by David Thomson
For 50 years we have been watching The Godfather films as much in the sway of their elegant darkness as if we are nameless but loyal members of the Corleone family. We are waiting for our chance to serve the smack of authority, the engine of the films. So we keep watching.
If you were old enough to see The Godfather when it opened (14 March 1972), then you are elderly now, and most likely a man who has been seeing the pictures once or twice every other year, and quietly aspiring to be one of the gang. I doubt many women that age are so faithful within this dream. They will have noticed how little power or voice women have in this sultry atmosphere. And then I suspect they sigh and smile over how their discreet, timid and often dull men are suckers for the spell.
Me too. Let me try to explain that. The first clear display of how the Corleones function is in the episode with the movie boss Jack Woltz. The insipid, self-typing crooner Johnny Fontane has come to the Corleone wedding desperate to get a key role in an upcoming Woltz production. Vito decides this is a matter for consigliere Tom Hagen (as Robert Duvall ever better?). On a cut, that effacing manager goes out to Los Angeles. If you’re in the family you are crazy for what follows: the sudden swoon of muted bands in 1945 dance music, the chromatic light, the feel of a prop plane landing, and an overview of Hollywood that is almost from Selnick’s 1937 A Star Is Born. That arrangement never fails: its rambling nostalgic and undaunted repeat feels like world lore. So then we meet Jack Woltz, and he’s urbane and polite at first. But very soon he’s into some of the most profuse, violent writing in the film and a display worthy of self. Here is evidence that Coppola and his gang have always assumed that people in power talk like show-offs who want to see their own existence as a movie. Everything Woltz says is an exuberant attempt to explain and radiate himself. This is the early sound of Trump: “You don’t understand. Johnny Fontane never gets that movie. The part is perfect for him; it’ll make him a big star. And I’m gonna run him out of the business, and let me tell you why. Johnny Fontane ruined one of Woltz International’s most valuable protégés. For five years we had her under training: singing lessons, acting lessons, dancing lessons. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her. I was gonna make her a big star! And let me be even more frank, just to show you that I’m not a hard-hearted man, and it’s not all dollars and cents. 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…”
On and on, a cadenza of confessional wickedness, fabulous in John Marley’s snarling delivery, and it is poor Woltz putting his own head on the chopping block of comeuppance (a recurring mechanism in the Godfather movies).
Then it’s a hushed dawn at the suave Woltz mansion. As he wakes, Woltz sits in silky sheets and feels the bed is untidy — did he have bad dreams? Then he discovers that he has been sleeping with the severed head of his prize stallion. Coming so early in the first film, this was a knockout signal and a promise of more. Horse lovers and light sleepers gave out with an earnest “Wow!” After all, the horse’s head was just a prop, set decoration, and the blood? We were used to that by then. In this genre of films, the blood glows like the egomaniacal meal, butterscotch on vanilla.
IT’S AS IF THE GODFATHER
IS ORDAINED MYTHOLOGY,
IMMACULATE AND WRITTEN,
AS IN THE WORD OF A LORD
The seductive editing erases any anxiety we might have over how Hagen (and his agents) have magicked the horse’s head into the bed without waking Jack, and as always in American movies we go along with the lush skid that transcends practical reality. Moreover, Al Pacino’s Michael has already told his girlfriend Kay a story about how in the past the family fashioned the idea of an offer no one could refuse. As Michael tells her that story, listless but entranced, you know he’s an angel ready to fall, and take over.
What the Woltz episode amounts to is the accumulation of piercing theatricality as an ideal: not just the language and the talk; not just the deft casting of Marley (and surely casting maestro Fred Roos had a part in that). Beyond this, the gang is assembled and busy: Gordon Willis dropping a predawn light on the house; the people who had chosen and dressed the house (Dean Tavoularis and several set decorators); and then the overall authority that would compose the scene so that for 50 years we guys have relished its sweet, lethal air of control. It’s as if The Godfather is ordained mythology, immaculate and written (as in the word of a lord). It’s how there is so little need for police in these films.
The allure of this sequence was smoky from the start. There were vocal suggestions that Fontane might be Frank Sinatra and the role might be Maggio in From Here to Eternity. There is no evidence for that insinuation, but it survived simply because it intuited or wished to credit such things. The atmosphere and the legend were creeping over fact and history like the blood on Woltz’s lustrous bed. From the start, there was an embedded code that whispered to us to believe in spectacular control. Isn’t that what the movies are about?
