I Believe in America: The Godfather Story and the Immigrant's Tragedy
SYNOPSIS
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I believe in America—those are the first words we hear at the very beginning of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather I. The film thus signals that it is going to examine the faith in the American dream. By linking that dream to the immigrant experience, The Godfather I and The Godfather II tell a foundational American story, perhaps the foundational American story. Together they chronicle life in America in roughly the first half of the twentieth century (1901-1959). America is a land of immigrants and they are drawn to its shores by the American dream. The Godfather films explore the two components of that dream: family and business. One aspect of the American dream—a role traditionally assigned to men—is to build a solid foundation for one’s family, to provide a good home and to promote one’s children’s growth and education. The other component is the classic American rags-to-riches success story. One should build a business empire and become rich beyond one’s wildest dreams. At a minimum, one should have a business of one’s own because the American dream is a declaration of independence. An American should not have to work for someone else; an American should not have to take orders from anybody.
The dream of being self-employed developed in conscious opposition to the centuries-old European nightmare of servitude. As we have seen in Huckleberry Finn, in the American imagination, Europe is the land of feudalism and autocracy, where the many are forever enslaved to the few. Historically, many Europeans left a variety of forms of oppression in the old country to come to America as the land of freedom and opportunity, with the Statue of Liberty as its welcoming beacon. The dream of founding a family and the dream of founding a business go together in America. Ideally the business should provide the financial foundation for the family and it may even develop into a family business. A man dreams of his son going into his business (perhaps his daughter too). Like the family farm, the family business is at the heart of the American dream. In America, the land of optimism, all good things should be compatible. One should be able to combine family and business to the benefit of both.
In interrogating the American dream, the Godfather films turn on these two polarities: family versus business and Europe versus America (or more broadly: the Old World versus the New). But the Godfather films do not accept the American dream of moving easily between these poles. Instead, the films show them in tension. Devotion to one’s family often comes into conflict with commitment to one’s business. The demands of his business may draw a man away from his family, just as family loyalties may get in the way of business responsibilities. The Godfather films also question whether it is possible to make a smooth transition from the Old World to the New. Their epic scale gives a wide geographic and historical scope to the films. Coppola portrays what it is to move from Europe to America and from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and neither journey goes well for the immigrant. Carrying over Old World habits to the New may interfere with pursuing the American dream, while adapting to the fast pace of change in America can be disorienting to the Old World immigrant. The New World way of life may undermine the immigrant’s Old World customs and traditions, and leave him without a moral compass. The Godfather films present America as the land of modernization but they also raise questions about modernity as a way of life.
The Godfather films are tragic in the way they present the immigrant experience, with characters caught between family and business, Europe and America, the Old World and the New. In Coppola’s view of the immigrant experience, the American dream is elusive and perhaps delusive, and turns all-too-easily into a new nightmare. He chronicles the way in which “fresh start” America threatens to become “false start” America. The immigrant, precisely because he is not fully accepted into mainstream America, is forced to survive on its margins, and thus is tempted by and drawn into a life of crime. Many of the core virtues that make a good American paradoxically turn out to make a good criminal as well—the drive to make something of oneself, the compulsion to succeed, the willingness to stand up for oneself, a commitment to hard work and self-discipline, a sense of self-reliance and refusal to become dependent on anyone, the courage to respond to challenges. The Godfather films tell a tragic story of how a life of crime, sometimes motivated by understandable reasons, becomes self-defeating. The central theme is that, if a man turns to crime to make his fortune and provide for his family, he may in the process lose that family. Thus the films raise profound doubts about the American dream. They question whether the pursuit of the dream really is open to all who come to the United States, and they raise doubts about whether it is possible to separate legitimate activities in pursuit of the American dream from illegitimate.
The opening of The Godfather I brilliantly encapsulates the fundamental dilemma of the immigrant experience. The first words are spoken by an Italian-American undertaker named Amerigo Bonasera, who epitomizes the immigrant pursuing the American dream: “I believe in America. America has made my fortune.”[2] Successful in his chosen profession, he has tried to assimilate into the American way of life, and to bring up his children as Americans: “And I raised my daughter in the American fashion.” Bonasera hoped that he could achieve a happy medium between the Old World and the New, not imposing the strict discipline of the traditional Italian Catholic family on his daughter, while still preserving an old-style conception of family honor: “I gave her freedom, but I taught her never to dishonor her family.” Unfortunately, Bonasera’s hope that he could combine Old World Italy with New World America proved to be unfounded in the case of his daughter: “She found a boyfriend—not an Italian.” The looser morality of young American males led to a disaster for Bonasera’s daughter. When she refused to yield to the boy’s advances, he and a friend beat her savagely and disfigured her face. Still, Bonasera, tried to remain a solid citizen of his adopted land: “I went to the police, like a good American.” Continuing to believe in the American dream, he assumed that, even as an immigrant, he could get justice from the American legal system. But to his dismay, the judge in the case suspended the sentences for the boys’ crimes and “they went free that very day.” Bonasera’s belief that America had accepted him into the ranks of its citizens was shattered by his failure to obtain justice from its courts.
At that point, Bonasera decided to turn to Don Vito Corleone to grant him Old World justice for his daughter. As the local Mafia chieftain, Don Corleone stands for the Sicilian code of vengeance, the primitive notion of an eye-for-an-eye, and Bonasera begs him to murder the young men who beat up his daughter. The Don understands what Bonasera is going through, and, from long experience, he knows how seductive the American dream can be: “You found paradise in America. You had a good trade, and you made a good living, the police protected you, and there were courts of law, and you didn’t need a friend like me.” As a Sicilian, Vito insists on pure reciprocity—the young men will be beaten up, not murdered—all as part of his demand that the transaction be “Old World” in character. Vito is insulted when Bonasera offers to pay him money for the act of vengeance. That would turn it into a commercial transaction, something that smacks too much of modern America for the Godfather. For him, it must be a traditional act of friendship: “accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.” Don Corleone turns his interaction with Bonasera into a case of Old World patronage.[3] His encounter with the undertaker ends with an Old World ritual moment, as Bonasera bows to him and kisses Don Corleone’s hand, finally swearing allegiance to him as his Godfather. Bonasera might as well be back in Europe, submitting to the rule of an aristocrat and committing himself to do his patron’s bidding when the time comes. To obtain Old World justice, Bonasera must submit to Old World servitude. Both the Godfather films grow out of the logic of this opening moment of Part I, during which we see the virtues and the defects of both the Old World way of life and the New.
The opening of The Godfather I introduces us to the conflict between two forms of community that will play out in the rest of both films. In German sociology, this conflict is famously known as Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft--a small, tight-knit, organic, traditional community (represented by the village) versus an extended, cosmopolitan, artificial, modern community (represented by the nation-state).[4] On the one hand, Gemeinschaft is a form of community characterized by concrete personal bonds and relations, in which people generally know each other and form a kind of extended family. These communities are generally ethnically homogenous and governed by custom and tradition. Social status trumps other considerations in most transactions. Gift-exchange is a prominent mode of interaction, and creates a web of obligations that binds people to each other. Relations between people tend to be personal, and “who you are” and “who you know” are crucial in determining your success or failure in the community. On the other hand, Gesellschaft is a form of community built on abstract and impersonal bonds and relations, which thus does not require ethnic homogeneity. In order to extend the number of people who can be included in the community, relations must be depersonalized, since there are just so many people than any one individual can know personally. In the extended community, economic exchange generally replaces gift exchange, as people enter into markets whose function is precisely to allow them to deal with strangers. Markets are impersonal—people give money for the commodities and services they want, rather than exchanging personal gifts. The principle of contract replaces the principle of status, as people freely enter into relations with each other as equals, rather then being woven into webs of domination and subordination (patronage).[5] Extended communities are characterized by the rule of law, not of men. People seek the impersonal justice of a legal system, rather than the personal justice of a vendetta.
