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.