Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
The Godfather is a top-drawer crime drama – gripping, expansive, great in parts. Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t the first choice to direct the screen version of Mario Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel. In view of the intense pressures on Coppola to make a crowd-pleaser, the chief wonder is what he delivered artistically as well as commercially. Although The Godfather was a crowd-pleaser (and how), it is much more.
Set largely in New York and spanning the decade 1945 to 1955, the film begins with a wedding and climaxes with a christening, followed by another anointing of sorts. The rituals at each end of the story illustrate the dual aspect of the Corleone ‘family’ whose story this is. In the usual sense of the word, the Corleones comprise a middle-aged Italian-American couple, their four adult children and their first grandchildren. The patriarch Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) is also the head – the ‘Godfather’ – of a large Mafia operation: the Corleones are one of New York‘s ‘Five Families’. The opening wedding reception takes place, on a late summer day in 1945, at Long Beach, Long Island, in the grounds of the house that is both the Corleone family home and the planning base for Don Vito’s criminal business. The action moves back and forth between the wedding celebrations, outdoors in the sunshine, and the Don’s discussions with a succession of visitors inside the house, behind closed doors and window blinds. The structure of the climactic christening is also based on cross-cutting but with a very different mood and tempo. Here, the movement is between the church in which the religious ceremony is taking place and, in several other locations, a series of killings that will confirm the Corleones’ victory in the Mafia power struggle, centred on the New York families’ move into narcotics, that has persisted through the narrative.
The bride at the start is Constanzia (Talia Shire), known as Connie, the youngest child and only daughter of Vito and his wife Carmela (Morgana King). The wedding introduces all the other main characters of The Godfather, Connie’s three brothers – Santino (James Caan), Fredo (John Cazale) and Michael (Al Pacino) – and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), an orphan befriended by Santino (‘Sonny’) when they were boys and informally adopted by his parents. Sonny and Fredo both work for their father, as does Tom, a qualified lawyer and Don Vito’s consigliere. Michael, who served as a US marine in the war just ended and who attends the wedding in military uniform, does not work for his father. As he makes clear to his WASP girlfriend Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) at the wedding reception, where she meets his parents and siblings for the first time, Michael is determined to keep it that way. The bridegroom Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), though marrying into the Corleone family at both levels, is relatively little in evidence. The extended introduction ends with the wedding guests applauding as the bride dances, not with her new husband but with her father.
The christening is of Connie’s baby, a boy (though actually the newborn Sofia Coppola). His godfather at the ceremony is Michael; the co-ordinated murders that coincide with the christening are Michael’s brainchild. ‘That’s my family, Kay, that’s not me,’ Michael assured his girlfriend at the start, in response to Kay’s alarm at his descriptions of the family business. An attempt to assassinate his father only a few weeks after Connie’s wedding changed Michael’s mind and the course of his life. Don Vito, though seriously injured in this gun attack, survived but was a declining force in the years that followed and has recently died of natural causes. Sonny, too, is dead, killed by rival gangsters. Fredo never was Don material. Tom Hagen remains an important figure but his non-Italian (German-Irish) ancestry disqualifies him from formal membership of the Mafia family. Michael is now in charge. He knows that Carlo was complicit in Sonny’s murder. Michael remains sensitive to ‘family’, as distinct from ‘business’, imperatives just enough to let Carlo attend his son’s christening. Michael then extracts his confession, has Carlo executed and returns to the house on Long Island and the study where his father conducted interviews at the start. Three of his henchmen take turns to kiss Michael’s hand, formally acknowledging him as the new ‘Don Corleone’.
Two further weddings take place, the second of them off-screen, in the course of the film. Michael is the groom at both. The aftermath to the attempt on his father’s life culminates in Michael’s murder of the drug baron Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), a prime mover in the shooting of Don Vito, and McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), a corrupt NYPD officer. The Corleones arrange for Michael, after he’s carried out these killings, to take refuge in Vito’s native Sicily, where Michael falls in love with and marries a local girl, Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli). She is killed by a car bomb intended for him. A year after returning to America, Michael renews contact with Kay and marries her; by the time he stands godfather to Connie’s baby, he and Kay have two children of their own. Kay’s role in the final scene both echoes and dramatically contrasts with the men-only meetings in Don Vito’s study in the opening sequences. During the wedding reception, the Corleone women and children are in the sunshine outside; when a couple of the kids run indoors and into the study, they’re swiftly removed. At the end, Kay demands to know from Michael whether, as the distraught Connie has claimed, he is responsible for the death of Carlo and for the other murders that took place that day and have made newspaper headlines. Michael angrily tells his wife not to ‘ask me about my business’. She persists and he agrees ‘this one time’ to let her ask. She does so again and Michael tells her it’s not true that he ordered the killings. As Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano), Rocco Lampone (Tom Rosqui) and Al Neri (Richard Bright) kiss her husband’s hand, the study door closes on Kay.
