Be My Friend, Godfather…

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

It’s ironic that Francis Ford Coppola made his name as arguably the leading director of the 1970s on the back of The Godfather. Just when Hollywood was embracing a new wave of film school educated directors, and financing lots of offbeat, low-budget “youth” pictures trying to recapture the success of Easy Rider, Coppola broke through with a very classical studio picture. It really is, as Leonard Maltin’s guide puts it, “the 1970’s answer to Gone with the Wind:” in other words, an epic but conventional adaptation of a lengthy source novel. Later, with Apocalypse Now, Coppola would try for a more highbrow art project that better justified his “auteur” status, but here – superficially at least – Coppola’s triumph is simply one of expert stewardship. The Godfather is, first and foremost, a perfectly wrought interpretation of Mario Puzo’s novel. People sometimes cite The Godfather as an example of a film masterpiece springing from a trashy book, but I think this is unfair to Puzo. The qualities that make the film great are mostly present in the novel: if we ascribe greater value to the film version, it’s because we are more willing to surrender to the experience of pulp fiction in the cinema than in print.

Coppola’s strength as an adapter of Puzo comes not just from his knack for shaping the material into a screenplay (he scripted with Puzo, with some uncredited additional work by Robert Towne). Without wanting to underestimate the task of compression he has managed, in many ways the direction he took is obvious from the novel: the material he excised is the material that cried out to be removed. Having distilled the novel into its essential elements, he never takes a false step in actually filming it. The film has a leisurely pace, but it achieves such immersion in the world it depicts that it is never boring. The casting is remarkable for the way in which actors of different strengths and abilities are astutely matched to their parts. So we have Brando simply radiating star power as the Godfather Vito Corleone; extremely talented actors such as Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and John Cazale providing depth as the inner circle of the family; and single note, almost typecast performers in the small roles who can walk on and instantly establish their role. The score (by Nino Rota) is by turns romantic and sombre, and finds a visual counterpart in Gordon Willis’ lush cinematography.

Despite the fuss that is made of the cross cutting in the climactic sequence, Coppola’s direction is notable for its well judged sobreity: this is not a superficially flashy film, as some of his later works would be. His real achievement is capturing the flavour of the novel: Coppola’s identification with the material is obvious from the loving attention he devotes to the gangster’s milieu. In saying this I am not suggesting that Coppola has some sort of affinity with organised crime, but simply that he understands the importance of family to the Italian-American community. (The film itself is a family affair, with Coppola’s sister Talia Shire playing Connie Corleone, and his father Carmine Coppola composing incidental music). Much of the warmth and romance of the film – the elements that make this world of crime so superficially seductive and welcoming – come from the constant incidental details of Italian-American family life that Coppola weaves so convincingly through the film.

It would be naïve, of course, to believe that the continuing fascination of The Godfather – which according to many reports is particularly strong amongst the real mafia – arises purely from its depiction of life in a large immigrant family. The Godfather bestows its gangsters with an aura of strength and control that borders on invulnerability. The film’s famous title logo, showing a hand pulling the strings of an unseen puppet, reflects the unspoken message of the scenes where gangsters deliberate in dark, lushly furnished rooms: this is where the real power is wielded. Little wonder that criminals like the movie. For the rest of us, the appeal is getting a glimpse into the inner sanctum. Marlon Brando is a key to this in the central – as opposed to large – role of Vito Corleone. This film marked the start of a period where he was wheeled into films as an iconic figure whose mere appearance leant a sense of gravity and status to both the role he was playing and the production as a whole (think of Superman and Apocalypse Now). Here he isn’t convincing, exactly, but his onscreen presence is suitably commanding: the star power of Brando works as a screen substitute for the criminal power of Vito Corleone.

Gangster films have always glamorised criminal lives – such “amoral” tendencies were a focus of the Hays Code industry censorship guideline in the 1930s – but few have created a central figure with quite the allure of Vito Corleone. While criminal heads are often depicted as nearly all powerful, and frequently shown as leading very prosperous lives, traditionally this is offset either be clearly showing their personalities or work as repugnant, or simply by the plot bringing them to an unfortunate end. The charismatic Vito, however, has his powers constantly talked up throughout The Godfather, but never receives his comeuppance. Even when he is ambushed and shot, his enemies can’t kill him: he lives on, and rises from his bed to save his struggling criminal network. He is never touched by the law, and his death comes peacefully in his own garden. The film is full of characters who meet nasty fates, but they are either villains, traitors, or members of the family such as Sonny who have failed to live up to the Don’s standards.

For this reason, the film’s central arc – in which Michael, the one son who wished to get out of the family business, gradually gets pulled in – lacks the tragic sense that Coppola presumably intended it to have. The famous final shot of Michael shutting the devoted Kay out his office neatly evokes Kay’s dismay at what Michael has become, but I wonder how much audiences really feel the tragedy of the moment. Emotionally, the film hasn’t left us outside the door with Kay: we’re in the room with Michael. The progression of his character is developed so convincingly, and the criminal world made so fascinating, that we can understand his choice despite deploring his actions. The whole pleasure of the film is the access it grants to the family’s deliberations: Coppola can’t put us on the other side of the door in the last few minutes alone.

This fundamental amorality never seems to have sat too well with Coppola himself. In The Godfather Part II he essentially rethought and reworked the first film to make sure that the audience would feel repelled from Michael, and morally it’s a much easier film to defend. But is an overtly moral conclusion in a gangster film ever really anything more than a thin veneer designed to make us feel better about how we feel about it? I don’t think we should kid ourselves about the appeal of films that depict criminal lives. As uncomfortable as it might be, we like movies about criminals because we are interested in their lifestyle, and The Godfather is a classic because creates such a compelling, enveloping portrait of their world