Bonasera is caught between these two conceptions of community. As a newly minted American, he turns to the law and its reputation for justice, and, even when disillusioned with that system, he expects to pay with money for any services he receives from Don Corleone. The Godfather has to remind Bonasera about the Old World he came from, where justice was done as a personal favor and everything hinged on whom he knew and whose personal authority he accepted. Don Corleone wants Bonasera to believe, not in America (which is indifferent to him), but in his Godfather, who, as his patron, will take care of him as a friend.
The geography of the Godfather films reflects this fundamental tension between small, traditional communities and extended, modern communities. The village of Corleone is the epitome of the small community, and its traditional way of life is both a curse and a blessing, something people flee from but also long to return to. The United States is the epitome of the modern nation, with its claim to impersonal justice and the rule of law, and its tendency—for good or ill—to turn every human interaction into an economic transaction. Las Vegas—an essentially artificial community springing up out of the Nevada desert—represents the hypertrophy of America as an extended, impersonal community. The New York of the Godfather films is in effect halfway between Corleone and Las Vegas, and indeed the halfway point in the Corleone’s family’s journey from the Old World to the New. As Vito’s son Michael Corleone understands, the family cannot become fully American until it follows the classic American injunction (“Go West, young man”) and moves to Nevada. Don Vito’s neighborhood in New York--Little Italy--is only half American; it is still half Italian. It is appropriately the place where the Corleones begin their transition from the Old World ways of the village to the New World ways of the modern nation, but they cannot complete their journey in New York. As the place where the Old World meets the New, where the traditional way of life intersects with the modern, Vito Corleone’s New York is at the center of his family’s tragedy.
In the Godfather films, the American dream, precisely insofar as it liberates people from the shackles of the Old World, subjects them to the new constraints of the modern world. Dealing with the immigrant experience, the Godfather films explore the tragedy of modernization, portraying what happens when people uproot themselves from their traditional communities to pursue the American dream of freedom and autonomy. In Coppola’s dark vision, the American dream of independence transforms into a new nightmare of servitude, as Michael Corleone becomes trapped in a life of crime. Struggling to liberate and legitimate his family, he ends up subjecting it to the impersonal forces of a modern corporate America, which drain the life out of it.[6]
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
As presented in the Godfather films, Corleone is the poster town for emigration to America. Corleone appears in the Sicilian interlude in The Godfather I, when Michael hides out there to escape the New York police and his mob enemies. We see the village again in The Godfather II in the flashback sequences that portray the childhood of the man originally named Vito Andolini, as well as his return later, after he, as Don Corleone, has become a successful mob boss. One can easily see why the American dream would seem attractive to the inhabitants of Corleone. In scenes in The Godfather I, set in Corleone just after World War II, young Italian men beg U.S. soldiers still stationed there: “Take me to the America, GI.” Corleone is characterized by crushing poverty, and offers few outlets for ambitious young men, whose aggressive impulses are directed into murderous feuds. When Michael Corleone asks about the lack of young men in Corleone, he learns that vendettas have claimed many of their lives.
Corleone is small enough so that everybody seems to know everybody else, but if the town is one big family, it is not a happy one. Corleone is a patriarchal society, dominated by a Mafia overlord, Don Ciccio, who treats the town as his private domain. Apparently the citizens of Corleone have no legal authorities to appeal to if Don Ciccio treats them unjustly.[7] When Vito’s father insults Ciccio, the Don has him killed, and then he has Vito’s brother Paolo shot as well, to prevent him from seeking vengeance for his murdered father. The young Vito is next in line to be killed; only by sacrificing her own life is his mother able to save him. With young men having little to look forward to in Corleone and facing a limited life expectancy as well, no wonder they long to leave for America. From what they learn from their relatives who have gone to the United States, and from watching American movies, the people of Corleone, especially the young men, think of America as the Promised Land, a place where they will be free to pursue a fulfilling life for themselves and their families. One of Michael’s Sicilian bodyguards, Fabrizio, asks him point-blank: “Is America as rich as they say?” His companion, Calo, is so sick of the American dream that he tells Fabrizio: “Stop bothering me with this rich America stuff.”
Although Corleone is stifling and suffocating as a community, especially for young men, the town does have its good side. Michael’s stay in Corleone brings him back to life after his shattering experience in New York, where he had to murder the police captain McCluskey and the rival mobster Sollozzo. In Corleone, Michael is thunderstruck by the beauty of a young Sicilian woman named Apollonia, he falls in love with her, and he gets to marry her. But in his pursuit of Apollonia, he gains more than just a beautiful bride; the process integrates Michael into the Corleone community. He gets back in touch with his family roots in Sicily.[8] He discovers what a small town like Corleone has to offer—a sense of belonging. To court Apollonia, Michael must participate in a series of age-old customs and rituals. On his first official “date” with Apollonia, a crowd of local women shows up as chaperones.[9] Gift-giving is a prominent part of the courtship ritual in Corleone, and creates personal bonds between Michael and Apollonia and her family. The courting process culminates in the ultimate village ceremony, marriage, presided over by the unifying cultural force in Corleone, the Catholic Church.[10] Michael marries into a whole family in Corleone and momentarily finds a home. This Sicilian idyll is shattered when an attempt to assassinate him goes awry and Apollonia is blown up instead. Although devastated by this outcome, Michael has at least gotten a taste of the warmth and fellowship of village life in Corleone.
The good side of the small town shows up again in The Godfather II when Vito returns to the place he had to flee as a young boy. Don Ciccio had wanted to exterminate every male in the Andolini family and the small size of Corleone seemed to make that outcome inevitable. How could young Vito survive if the Mafia boss’s henchmen could scour every corner of Corleone and proclaim that anyone who hid the boy would be killed? Yet here the tight personal ties of the small town come to Vito’s aid, as townspeople risk their lives to smuggle the young boy out of the clutches of Don Ciccio and on his way to America. There, after a long struggle, he establishes himself as Don Corleone, a powerful man in the New York Italian-American community. Among other things, he founds an olive oil company, which imports its product from Sicily. Vito is thus able to return triumphantly to Corleone, with his wife and three boys. For the townspeople, he is the living embodiment of the American dream, a wealthy and respected man in the New World, maintaining business ties with the Old.
Back in Corleone, Vito is reunited with his relatives at ceremonial occasions, which center around the obligatory gift-giving, including a miniature Statue of Liberty (evidently a popular item in Sicily). Some happy memories must have brought Don Vito back to his hometown, and, as Michael does years later, he momentarily gets back in touch with his Sicilian roots. But before we sentimentalize this other Sicilian idyll, we need to remember that Vito has another reason--more pressing than nostalgia--for returning to Corleone. He finally gets his revenge for the murder of his father by personally killing an aged, nearly senile Don Ciccio (in deleted scenes, Vito murders two other men complicit in his father’s death).
Coppola gives a complex portrait of Corleone in the two Godfather films. The village is visibly rooted in the distant past, but that is another way of saying that it is virtually in ruins. We see the virtues of the village community—its ties are personal and run deep, family bonds are strong, people help each other, their lives are anchored in religious faith, and they are guided and supported by a whole array of customs, traditions, rituals, and ceremonies. In Corleone, you need never be alone and you will never be left to your own devices. But that strong sense of community also creates a stifling environment in the town. You will never be left alone. Corleone is too small—it lacks the resources to help young people flourish and it makes it all-too-easy for a local boss like Don Ciccio to dominate its affairs. The worst aspect of the town’s traditionalism is that it is caught up in cycles of vengeance that appear to be unending. For both Vito and Michael, Corleone turns out to be the proverbial nice place to visit, but they are lucky that they did not have to grow up there. Only America, with its much broader horizons, gave them a chance to rise above the level of an ignorant peasant. If they had been raised in Corleone and remained there, no one would ever have heard of them.[11] Instead, by coming to America, they achieve a kind of national prominence, if only as crime bosses. They get their names in the newspapers; indeed, they draw the attention of the federal government and become national news. Only in America can a Corleone become somebody important, a serious man.