The story and its meanings sound easily comprehensible, and so they are. A major strength of Coppola’s direction is that, in spite of the various subplots and the large cast he has to manage, the storytelling is consistently clear. For a short while, after Michael’s return to America, the narrative grip loosens: the resurrection of his relationship with Kay is sketchy; the accelerated passage of time results in a slight loss of momentum. But slight is the word: the picture, which runs just a few minutes short of three hours, is almost relentlessly compelling. The two-level family theme is developed through plenty of domestic detail, as well as the well-defined characters and their interactions. The cinematographer Gordon Willis uses a varied palette yet succeeds in creating a continuing chiaroscuro effect, entirely appropriate to this Manichaean tale of two families. The use of music to support and interpret the drama – Nino Rota’s emotionally rich score, the popular Italian songs played at Connie’s wedding – is exemplary. In retrospect, moments that anticipate moments in The Godfather: Part II are one of the film’s most remarkable features. When he comes to sit with Michael and Kay at the wedding reception, Fredo has had too much to drink: your mind flashes forward to the social scenes in Cuba in the second film. The Sicily sequences are a more extensive example in the way they foreshadow their counterparts in the sequel. What’s uncanny about these resonances is that you’d swear Coppola, in crafting The Godfather, had the entirety of the second film already in mind. If so, it was an amazing effort of creative imagination because part two, during the making of part one, could not have been anywhere but inside the director’s head. Development of the screenplay for the sequel didn’t begin until the first film had opened and smashed box-office records.
Each of Don Vito’s appointments during the wedding reception has a part to play later on. The undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) – whose ‘I believe in America’ speech opens the film – has come to demand vengeance for a vicious assault on his daughter In due course, Vito will return to Bonasera, with Sonny’s corpse and a request to the undertaker to repair his eldest son’s face (‘I don’t want his mother to see him this way’). Nazorine (Vito Scotti), who has made Connie’s wedding cake, wants the Don to see to it that Enzo (Gabriele Torrei), the pastry-chef his daughter wants to marry, not be repatriated to Italy now that the war is over. The grateful Enzo (Gabriele Torrei) will visit the wounded Vito in hospital and stand guard with Michael there, preventing a further attempt on the Godfather’s life. His actual godson Johnny Fontane (Al Martino), an actor-singer whose career is on the skids, desperately wants a role in a Hollywood film that he’s sure will turns things around for him[1]. The Don instantly dispatches Tom Hagen to Los Angeles to put pressure on the movie producer concerned. All this may sound like basic, mechanical plot construction. In the context of a complicated screenplay (by Coppola and Mario Puzo), it’s judicious forward planning.
The wedding overture’s blend of artistry and narrative efficiency makes it a hard act to follow. How Coppola chooses to follow it is significant. The shape and register of the next sequences, at the LA mansion of the Hollywood mogul Jack Woltz (John Marley), are sharply different from what’s gone before. This isn’t just because of the notorious climax, Woltz’s horrified discovery that he’s sharing his bed with the severed head of his prized horse Khartoum[2]. The potboiler origins of The Godfather aren’t intrusive in the opening scenes but they are in Woltz’s tirade (which John Marley shouts throughout) about how Johnny Fontane ruined a starlet – ‘She was beautiful, she was young, she was innocent. She was the greatest piece of ass I ever had and I had ‘em all over the world!’ Very soon after this sensational episode, we learn Fontane got the role he wanted and that Woltz insisted he would never get. After the absorbing but relatively leisurely wedding scenes, it’s as if Coppola is at pains to assure the audience that, like the Don, he will follow up quickly and get things done.