This rhythm of justified punishment is central to the films. Coming up is that moment, at night, outside the hospital when Marlon Brando’s Vito is inside, grievously wounded. Michael guesses that final execution will be at hand. So, with Enzo, he stands outside the hospital, trying to look ominous, two small men in dark coats, as the malignant cops arrive. That’s when Sterling Hayden breaks Michael’s jaw. But he is too late, for there is that instant when the Ivy League Marine notices, with intellectual interest, that his hand is not shaking as he lights a cigarette: the good boy is made for this stuff — that is our true romance into the labyrinth. We do not have to wait long for a proper retribution as Hayden’s corrupt cop is shot dead — in the feeding face — at that little restaurant with the best veal in town and a howling subway only a few feet away.
It has always been the case in the first two parts of The Godfather that the authority of action is so heady that our hands and our moral concern give up wavering.
If that’s what we want.
That authority is the heart of movie power. That’s what makes these pictures so problematic in terms of history. It was easy enough and uplifting to propose that in the early 1970s there was a regeneration of rich, independent filmmaking in Hollywood. This was the age of Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, Deliverance, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Long Goodbye. It meant pictures where awkward, misguided, passionate failures behaved like people in a novel, or in the mess of America, instead of being blessed by the screen’s flourish.
Those new filmmakers felt the company of pictures from elders or outsiders: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Aguirre, Wrath of God, Two English Girls, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Last Tango in Paris, Cries and Whispers and even Welles’s F for Fake or John Huston’s Fat City, the world of droll subversive kids. So The Godfather seemed to fit. Coppola had been to film school and had lavish ideas about transforming the American film business. Wasn’t this a grand sign of the kids taking control, in a world of characters as disenchanted as Nicholson at the end of Five Easy Pieces or Elliott Gould strolling away after offering Terry Lennox to close The Long Goodbye?
It seemed like a great time to be alive (while killing enemies), and then between the two parts of The Godfather the amazing Francis had the energy and the need to slip in The Conversation (1974), one of the most foreboding projections of what would happen to independent intelligence in the new world. Even so, these same Coppola (he has always been a man of clashing moods) would help usher in the return of the business, borne on the wings of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. So one cannot look back on The Godfather now without seeing the conflict between something new and daring and a return to the power of corporate fantasy. If you are anywhere near Hollywood (if you believe it exists) you cannot miss the male entourage whose dress code and dialogue owe so much to those classic films. The old threat of “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse,” sometimes sounds like foreplay endearment now. So it is useful to remind ourselves that this is a line one might have heard from the Gestapo or other agents of the darkness.
Moreover, 1972 was a very complicated year. Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky; Richard Nixon went to China; for the last time, a man walked on the Moon; California was trying to abandon the death penalty; there was a terrorist event at the Munich Olympics; the Dow rose above 1,000; there were break-ins at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC; and a few months later Nixon won the presidential election 520–18 in the electoral college.
This is not just background. It is a way of suggesting the difficulty our movies had in keeping up with, or being fair to, our chaos.
The aftermath of Watergate can be interpreted as a grand comeuppance for tyranny and a bright time for liberty. But don’t forget how many Americans had wanted Nixon in November 1972 (he got 47.2 million votes, 60.7 per cent of the popular vote). It was a terrible world – we all said so – though in 1972, very likely, the readers of this magazine were tiptoeing into sex, drugs, racial equality, feminism and green thinking in unprecedented ways. But that only painted the majority the more.
THE TWO FILMS
ARE SHOCKINGLY CONSERVATIVE:
IN THE UNQUESTIONED DECISIVENESS
OF MALE ORDER
AND THE SCARCITY OF WOMEN
I put it that way because of a need to say that the most adult authority in The Godfather was the promise of a return to narrative order in movies and to the alarming strength of heroic monsters. So The Godfather should be seen then as a harbinger of the new and the brave. But looked at from 2022, how do we ignore the baleful, dehumanised Michael becoming a warning of “only business”, presidential, sitting in the darkness and contemplating the feebleness of order, knowing how the family has been able to kill anyone wanted gone? But who might one day make a film as muddled and impressive as The Godfather Part III (1990).
As a political gesture, the two films are shockingly conservative. That can be felt in the unquestioned decisiveness of male order and the scarcity of women. But it is most palpable in the texture of things like the Woltz episode. It’s the chronic need that everything fits. The tidiness is paranoid. The passion of The Godfather is akin to a police state religion: it is a way of serving unchallenged order and devoutly respectful ritual. So the two films can be read as the apogee of a narrative style that set in Hollywood with sound. It is what we call mise en scène, a matter of predictable and beautiful photographed sequences, with suspense and a pay-off, that trade in every craft in filmmaking and so requires a kind of factory context. Thus, in the gang he kept, Coppola’s Zoetrope was one of the last movie studios – and he and his inhibited designs on remaking the old Hollywood kingdom in northern California.