LIVING THE DREAM IN LITTLE ITALY
Vito’s transformation from a frightened boy into the powerful Don Corleone does not occur immediately when he comes to America, largely because the America he finds is initially not all that different from the Italy he left. In one of the many ironies in Godfather II, Vito Andolini’s first taste of the Land of the Free is imprisonment. Immediately upon arrival, he is quarantined on suspicion of smallpox in a medical ward on Ellis Island. In one of the film’s most poignant moments, the sad and lonely boy sings to himself with the Statue of Liberty visible through what look like the bars of his “cell” window. This is Vito’s first sign that America may not be the welcoming land of opportunity it claims to be. He grows up and reaches manhood in a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan that is still known today as Little Italy. Although technically Vito is now in a nation called the United States, effectively his life is confined to a few city blocks in either direction, giving Little Italy the feel of an Old World small town.[12] Vito still speaks Italian (in a Sicilian dialect) among his family and friends, and he still follows Old World customs. As an immigrant, he finds that his economic opportunities remain limited. To support his growing family, he is forced to take a menial job in a local grocery store.
Worst of all, Vito finds that even in democratic America, he is still subject to the whims of an Old World big shot. Just as Don Ciccio dominated Corleone, Don Fanucci rules the neighborhood in Little Italy. Well-dressed and affecting a kind of Old World charm, Fanucci struts around the neighborhood running a protection racket that extorts money from local merchants who fear his power. Throwing his weight around, Fanucci gets Vito fired from his grocery store job in order to replace him with his own nephew. Just as in Corleone, there is no civic authority to whom Vito and the other denizens of Little Italy can turn to protect them from Don Fanucci and his Mafia connections. Vito is puzzled by this situation and asks his friend Genco about Fanucci: “If he’s Italian, why does he bother other Italians?” Genco replies: “He knows they have nobody to protect them.” As we have already seen in the case of Bonasera, the much-touted American rule of law does not extend to Italian-American immigrants. New York’s Little Italy maintains much of the warmth and community feeling of an Italian village, but it is also plagued by the same kind of lawlessness that allowed the Mafia to flourish back in the old country.
It is this lack of any kind of legal protection that impels Vito Corleone into a life of crime. With his livelihood and his family’s future at risk, Vito gets involved in petty theft with some fellow Italian-Americans named Clemenza and Tessio. Their close proximity in their small neighborhood brings them together, and they are drawn into their partnership in crime by doing a series of favors for each other, not by signing a formal contract. Unfortunately the close quarters in Little Italy also mean that Fanucci, as the local boss, knows all the details of what they are stealing and how much they are selling it for. Fanucci is actually surprised that a man of Vito’s mettle has escaped his scrutiny; he asks him: “How come I never heard of you before?”
When Fanucci tries to muscle in on the trio’s meager action, Vito decides to take the law into his own hands and murder Fanucci. Given the fact that we have seen Fanucci to be a glorified thug and we have also seen Vito’s need to take care of his wife and children, it is easy to sympathize with his violent act. Fanucci acts like a patron of the community, ostentatiously giving money to the Catholic Church, but he is in fact bad for the neighborhood. Vito becomes a hero for liberating Little Italy from Fanucci’s tyranny. He gains a reputation for being a man of consequence in the community. Vito’s increased stature in Little Italy is clear in a deleted scene when he goes to buy some fruit from a street vendor and the man will not let him pay for it: “I don’t want your money. Take it as a gift.” We are squarely within the Old World gift economy, especially when we hear Vito’s reply: “If there’s something I can do for you, you come, you talk.” The Godfather is born.
Coppola made an interesting choice in the way he shows Vito’s emergence as the local godfather in Little Italy. We have already seen him assert his dominance over Clemenza and Tessio, his initial partners in crime, who will go on to become his captains, the caporegimes, in his crime organization. At this point, we might expect the film to move on to show Vito establishing the rackets that will soon form the core of his crime empire. How did the Corleone family become involved in bootlegging? How did they gain a foothold in gambling? How did they establish their control over powerful labor unions?[13] Instead of answering these obvious questions, Coppola made an odd choice to show Vito’s newfound stature in Little Italy. We see him settling a minor dispute between a landlord and a tenant. An old woman, Signora Colombo--who happens to be a friend of Vito’s wife--comes to beg him to get her re-instated in her apartment. Her noisy dog has given her landlord an excuse to evict her and rent out the apartment for more money. This is not exactly the stuff of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Playing the younger Vito, Robert de Niro does a great job of subtly conveying the new godfather’s bewilderment and annoyance at being drawn into such a trivial dispute and having to waste his time settling it. Nevertheless, Vito does meet with the landlord and he tries to reason with him to take the woman back, calmly and politely appealing to Don Roberto’s sense of decency.[14] He evokes the communal spirit of the small town, speaking of the plight of the poor widow: “She has nobody to take care of her. . . . All she has is this neighborhood.” When the landlord refuses to comply with Vito’s request, he simply suggests that Don Roberto enquire about Don Corleone in the neighborhood. The landlord returns in the next scene, obviously scared to death, and quickly makes one concession after another on the merest hint from Vito, bidding against himself to lower the widow’s monthly rent. Vito gets the greedy landlord to become an Old World gentleman and admit that “money isn’t everything.” When he leaves the offices of Genco Olive Oil, the rattled landlord is clearly relieved to have escaped with his life.
This sequence is brilliantly contrived to show that Vito has indeed become the criminal equivalent of the new sheriff in town. We do not have to see a scene in which the landlord asks around and learns to his dismay that Vito is the man who killed Don Fanucci. Don Roberto’s nervous fumbling with the door lock as he tries to get in and out of Vito’s office tells us all we need to know—the word is out in Little Italy that Don Corleone is a man to reckon with—and to be feared. This scene does a better job of conveying a sense of Vito’s new-found status and power in the community than the more obvious tactic of showing him coming into his own in an organized crime situation.
The landlord-tenant sequence is part of a larger strategy that is vital to the overall effect of the Godfather films. The triviality of the dispute is precisely the point. It reveals how much New York’s Little Italy is like the town of Corleone. Everything is focused on the immediate neighborhood. The old woman needs the neighborhood to take care of her, and all Vito needs to do to bring Don Roberto into line is to refer him to what the neighborhood now thinks of Don Corleone. Little Italy is still a kind of village and whoever wants to dominate it must get involved in its day-to-day activities. That is integral to the all-important system of personal relations that characterizes both Corleone and Little Italy. Vito must be a hands-on godfather; he must intervene personally in the neighborhood’s affairs if he wants to gain and maintain its respect. Even Don Fanucci, with all his gentlemanly pretentions, is willing to get his hands dirty as a criminal. He shakes down his victims in person. To use the language of the congressional hearing scenes in The Godfather II, the crime bosses in the early days of the Mafia do not yet have “buffers.” They do not yet act only through intermediaries to insulate them from legal responsibility for the crimes they want done. When we see Vito emerge as the new godfather, it occurs in a kind of Old World context, a community in which he knows just about everyone in Little Italy and just about everyone in Little Italy knows him. And we do not see him entering into financial transactions; he does people favors, and he expects to be repaid with favors from them in turn. Of course, he wants money, but, as we saw with Bonasera, Don Corleone wants respect even more.