From this point on, The Godfather settles into a confident narrative rhythm and sustained balance of incident and insight. The shooting of Don Vito, Michael’s hospital vigil and the almost intolerably suspenseful scenes at the Bronx restaurant where he shoots Sollozzo and McCluskey are variously impressive. (The editing by William Reynolds and Peter Zinner is especially brilliant in the last of these.) The Corleones quickly realise that Paulie Gatto (Johnny Martino), one of their foot soldiers, helped facilitate the attempt to kill their Don. The senior capo Clemenza and Rocco are assigned to the job of dispatching the traitor. They drive out to a deserted spot. Clemenza takes a leak while Rocco shoots Paulie, the camera some distance away from all concerned. It’s one of the most economical and imaginative moments of violence in the film. The distinctive texture and cadence of the scenes in Sicily are highly effective. The humour and romantic elements here provide a welcome diversion from the New York narrative. The luscious bloom of Simonetta Stefanelli’s innocent Apollonia makes the girl’s annihilation all the more appalling.
Just as the opening wedding section – unhurried, nuanced and seminal – is, in the first instance, followed by a short, virtually self-contained episode that’s a tonal shift to an almost jarring degree, so, in the longer term of the film, it’s complemented by a startlingly contrastive big finish. Coppola’s alternation between christening and carnage, with melodramatic organ music linking the two, is bravura yet the operatic finale seems bombastic compared with the start. Its immediate aftermath is the culmination of the picture’s movement towards mayhem as dehumanised spectacle. When Don Vito is shot, it’s shocking because the attack occurs moments after he’s been doing some personal rather than professional family business – getting fruit for Christmas from a stall in the street. The killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey powerfully dramatises Michael’s rite of passage into crime and, thereby, passing of the point of no return. Even the earlier brutal murder – a garotting – of the Corleones’ enforcer Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana), by Sollozzo and his boss Bruno Tattaglia (Tony Giorgio), has human meaning, coming as soon as it does after illustrations, at Connie’s wedding, of Brasi’s singular loyalty to Don Vito.
The later killings are a different, showier matter: Sonny, ambushed and riddled with machine-gun bullets at a highway toll-booth; the Jewish mobster Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) shot through the eye as he lies on a massage table; Don Barzini (Richard Conte) and his adjutant, tumbling down a long flight of steps. The garotting of Carlo Rizzi, at the hands of Clemenza, climaxes in an image apparently inspired by the protagonist’s nightmare at the start of Fellini’s 8½, when Guido is trapped inside a car and we see his feet pressed against the window. Coppola takes this further: as Carlo struggles, in the front passenger seat, one foot breaks the windscreen. The violence in The Godfather becomes offensive through a combination of garishness and impersonality. It leaves you grateful for the understated staging of the last scene featuring the Corleones’ long-serving capo Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda), whom we first saw dancing merrily at the wedding with one of the children there. Tessio betrays the family by going over to the Barzinis. When he realises the game’s up, he asks Tom Hagen to tell Michael ‘it was only business – I always liked him’. Tessio asks if Hagen can ‘get me off the hook … for old times’ sake’. ‘Can’t do it, Sally,’ replies Hagen. That’s the last we see of Tessio.
Marlon Brando’s interpretation of Don Vito reflects both sides of The Godfather – the work of art and the ingenious, shallower entertainment. Brando’s great moments are pieces of physical acting: Don Vito’s fall to the pavement after being shot in the street; the sigh he breathes at news of Sonny’s death; Vito playing happily with his little grandson (Michael’s son) in the orange grove of his garden, followed by his fatal heart attack and collapse. (Fruit links this sequence with the street attack that nearly killed him.) Brando subtly shows, through voice and movement, how Vito’s injuries age and weaken him. He’s superb in the final conversation with Michael that shows the older man’s fretful forgetfulness and how in control the younger one now is. (Al Pacino gives Michael a quiet tenderness towards his father in this fine exchange.) Sometimes, though, the vocals seem too mannered; even though Vito Corleone is a fictional creation, Brando gives the impression of doing an impression. (Admittedly, it doesn’t help that the performance became famous enough to inspire comedy-show imitations of it.) I remember, months before I first saw The Godfather (in early January 1973), coming back on the train from a day trip to London and reading an interview with John Gielgud in the Evening Standard. The Godfather was already all the rage and Gielgud was asked to comment on it. He said he thought Brando’s elaborate, deliberate playing had the effect of slowing scenes down. I’ve always felt the same way.