In most sure Francis counts as an auteur, an artist with a vision (like Hitchcock, Welles or Scorsese), but he was a tempest and a hard-hearted godfather himself. He knew and trusted Willis, Tavoularis, Rota and Walter Murch and he made two films so populated with attractive male supporting actors that we are as ready as Faye or Clemenza to be part of the family. Like Hawks, Ford or Preston Sturges, he liked to stick with his people, his entourage. And we want to be there, too.
That is why we keep watching these films. We long to be made men.
So where do we stand now with the two parts of The Godfather, at the age of 50? As I have tried to admit, I am ready to see them again tonight, because I am addicted to the efficient and lovely rendering of life on screen – the mise en scène – with a gallery of engaging people. Yet I feel ashamed of my own taste. I can believe these are great films – and Part II was founded on extra ambition whereas the first was content to be a knockout. But then I wonder whether the culture of such great films is fit for the life and the experience I have tried to be part of. What I mean by that is to point out that these achievements are painfully short of humour, women and uncertainty. And that is a trinity I want to live by.
Who are the women? There is Vito’s wife (can you recall her name in the story?), the kind of spouse men hire when they decline to partake in conversation, let alone argument. His daughter Connie is there, too, played by Talia Shire, but I think in any analysis of the drama she is a neglected character and no more than a surrogate wife. Michael’s first wife Apollonia is very vivid, for a moment, until she’s blown to bits. But the greatest problem one can have with female Corleones is with the biggest part, Diane Keaton’s Kay.
I have argued in the past that Kay is the character most outraged by what happened to Michael. She knows the power of his evil, not just as its most immediate victim, but as the mother of his children. The most distressing thing about Part III for me is the way in which she wants to be reconciled to Michael, when she has every narrative reason to oppose him. But she can only love him again, if they were in love before – and was that evident? I have even suggested that Kay might testify against Michael, and suffer every poisoned offer that he cares to apply. There is a way in which any audience now might step back from these films, gratified by their precision, but horrified at their indulgence of an exhausted criminal code.
So what will happen in 2022 in the Sight and Sound poll of our greatest films? The last time out, in 2012, The Godfather was #21 in the Critics’ Poll, The Godfather Part II was #31. But in the Directors’ Poll The Godfather ranked #7 and Part II was #30. I’d guess that in the new poll a lot of the old order will be tossed out. I cannot conceive how Vertigo (1958) retains its eminence. The new spirit in cinephilia should insist on films from the last 20 years. And I can believe that a large part of the electorate will be unable to stomach the Godfather films.
IN THESE PICTURES
WE ADORE EVERY MURDER.
THE FILMS ARE AS MAGISTERIAL
AS THE WORST LEADER
WE MIGHT IMAGINE.
THEY DISGRACE US
But the polls do not matter much, just as the political voting we keep going along with has less and less to do with the nature of our life and its problems. I do not believe fresh poll attitudes will make much of an impact on the abiding atmosphere of The Godfather. In short, men are going to keep watching those films and feeling nostalgic for a fantasy world in which, under stress, a young husband, like Michael, could in the same sequence participate in the christening of his nephew and the execution of all his enemies. That is still the greatest comeuppance scene in these films, an immaculate display of merciless editing and inventive deaths carried out (I think) by the admirably humane and decent Walter Murch. Just think of Al Neri on one knee so that his sure shot will have Barzini tumbling down the steps.
This is some of Walter’s greatest work (and, of course it was approved by Francis, and by Robert Evans, and by Paramount – it was part of the system). It is also one of the most clear-cut shows of gloomy but triumphant fascism in American film. That’s where we have to be brave enough to discard the bromide that The Godfather films attack organised crime and gangsterism’s dance. These are pictures in which we adore every murder, and share in the command that carries it out. The films are as magisterial as the worst leader we might imagine. They disgrace us. And we cannot hide from how they have been an inspiring model for people we despise and fear.
So it is in being aware of how these two films did what their system required that we have reason to shrink from our own pleasure. Be especially aware of the lack of humour or doubt. Appreciate that Fredo has to die near the end of Part II because the enterprise believes that that is what we want and expect. Even so, 50 years later, in the form of John Cazale as a weakling and a fool, Fredo is the most interesting and self-critical of the family, and the one like us.
Sooner or later, if there is time, we have to live with the awkward truth that we are a society of Fredos who like to watch movies about lovable supermen who might drop us into the depths of Lake Tahoe. There is a local theory there that the waters are so pure and cold that bodies are preserved on the lake floor and do not rise to the surface. I don’t know. It could be just one more of those Sinatra stories one should not trust.
Sight and Sound, April 2022 – Volume 32, Issue 3