The way Coppola painstakingly creates on screen the small-town environment in which Vito operates in the early stages of his crime career is key to the sympathy he generates for his protagonist. In their humanizing portrait of gangsters, the Godfather films represented something new in the history of cinema. In the classic period of Hollywood’s gangster movies—the days of Little Caesar (1931), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932)—the mobster was generally presented as a psychopath or a sociopath.[15] He was portrayed as an outsider, a lone wolf, at war with society, a kind of monster in his inability to participate in normal human relationships. If he has a family, it is somehow pathological, as in Tony Camonte’s quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister in Scarface. The main point about the gangster in the earlier films is that he cannot fit into society, and thus is denied our sympathy; at best he can be an anti-hero.[16] Coppola’s Godfather films are much subtler and more complex than their precursors because several of his gangsters are well-rounded characters, developed as full human beings, who have families and friends. They thereby earn our sympathy for the humanity they share with us. They are gangsters, but we see them first as human beings (in The Godfather I, we first meet the Corleones at a family wedding party).[17]
How can we not sympathize with the emergent godfather when the first thing that we see Vito do with his new-found power is to take the side of a poor widow against a money-grubbing landlord?[18] To be sure, we see Vito cold-bloodedly commit murders. But the men we see him kill personally—Don Fanucci and Don Ciccio—are themselves gangsters, who have the particularly nasty habit of threatening and sometimes killing helpless women. Whatever else may be said against Vito, he is not a psychopathic killer. His murders, although clearly against the law, at least have understandable motives (self-preservation or vengeance). Vito uses the power he gains to do good in his community, and from everything we see of him, we can only conclude that he is a decent family man, faithful to his wife and always trying to do what is best for his children. In making the Godfather films, Coppola’s genius was to take the stereotypical figure of the Italian-American gangster and make him sympathetic by emphasizing, not the gangster part, but the Italian-American part.[19] He fleshes out his principal gangster figure, giving him a family and a community in the context of which he can display his fundamental humanity. As an Italian-American himself, Coppola was able to draw upon the rich immigrant heritage of his own family to bring an Italian-American community to life on screen.[20]
MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE
Nowhere is Coppola’s genius more evident than in the wedding sequence at the beginning of The Godfather I, a tour-de-force in capturing Italian-Americans at their most ethnic. The Corleones are no longer living in Little Italy, but they still bring Italy with them to the suburbs (Long Beach, Long Island). They seem to be re-creating Corleone on some higher level, now that they have the wealth to do so.[21] The wedding is Italian-style, but one that poor Sicilians could only dream of. There seems to be an endless supply of food and drinks. The wedding guests speak Italian, they sing Italian songs, they dance Italian dances, and they follow Italian wedding customs. All the emphasis is on family. Vito is not satisfied until the last of his sons, Michael, shows up to participate in the festivities. Gift giving is the order of the day. To be sure, the bride’s purse is filled with envelopes stuffed with cash, but on such occasions, it is the thought that counts. This is still a traditional gift-exchange economy. As we have seen with Bonasera, a Sicilian father cannot refuse any request on his daughter’s wedding day, and Vito is dispensing favors left-and-right, confident that someday they will be returned.
We thus see how Old World customs are still operating in the suburbs of New York. On balance, it is the good side of Don Corleone that is in evidence, as we see him use his powers to aid his clients. He is the champion of the family. He will get justice for Bonasera’s daughter, he will help the baker Nazorine get the Italian son-in-law he wants, and he will come to the aid of his own godson, Johnny Fontane, by rescuing his faltering entertainment career. To be sure, accomplishing these “good” deeds will require violence, intimidation, and the use of Vito’s connections with corrupt judges and members of Congress. But at least Vito is trying to help people, and we see the people who will be benefitted and we do not see the people who will be harmed. The wedding sequence holds out the hope that the Old World might be successfully synthesized with the New. The Corleone family abides by its Sicilian customs, but it can now finance them with its New World wealth. No Italian wedding would be complete without an Italian singer, but the Corleones get the most famous crooner in America, no less than Johnny Fontane (a stand-in for Frank Sinatra).
The wedding sequence shows the Corleone family at its best, and indeed at a kind of pinnacle, from which it is soon to descend into tragedy. Vito appears to have achieved the American dream. He has provided a good home for his wife and children, and he is looking ahead to their future. Sonny has gone into the family business; as for Michael, Vito has sent him to an Ivy League college (Dartmouth) and, as we later learn, he has plans for Michael to enter politics and become a senator or a governor. Vito has also fulfilled the entrepreneurial side of the American dream. He has founded a joint venture and become successful in the olive oil business. His less legitimate enterprises are even more profitable and have made him a very wealthy man, just as the American dream calls for. He is involved in criminal activities, but his marginalized status as an immigrant seems to have forced him into a life of crime. We get glimpses of the violence that underpins Vito’s success, but in both films we mostly see Vito helping family and friends. He has become a pillar of the Italian-American community and earned the honorific title of Don Corleone.
Vito seems to have learned how to deal with the inner tensions that threaten to make the American dream problematic. He has managed to combine success as a family man with success as a businessman, largely by compartmentalizing the two sides of his life. He insulates his wife and all the women in his family from any danger stemming from his criminal business activities. He does not allow family business to be discussed at the dinner table. At the beginning of The Godfather I, he thinks that he has successfully kept Michael’s hands clean and that his youngest son is poised to pursue the kind of legitimate success that has eluded Vito. At this point, the mobsters seem to have a gentleman’s agreement to keep family and business separate. Michael does not need to go about with a bodyguard because the family’s enemies know that he is a “civilian” and thus he is off limits for their vengeance.[22] According to the Mafia code, you do not attack a man’s family, and his house remains a safe refuge. If a gang war breaks out, the mobsters “go to the mattresses,” moving out of their homes and into rented quarters in order to avoid civilian collateral damage. As long as the Corleones and the other mafiosi can keep family separate from business, they can hope to combine the best of the Old World and the New. The mafiosi can maintain the personal family values and the sense of honor characteristic of the Old World village, while pursuing their business activities and piling up wealth on the model of the heroic American entrepreneur.
“DRUGS IS A DIRTY BUSINESS”
As we have seen, the Godfather films have a geographic and a historical dimension. They deal with the movement from the Old World to the New, which is correlated with the movement from a traditional way of life to a modern. In particular, the films deal with the Mafia in transition, moving from a backward-looking, quasi-feudal institution, rooted in Old World values and based on an almost chivalric code of honor, to a forward-looking, quasi-corporate model, more suited to liberal democratic America, in which commercial interests predominate, often at the expense of traditional considerations, including moral scruples. The Godfather I focuses on a development that brings these issues to a head, an important crossroad in the Mafia’s history—the question of whether the mob should get involved in drug trafficking.[23] This issue is at the center of the plot of The Godfather I and drives the action, especially the repeated attempts to assassinate Don Corleone. An upstart gangster named Virgil Sollozzo has set up an operation to import heroin into the United States and he wants to partner with the Godfather for the sake of financing and obtaining protection from the police as a result of Vito’s political connections (the politicians and judges he infamously has in his pocket).
The move into narcotics would mark a major departure for Don Corleone, who has been hitherto somewhat old-fashioned in his criminal activities. His younger associates are in favor of entering the drug trade. His eldest son Sonny sees the financial advantages: “There’s a lot of money in that white powder.” Vito’s adopted son Tom Hagen, his consigliere (his official counselor), is also in favor of taking Sollozzo’s offer. He argues that the Mafia is at a turning point:
There’s more money potential in narcotics than anything else we’re looking at. Now if we don’t get into it, somebody else will—maybe one of the Five Families, maybe all of them. Now, with the money they earn . . . they can buy more police and political power. Then they come after us. Now we have the unions, we have the gambling—and they’re the best things to have---but narcotics is the thing of the future. Now if we don’t get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean, not now, but in ten years from now.
