so much more intriguing and powerful than the chronological four parts I saw. I don't even remember how the first three parts ended, everything bleeds together but I do think that the crosscutting between the baptism and the multiple executions happened somewhere in the middle. Grrrr.

Thanks again for linking me to this wonderful meta. It was a pleasure as always.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

When Michael was first introduced to the story I didn't even recognize Pacino (I missed the credit sequence) and that was partly due to his youthful face and probably even more for playing so much against the screen persona I have come to associate him with.

Due to watching The Godfather so early, this was actually the first time I saw Al Pacino in anything. Then I saw him in Dog Day Afternoon, which was made between the first two Godfather movies, I think, then in Scarface and then in his 80s onwards roles, so I saw him age in the right direction.*g* (Marlon Brando, on the other hand, I had never seen as a young man when watching The Godfather, and it was many years later that I got around to On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire when I finally saw the films that made his name.) But yes, most of his later roles were very different. Have you seen Heat by Michael Mann, though? That is the only other film, aside from The Godfather II (where they are never on screen at the same time for flashback reasons), which stars both Pacino and De Niro, as cop and gangster respectively, and here Pacino has the quiet role again.

(Also very watchable: Looking for Richard which is both a witty meditation of Shakespeare's Richard III and a great chance to see acting in process, as Pacino and various other actors - and he got everyone from Kevin Spacey to Vanessa Redgrave to go along with this - act out various scenes from the play in different ways and discuss them.)

Do you know when Puzo wrote the novel?

1969.

I don't even remember how the first three parts ended, everything bleeds together but I do think that the crosscutting between the baptism and the multiple executions happened somewhere in the middle. Grrrr.

Grrrr indeed. That is one of the most famous climaxes in cinematic history, with the epilogue between Michael and Kay, and the closing door, leaving Kay and us in the darkness, as again one of the most famous endings. (Joss paid homage to it in Dr. Horrible, if you've seen it, with a similar intention - the closing of the door at the end, locking the audience out, after the character has achieved success but has lost some crucial bit of his humanity on the way.) And again, the end of The Godfather II cuts from a last flashback - the Corleones, all alive and well, eating, waiting for Vito to come home, being a family, Connie introduces Carlo, Michael confesses to having enlisted for the war, Fredo defends him to Sonny - to Fredo's death on the lake, and Michael alone on the shore, and that juxtaposition is important.

Here's a vid summing up Michael's arc:

[mimesh.livejournal.com]

First of all: Thanks for linking me to this gem of a video. I have watched it multiple times already (even though I haven't seen Godfather III yet ;)

Have you seen Heat by Michael Mann, though? That is the only other film, aside from The Godfather II (where they are never on screen at the same time for flashback reasons), which stars both Pacino and De Niro, as cop and gangster respectively, and here Pacino has the quiet role again.

Yes, I have, just recently in fact. It was shown right after the first part of the Godfather which was a very weird experience to see these two actors age 20 years in a couple of minutes ;). In direct comparison I have to say that Pacino played Michael a lot more understated and subdued than the Cop in Heat, though.

And again, the end of The Godfather II cuts from a last flashback - the Corleones, all alive and well, eating, waiting for Vito to come home, being a family, Connie introduces Carlo, Michael confesses to having enlisted for the war, Fredo defends him to Sonny - to Fredo's death on the lake, and Michael alone on the shore, and that juxtaposition is important.

Oh god, I can imagine how powerful that juxtaposition has to be. Damn it. I seriously need to see the original movie cut but I think I will wait until the movies are less fresh in mind.