John Gielgud also said that Al Pacino was marvellous as Michael and he is. The transformation of a college-boy war hero into a cold-blooded professional criminal is a terrific opportunity (and challenge) for an actor; but one of the many virtues of Pacino’s performance is that he shows the potential for that transformation from the start. In his conversation with Kay at Connie’s wedding, Michael is already single-minded – it’s the direction of his single-mindedness that is changed by subsequent events. Courting Apollonia in Sicily, he’s a young man who knows what he wants and expects to get it. In the intervening scenes in the Bronx restaurant and Michael’s adrenalin-fuelled ordeal there, Pacino’s acting is exceptional. Michael can’t go through with it, must go through with it. One moment, he looks to be disintegrating under pressure; the next, he’s boiling up for the task in hand. Clemenza, Michael’s coach for the assignment, has told him that, when he emerges from the gents’ with the gun that’s been hidden for him there, ‘you come out blastin’’. It’s an excellent touch that, instead, Michael reappears and resumes his seat at the table: has he lost his nerve? He then stands up and shoots first Sollozzo, then McCluskey. Clemenza has also told him how to exit the restaurant once he’s done the deed: ‘Just let your hand drop to your side, and let the gun slip out …walk outta the place real fast but you don’t run’. Michael remembers his instructions but his arms are too rigid to obey them. He heads for the exit in a semi-paralysed movement; just before he gets to the door, he disengages his hand from the gun and it falls to the floor.
Among the many first-rate contributions in supporting roles, Robert Duvall’s is outstanding. He expresses most convincingly that Tom Hagen is completely professional, crucial to the success of the Corleones’ operations yet always, thanks to his ethnicity, somewhat excluded. Two performances of which I’m less fond are James Caan’s and Al Lettieri’s. The latter’s shortcomings aren’t a big deal since Virgil Sollozzo isn’t around for long but Lettieri’s overplaying sticks. Sonny is a narrowly written role beside Vito, Michael and Tom. The personality that emerges in the introduction predicts almost too accurately what’s to follow. Sonny acts and speaks before he thinks. At the wedding, he angrily smashes the camera of an unwanted photographer (compare how Don Barzini, a guest at the reception, removes film from the camera of another). Husband and father Sonny briefly absents himself from reception duties for a quickie upstairs with a young woman who’s not his wife (they’re played by Jeannie Linero and Julie Gregg respectively). In the story that follows, his hothead aggression and impulsiveness become a little too predictable and James Caan’s appetite for the role reinforces the effect. It’s no surprise, given the set-up, that the parts for women are many fewer and less rewarding. More disappointing is that the main female role is seriously underwritten: Diane Keaton isn’t given the opportunity to show either the strength or the complexity of Kay’s attachment to Michael. Keaton still registers strongly, though, and the emotional contrasts between the controlled, anxious Kay and Talia Shire’s spoilt, petulant Connie are effective. The lack of personal interaction between Don Vito and his wife is eloquent. Morgana King’s beautiful, dignified Carmela, is simply always there – an altogether constant companion.
The Godfather is, in all sorts of ways, a splendid film. It also turned out to be a lesser work than its sequel. In 2008, the American Film Institute named its top ten of all-time great gangster films[3]. It placed The Godfather first and The Godfather: Part II third, with Goodfellas splitting them. This isn’t exactly an unfair judgment (and the first Godfather is certainly better than Goodfellas) but it makes sense to me largely because Godfather 1 is more decidedly a gangster picture than Godfather 2. It fits more comfortably into the cinematic tradition of the genre – even though, at its best, it transcends that tradition. Over the years, I must have seen both films six or seven times – after the first viewings (on their original release), usually in close proximity. This time around, I was more conscious than ever of the differences between them[4]. The famous ‘make him an offer he can’t refuse’ line in The Godfather provoked laughter in NFT1 all three times it was delivered. This was relieved, it’s-only-a-movie laughter. The Godfather: Part II doesn’t offer such comfort.
26 September 2018
[1] Events that resulted in the casting of Frank Sinatra as Maggio in From Here to Eternity are the persistently alleged (and persistently denied) true-life inspiration for this.
[2] A minor point, though one that’s hard for a horseracing and bloodstock fan to ignore: Woltz, introducing Khartoum in the stables, says to Hagen, ‘I’m not gonna race him, though. I’m gonna put him out to stud’. As a determined and hugely successful money-maker, Woltz would hardly pass up the chance to let Khartoum win races in order to increase his value as a stallion.
[3] Defined by AFI as ‘a genre that centers on organized crime or maverick criminals in a modern setting’ (although how AFI defines ‘modern’ isn’t clear).
[4] I saw the films three days apart at BFI this month.