Hagen’s considerations are economic. He does not view drugs as a moral issue and does not seem at all concerned that moving into narcotics would mark a break with a family tradition. Hagen sounds like an American business executive, staring at the bottom line and looking for the next big thing, “the thing of the future.” He takes the long view of the matter (looking out ten years into the future) and he thinks about the larger context. Ultimately his economic concerns turn out to be political. The profits from narcotics can be “invested” in building up the family’s political connections and thereby forestalling any other mobsters’ attempts to displace the Corleones. At several points in the Godfather films, people say: “Times are changing,” and the challenge for the Corleones is to keep up with those changes.[24]
Caught between his customary way of doing business, which still has an Old World feel to it, and the wave of the future in the New World, Don Corleone decides not to break with what amounts to a family tradition. He turns down Sollozzo’s proposal, offering his reasons: “I have a lot of friends in politics, but they wouldn’t be friendly very long if they knew my business was drugs instead of gambling, which they regard as a—a harmless vice, but drugs is a dirty business . . . . It makes—it doesn’t make any difference to me what a man does for a living, understand. But your business is . . . a little dangerous.”[25] Don Corleone does not exactly make a moral argument against the drug trade; in fact, he claims to be indifferent to any moral considerations.[26] He simply argues that getting involved in drugs would be bad for business. But his argument is indirectly moral because it rests on a moral distinction between narcotics and other rackets. The community regards gambling (and presumably prostitution and several other mob activities) as victimless crimes. These are crimes only because the law prohibits them, not because they are inherently evil. Like many good Americans, Don Corleone puts drugs in a different moral category; for him, selling drugs is not a victimless crime and thus he refuses to participate in it.
Prohibition—instituted by the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States—is the classic example of the issue Vito raises. The folly of Prohibition was the attempt to deny people a product that the majority of Americans did not regard as evil. In retrospect, the stupidity of Prohibition as government policy is crystal clear. It is a perfect illustration of what goes wrong when government regulation overextends itself and produces unintended consequences. Prohibition only succeeded in increasing alcohol consumption in the United States, and it was the greatest boon to organized crime in American history. By criminalizing a widely accepted activity, Prohibition made sure that only criminals would become involved in it, thereby giving the mob a lucrative business to finance all its other operations. The argument over the drug trade in The Godfather I is brief, but it is at the center of the plot, and has a larger resonance. In rejecting the drug trade, Don Corleone in effect offers a defense of the Mafia as it has been operating up until this moment. Many of its businesses—bootlegging, gambling, prostitution—were criminal only because the government had made them illegal. The fact that these activities have at other times and other places been perfectly legal confirms the arbitrariness of outlawing them. It may or may not be good public policy, but it is not a matter of the inherently immoral nature of these activities.
Don Corleone suggests that he and his criminal associates have simply been acting like businessmen, providing products and services that American consumers want and approve. As immigrants, he and his fellow Italian-Americans have been the victims of prejudice and blocked from pursuing many legitimate business opportunities.[27] The more dubious aspects of their behavior follow from the fact that they cannot operate out in the open and do not enjoy the protection of the law. For example, their need to enforce their contracts themselves leads directly to their use of their own “enforcers,” murderous thugs such as Luca Brasi. The Godfather films are constantly drawing parallels between gangsters and legitimate businessmen. This is usually taken to be a way of showing that so-called legitimate businessmen are really gangsters, and that was certainly Coppola’s stated intention. He famously said that The Godfather I is “a metaphor for capitalism.”[28]
But this principle cuts both ways. It can also suggest that the so-called gangsters are just businessmen.[29] They are giving the public what it wants, and if their actions are criminal, the only reason they are is that the government has declared them illegal. When we see the Genco sign being raised above Don Corleone’s olive oil company, it is a scene right out of the American dream, the moment when the entrepreneur proudly opens his own store for business. Genco says: “God bless America. We’re gonna make a big business.” From Huckleberry Finn on, we have seen how thin the line between legitimate and illegitimate activities has been in American life. The Godfather films help explain this development by showing how that line keeps shifting, depending on what the government, sometimes arbitrarily, decides is legal or illegal. One moment Italian-Americans are making a major contribution to the developing American wine industry by bringing their Old World skill and experience to the New. The next moment these perfectly honest entrepreneurs are put out of business by Prohibition. No wonder some of them are tempted to become involved in the Mafia’s clandestine alcohol-making operations during Prohibition. The 18th Amendment passes, and suddenly hitherto honest citizens become criminals or lose their livelihood.
Here is another respect in which the Godfather films depart from the traditional Hollywood gangster movie: they do not draw as sharp a line between their criminals and their representatives of the law. The early gangster films tried to paint in whites and blacks, whereas the Godfather films use a palette of grays. Generally it is easy to separate the good guys from the bad guys in films such as Scarface or Little Caesar. The criminals are thugs, shattering the peace of society, and they are dishonest to the core. By contrast, the police who pursue the criminals are usually representatives of law and order, and embody a whole series of familiar virtues, from honesty to courage. The representatives of government are clearly presented as morally superior to the criminals. The way Eliot Ness figures as Al Capone’s nemesis in a whole series of films and television programs is a classic example of this kind of Hollywood stereotyping. Capone is at best presented as a charming rogue and more frequently as a murderous thug, whereas Ness is a boy scout with a badge—the untouchable, the incorruptible. There is no Eliot Ness figure in the Godfather films—no morally uncompromised figure who sets out to bring the gangsters to justice out of public-spirited motives. The very premise of the Godfather’s power is that he has corrupted a vast number of public figures. He can rely on a network of judges, congressmen, senators, police officers, and journalists to do his bidding.
Is there a single honest prominent public official anywhere in the two Godfather films?[30] The gangsters may be sinister, but they often seem to have higher ethical standards than the people pursuing them. Most of the public figures are hypocrites—they will not show up at Vito’s daughter’s wedding, for fear of the publicity, but to remain in the Don’s good graces, they make sure to send their greetings and a gift of money. The one major policeman in Godfather I is Captain McCluskey and he is in the pay of Sollozzo, agreeing to act as a bodyguard for a known criminal. McCluskey is a party to the second attempt to assassinate Vito, when he is in the hospital recovering from the first. Without any legal justification, the police captain breaks Michael Corleone’s jaw, at a time when the young man has no criminal record and is in fact a decorated war hero. Don Corleone and his associates commit a lot of crimes, including murder, but the government forces arrayed against them cannot claim any moral high ground in the conflict between them.
This pattern continues in The Godfather II. If anything, government figures appear in an even more dubious light. In the person of Pat Geary, we finally get to know a U.S. Senator and he may well be the single most contemptible figure in both films. He puts on a good show in public, pretending to be a servant of the people and glad-handing with the best of them. But in private, Geary is as sinister as any of the gangsters, attempting to shakedown Michael over a casino deal in Geary’s home state of Nevada. Michael is justified in telling Geary: “Senator, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy.” Moreover, Geary turns out to be a sexual predator, unfaithful to his wife with prostitutes in both Nevada and Cuba. One would be hard pressed to find a more vicious portrayal of a member of Congress anywhere else in popular culture—not even the despicable Frank Underwood in the television series, House of Cards.
In the closing sequence of The Godfather II, it seems that Michael Corleone is finally going to be brought to justice by a congressional committee investigating organized crime. Our first hint as to the morally compromised status of this committee is the fact that Pat Geary is a member of it. Subject to blackmail by the Corleone family—they have effectively framed him for killing a prostitute in a rough sex game—this man, who earlier in private castigated Michael and his associates for “trying to pass [themselves] off as decent Americans,” gives a fulsome public speech in praise of Italian-Americans as his main contribution to the committee hearings. In his panegyric, he pulls names like Enrico Fermi out of his hat, and he has the nerve to say: “Some of my best friends are Italian-American.” We later learn that the committee’s lead lawyer is in the pay of the rival gangster, Hyman Roth. What appears to be the pursuit of justice is actually just part of a clever mob attempt to destroy Michael Corleone.
In sum, far from being presented as the mob’s antithesis in the Godfather films, the government is repeatedly presented as in league with it, deeply implicated in its worst crimes. The films are anti-capitalist in conception, but they are by no means pro-government, and do not suggest that government is the answer to the problems supposedly created by capitalism. In fact the films suggest a continuity between the quasi-feudal lords of Sicily, the crime bosses of New York, and the politicians in Washington, D.C. Each one is in the terms of the film a pezzonovante, a “big shot” who uses his position of power to exploit common people. In that sense, the problem with capitalism is not that it is at odds with a genuinely public spirited government trying to regulate it. The real problem is, not the free market, but what is known as “crony capitalism,” the way government officials are constantly in bed with businessmen and allow them to manipulate public policy to enrich themselves at the public’s expense.[31] With all the judges and the politicians in his pocket, Don Corleone is the poster boy, not for the free market, but for crony capitalism. After all, his origins are in Old World feudalism, not New World capitalism.[32] In historical terms, the Godfather films repeatedly show that the oppression and injustice ordinary people endure result from the ways that Old World feudalism has carried over into the New World. For all the talk of democracy, common people in America are still under the thumbs of big shots. It was government interference in the operation of free markets that generated gangsters. It was Prohibition—the reductio ad absurdum of market regulation—that set in motion mob violence on an unprecedented scale.[33] Prohibition is the classic case of government regulating, not too little, but too much.
A NATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE
The fact that the government forces arrayed against the criminal figures in the two Godfather films are not portrayed as superior, morally or otherwise, does not justify the crimes of the Corleones. But it does make it difficult to present them as moral monsters, a few uniquely evil men in a world of moral sanctity and government officials who unequivocally stand for justice. The Godfather films depict, not good versus evil, but a thoroughly corrupt world, with bad guys on both sides. Again, this does not excuse the Corleones, but it forces us to qualify any condemnation we wish to make of them. They are the product of the morally compromised and fundamentally corrupt world in which they live. If anything, the criminals in the Godfather films at times appear to be more virtuous than the forces supposedly bringing them to justice. At least some of the gangsters are good family men. Unlike Senator Geary, Hyman Roth, for example, seems faithful to his wife.[34] They are in fact presented as almost a stereotype of an elderly, middle-class couple, peacefully living out their twilight years in Florida.
The forces of law and order in the films, if not downright evil themselves, tend to be faceless bureaucrats, with no private lives to speak of and hence no private virtues. The FBI agents assigned to guard Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather II seem perfectly content to spend the rest of their lives playing cards with the gangster-turned-government-witness. We are used to seeing the FBI in a more heroic role in gangster movies. In The Godfather II, it turns out that they cannot keep Frankie Pentangeli alive; despite all their elaborate precautions, the Mafia is still able to get to him. In The Godfather I, the FBI first appears in the diminished role of wedding crashers. As they intrude upon this private family occasion to take down the license plate numbers of the cars parked outside the compound, Sonny Corleone, with some justification, says: “Goddamn FBI doesn’t respect nothin’.” Paradoxically, the gangsters are generally more decent and humane than the representatives of the law in the Godfather films.
This is another way in which these films depart from cinematic tradition and create sympathy for some of their gangster protagonists. It would not be unreasonable to argue that Vito Corleone, all things considered, is the most admirable main character in both films (admittedly, in a world of generally less than admirable human beings).[35] For all his faults and all the evil deeds he commits, he exhibits some of the traditional virtues, above all, as a family man. Accordingly, unlike the traditional Hollywood gangster, Vito does not die in the street in a hail of bullets, getting his just deserts for a life of crime. It tells us a great deal about Coppola’s distinctive vision that, in a deeply moving scene, Vito gets to die of natural causes, at the end of a long life, and in the company of his grandson Anthony. In a brilliant bit of improvisation, Marlon Brando shows Vito only pretending to be a monster just to scare the little boy in play. In the end, Vito seems to deserve the lavish funeral he is given.
By comparison with traditional screen gangsters, Don Corleone is a decent human being (this may not be saying much, but it is saying something). He is not particularly aggressive or vindictive (certainly not by Sicilian standards), and he repeatedly shows that he is a man who can be reasoned with. Even his worst enemy, Don Barzini, pays tribute to him: “We all know him as a man of his word—a modest man, he’ll always listen to reason.” Vito claims to reject Sollozzo’s drug deal out of purely prudential considerations, but it is hard to believe that some form of moral scruples on his part is not involved. He seems to be old-fashioned in his ways, and contrary to an American entrepreneur, he is out of touch with the latest business developments. As Vito moves further into the 20th century in America, he starts to become an anachronism, a throw-back to the Old World (just as earlier Fanucci—a throwback to the old-style Moustache Petes in Little Italy--had become an anachronism by the time Vito killed him). In some ways, Vito’s tragedy is his failure to adapt more fully and more quickly to American ways. He does not remain wholly true to the village ethos of his native Sicily, but he does not completely abandon it either and go over to life in the fast lane in modern America, letting nothing stand in the way of making money. A fully Americanized gangster would have taken Sollozzo’s drug deal.
Once Vito turns down Sollozzo’s offer, his fate is sealed; he has earned the enmity of all the gangsters who want to take the Mafia into the drug business. In the aftermath of the attempt on Vito’s life and Michael’s retaliatory murder of Sollozzo, an all-out gang war erupts between the Corleones and the Five Families. We are reminded of the fact that gangsters are violent men and that they do kill people. But even in this sequence, Coppola is careful to maintain sympathy for the gangsters. We see very little of the actual violence of the gang war. It goes by quickly in a montage and we mostly just get glimpses of it in newspaper headlines: “Police Hunt Cop Killer,” “City Cracks Down: Pressure on Organized Crime,” “Police Captain Linked with Drug Rackets.” “Mobster Barzini Questioned in Underworld Feud.” Coppola spends much more time on Clemenza’s giving Michael an extended cooking lesson, and indeed there is something strangely domestic about the scenes of the gangsters going to the mattresses, sustained by Clemenza’s Italian cooking and Chinese take-out. Assigned to kill the traitor Paulie on a trip to Manhattan, Clemenza remains the consummate family man as they leave: “Watch out for the kids when you’re backin’ out.” Clemenza has combined the errand of rubbing out Paulie with a shopping trip on behalf of his wife. In perhaps the most memorable line in both the Godfather films, the actor who plays Clemenza, Richard Castellano, improvised what amounts to Paulie’s epitaph in words that seem to epitomize the choice between crime and family: “Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.”[36]
In this whole sequence, Coppola does his best to normalize the gang warfare by routinizing it, suggesting that it is periodic, inevitable, and predictable, as Clemenza explains to Michael:
These things gotta happen every five years or so—ten years—helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. You know you gotta stop ‘em at the beginning, like they shoulda stopped Hitler at Munich. They shoulda never let him get away with that. They were just askin’ for big trouble. You know, Mike, we was all proud o’ you. Bein’ a hero and all. Your father too.
At first a gang war seems as far removed from normal and decent human behavior as possible, but Clemenza reminds us that war is a common and legitimate human activity and sometimes a necessary one. In the American imagination, World War II is the good war and one of the heroes it produced was Michael Corleone.[37]
In The Godfather II, the last conversation between Tom Hagen and Frankie Pentangeli again associates the Mafia with the events leading up to World War II. Trying to persuade Pentangeli to commit suicide so that he can never again be used to testify against Michael Corleone, Hagen mentions that Frankie was “always interested in politics and history,” and points out that he was worried about Hitler as early as 1933. Tom then extends the parallel between high-life politicians and low-life gangsters further back in time and indeed offers a classical precedent, reminding Frankie how the Mafia modeled itself on the Roman Empire: “They based it on the old Roman legions and called them regimes—the capos and soldiers.” Waxing nostalgic, Frankie says proudly: “Those were the great old days, you know. And we was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.” Michael draws similar parallels between politics and crime when discussing his father with Kay: “My father’s no different than any other powerful man. . . . Any man who’s responsible for other people—like a senator or president.” Kay tries to draw a distinction: “You know how naïve you sound? . . . Senators and presidents don’t have men killed.” Michael shoots back: “Oh, who’s being naïve, Kay?” Both films seem to take Michael’s side in this argument. Associating the mafia with grand political parallels casts gang warfare in a much better light. Perhaps this internecine strife will have positive results too, and bring a lasting peace to gangland.
But more violence must occur before that peace becomes possible. Vito must endure the murder of Sonny in a particularly brutal fashion by the rival mobsters. In the depths of his grief, Don Corleone once again shows that he is not a common thug. He suppresses his violent impulses, foreswears all retaliation, and sets the course for peace. He tells Tom Hagen: “I want no enquiries made. I want no acts of vengeance. I want to arrange a meeting with the heads of the Five Families . . . . This war stops now.” Ultimately, Don Corleone proves to be a peacemaker. With the meeting Hagen arranges, the Mafia takes a decisive step forward—out of the old world of the Sicilian small town and into the new world of the American nation-state. As we have seen, the mafiosi, rooted in Little Italy, had in effect recreated Corleone in New York—with predictable results. The principle of vendetta was on its way to destroying the Mafia just as it had done in Corleone, as one mobster after another was wiped out in retaliation for prior murders. Just to preserve themselves, the mafiosi must make the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesselschaft, and seek a more abstract and impersonal way of dealing with each other. The Mafia must start operating more like an institution united for business and less like a family divided against itself. Accordingly, under the leadership of Don Corleone and Don Barzini, the Mafia re-organizes itself on an American corporate model.[38]
To bring home this point, Coppola shows the mob bosses getting together as if they were business executives at a corporate board meeting. The script specifies that the scene take place at “the boardroom of a bank.” To lend authenticity to the scene, Coppola shot the exteriors at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the interiors at “the boardroom of the Penn Central Railroad in Grand Central Terminal, 32nd floor.”[39] The goal of the meeting is to organize the Mafia into a larger organization that will go beyond the parochial limits of the families that comprise it—in short, to create a national crime syndicate. The various families will reach beyond their local boundaries and learn to deal with each other at a distance. Don Corleone gives a sense of the expanded geographic scope of the meeting as he greets and thanks the participants: “And also the other heads of the Five Families, from New York, New Jersey, Carmine Cuneo from the Bronx, and from Brooklyn—Philip Tattaglia—and from Staten Island, we have with us Victor Stracci. And all the other associates that come as far as from California, Kansas City, all the other territories of the country.” The Mafia will no longer be restricted to a single city; having expanded throughout the United Sates, the mob must become a truly national organization.
This development marks a major departure from tradition for the Mafia. Back in Sicily, it had long served as a bulwark against the encroachment of the emergent Italian nation-state, largely based in the north, on local affairs in the south.[40] The Mafia’s hostility to the nation-state is the crux of the argument between Michael and his family that breaks out in the final scene of The Godfather II. News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is threatening to spoil Vito’s surprise birthday party. When Tessio says: “I understand thirty thousand men enlisted this morning, “ Sonny calls them “a bunch of saps.” Michael questions Sonny’s judgment, provoking his brother to reveal his Sicilian clannishness: “They’re saps because they risk their lives for strangers.” Here is the old spirit of the Sicilian village—moral obligations do not extend beyond the immediate family, or at least not beyond people you know personally. Michael shows that he is the most modern of the Corleones when, thinking in terms of an extended, impersonal community, he speaks up for patriotism: “They risk their lives for their country.” Sonny sticks to the Old World attitude when he insists: “Your country’s not your blood.” Placed where it is, this scene is completely out of chronological order, but it was a brilliant decision on Coppola’s part to end the two Godfather films with a dialogue that crystallizes the conflict between the Old World and the New—“your blood” versus “your country.” This ending harks back to the “I believe in America” scene at the beginning of The Godfather I, thus rounding out both films effectively. It turns out that Michael has already enlisted in the Marines that morning, a sign that he has broken with his family and embraced the ethos of the modern nation-state of America.[41]
Faced with the unending violence of mob warfare, the Mafia after World War II has to follow Michael’s lead and Americanize itself. Leaving the small towns of Sicily behind, the Mafia must finally acknowledge that it is operating in a modern nation-state in America. The organization of the Mafia will mirror that of its host nation—a kind of federal system, in which each of the regional powers will be represented.[42] Don Barzini speaks of the historical significance of this moment: “Times have changed. It’s not like the old days when we could do anything we want.” As we have seen ever since Sollozzo’s initial proposal, the drug deal is necessary for the mafiosi to move out of the past and into the future.
The mobsters reach an agreement on expanding into the drug trade, based on compromise. They behave like decent businessmen, willing to make concessions to each other to get a deal settled. They will go into narcotics, but they will regulate it—no free market for them—they start to act like a government themselves. A gangster named Zaluchi insists: “I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable.” As paradoxical as it sounds, by entering the drug business the Mafia will finally go legit. Zaluchi specifies how he would regulate the drug trade: “I don’t want it near schools. I don’t want it sold to children. That’s an infamia. In my city we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the colored.” Note the federalism of this proposal—within the overall framework of the agreement, local authorities may set up their own local regulations. Zaluchi anticipates future politicians (perhaps because he knows them so well): he is already calling for drug-free zones around schools. He and not the free market will determine who the customers are. Zaluchi shows that at least some of the mobsters still have moral reservations about drug trafficking. To sell drugs to children would be, as Zaluchi says, an infamia, a shameful deed that would cost someone his reputation (and in ancient Roman law all legal protection). He wants to remain loyal to his Old World morality, even as he consents to expanding into a New World business.
The overriding need to put an end to gang warfare dictates the successful outcome of the conference. As Don Corleone says: “I hoped we could come here and reason together. And as a reasonable man, I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to find a peaceful solution to these problems.” Spoken like a good citizen of America. The mafiosi are moving from the rule of men to the rule of law. Having created a kind of legislature for themselves, they are finally setting up rules to govern their conduct. As Barzini concludes: “Then we are agreed. The traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled.”[43] The mafiosi have come up with a system that will allow them to operate successfully on a much larger scale, indeed a national scale. They will no longer be a set of local families perpetually at war with each other, bogged down in territorial disputes. It will be far more lucrative to have a national organization and peaceful ways of settling conflicts before they erupt into gang warfare. The Sicilians have learned a lesson from America. In their own way, they have become patriotic Americans, with the Cold War mentality that gripped the country in the 1950s. When Don Barzini acknowledges that Don Corleone must profit from this deal, he reassuringly says: “After all, we are not Communists.”[44]
But the old country habits run deep, and some of the mafiosi are skeptical about this new organization. Philip Tattaglia hesitates to accept the peace deal: “But I must have assurance from Don Corleone. As times goes by and his position becomes stronger will he attempt any individual vendetta?” It is understandably difficult for a longtime mafioso to believe that the mob can ever move beyond the Sicilian principle of vendetta. Don Barzini tries to make light of the matter: “Look, we are all reasonable men here; we don’t have to give assurances as if we were lawyers.” Barzini suggests that the mafiosi are actually more honorable than conventional businessmen; they can trust each other without legal guarantees. But Barzini is missing the point. What Tattaglia doubts is precisely whether they as gangsters can successfully make the transition to the rule of law. In fact what he wants is an Old World form of assurance—not a signed legal contract, but a good old Sicilian oath from Don Corleone. And that is what Tattaglia gets from Vito: “I swear—on the souls of my grandchildren—that I will not be the one to break the peace we’ve made here today.” The mafiosi still have one foot in the Old World, even as they take a bold step into the New.
It is Don Corleone’s fate never to make the full transition from Sicily to America. He lives to see the Mafia re-organized on an American, corporate pattern, and he goes along with and even promotes this development. But he does not get to enjoy the benefits of this new agreement. From the moment it is concluded, Don Corleone goes into semi-retirement and soon into complete retirement. He acknowledges that his day is over. As Michael explains to Kay: “My father’s way of doing things is over; it’s finished. Even he knows that.”[45] In retirement, Vito retreats to his garden, and, in a profound irony, he goes back to being a Sicilian peasant, tending to his lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers, and playing with his grandchild.[46] Just when the Mafia expands to embrace the whole of America, Vito’s horizons contract to a suburban backyard. He does at least achieve a peaceful death, a fate seldom granted to gangsters, at least in popular culture.[47] The last words he hears are “I love you” from his grandson. In external terms, he does seem to have achieved the American dream: a big house, a large family, a successful family business, and great wealth—remarkable achievements for an immigrant who arrived in the United States not speaking a word of English and with few possessions and not a penny to his name. Talk about rags to riches.
Vito’s rise in the world is guided by an important lesson he learns from his paisan Clemenza. In a deleted scene, Clemenza tells him the story of his father, who worked twelve hours a day building the New York City subway, but never even got to ride on it. That is why Clemenza turned to a life of crime: “Nobody orders me around. I’m my own boss.” Vito never forgets those words. With his death approaching, he offers a moving reflection on his life: “I work my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on a string held by all those bigshots.”[48] Vito speaks his own epitaph: “I refused to be a fool.” It is the epitaph of a true American, a man who would never let himself be pushed around by pseudo-aristocratic elites.
But Vito’s realization of the American dream is tainted with failure. He has lived to see the bullet-ridden corpse of his eldest son. His dreams of his youngest son’s becoming a governor or a senator have been shattered. He had hoped to keep Michael free of the taint of the family business, but precisely in defense of his father, Michael has become deeply involved in Mafia business—and a cop killer fugitive in the process. There is something heroic about Vito’s rise to power in America, but if he is a hero, he is a tragic hero.[49]
“GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”
It is up to Michael Corleone to fulfill his father’s hopes for him and his family, but he fails more fundamentally and ends up a tragic figure as well. Michael’s challenge is to complete the Americanization of the Corleone family, to leave their Old World ways behind and fully embrace the modern United States. As Al Pacino described the character he so brilliantly brought to life on screen, Michael is “caught between his Old World family and the postwar American dream.”[50] To embrace that dream, Michael follows Horace Greeley’s famous injunction to Americans: “Go West, young man”—a pattern we have already seen illustrated in the lives and works of both Mark Twain and W. C. Fields. The geographic logic of the Godfather films is relentless. The Corleone family must keep heading west.[51] Coming from Sicily to New York does not complete their journey, because for them New York means Little Italy and at first their story proves to be a case of: “You can take Italians out of Italy, but you can’t take Italy out of Italians.” As we have seen, the home the Corleones find in New York is not all that different from Sicily and confronts them with similar problems. As the site where immigrants to America first arrived, the East Coast remains tainted by its European heritage.
To free his family from the stigma of being immigrants, Michael must engineer a move to the American West. That is the site of the American frontier, where people can leave the European corruption of the East Coast behind and get a fresh start at becoming Americans. Everyone except Native Americans are immigrants to the West and traditionally Westerners care only about who you are, not where you came from. If America is the land of the fresh start, then the West is America in its purest form, because it lets people recover from any false starts they might have initially made. Accordingly, even before Vito dies, Michael is already planning to move the Corleone family west to Nevada.
Nevada is crucial to Michael’s plans because it has legalized gambling. The Godfather I does not stress this point, but it is the reason for the Mafia’s development of Las Vegas in the first place and also the premise of all Michael’s scheming.[52] The fact that gambling is legal in Nevada is a good reminder of the arbitrariness of its being illegal in other states. There is nothing illegal about gambling that a state legislature cannot change at a moment’s notice. Indeed, today many states run their own gambling operations—calling them “lotteries”--a particularly insidious form of gambling because it attracts poor people, especially given the heavy television advertising behind it. If the Mafia runs a lottery, it is called the “numbers racket”; if a state runs a lottery, it is called “funding for public education,” even though many states have diverted lottery funds from their original designated purposes.[53]
The issue of gambling has perpetually divided Americans and goes to the heart of the ambiguity in their self-conception as a nation. On the one hand, many Americans have opposed gambling on ethical and religious grounds, viewing it as an activity that subverts the family and other middle-class values. On the other hand, from the very beginning America was itself a kind of gigantic gamble. Explorers had to risk everything just to find it, colonists had to gamble with their lives to settle it, and its entrepreneurs became heroes precisely by their willingness to take risks that ordinary people are unwilling to assume. The issue of gambling thus helps to reveal a contradiction at the heart of the American dream. One version of that dream is a vision of security—a family protected from all risks, with a breadwinner’s steady income, a fixed-rate home mortgage, and a drawer full of insurance policies. But another version of the American dream involves wining the lottery, or striking it rich in a risky venture, or correctly calling a longshot winner at the Kentucky Derby. Americans do not seem to know whether to avoid risks or to embrace them. Perhaps it is the signal achievement of Las Vegas that it has been able to domesticate gambling and transform it into a middle-class pastime, fun for the whole family. Especially, as it turns out, the Corleones.
Michael is hoping to make the Corleone family legitimate; he promises to his wife Kate that he will accomplish that goal in five years. Muscling into the legal casino business in Las Vegas appears to be a quick route to legitimacy, and allows Michael to draw upon the family’s long years of experience running illegal gambling operations in other states. As explained in The Godfather II, mob money financed the development of Las Vegas under the leadership of Moe Greene (a stand-in for real-life gangster Bugsy Siegel). If Michael can get control of several large casinos in Nevada, he will be much closer to his goal. He can continue to pursue one of the family’s core businesses—gambling—but now it will be perfectly legal (although the film only hints at this point, casino operations involve huge cash flows and thus are very attractive to gangsters, who can use the technique known as “skimming” for various criminal goals, including money laundering and tax evasion).[54]
To prepare the way for the move to Nevada, Michael feels that he must first settle the score with the other families in the New York area. He will eliminate his competition and get revenge for the murder of Sonny (Vito swore that he would never take vengeance for his son, but Michael was not party to the oath). Michael’s ruthlessness in dealing with his mob enemies reveals that his attitude toward crime is different from his father’s. Michael is much more coldblooded and calculating than Vito was. He lets nothing stand in the way of accomplishing his goals, including any Old World heritage of respecting family and religion. Michael has Carlo Rizzi killed because he set up the assassination of Sonny; the fact that Carlo is married to Michael’s sister Connie means nothing to him. To compound his treachery, Michael lulls Carlo into a false sense of security by agreeing to be godfather to his new baby. In a brilliantly orchestrated sequence, Coppola shows Michael participating in the baptism of Carlo’s and Connie’s new born child, while his orders to murder the heads of the Five Families (together with Moe Greene) are carried out.
To be sure, in The Godfather II, Vito is shown using a Catholic street festival as cover for his pursuit of Don Fanucci, and the murder is counterpointed with the moment of communion in a Catholic Mass. Still, Vito would never do anything as sacrilegious as Michael’s participating in a sacred ritual at the very moment he is having his enemies assassinated. With Vito gone and Michael running the whole show by the end of The Godfather I, the mob is operating on purely business principles, with no regard for personal considerations. As we might expect, it is the most forward-looking of the gangsters, Virgil Sollozzo, who begins the movement to make the Mafia a pure business. When he kidnaps Tom Hagen and tries to convince him to support his drug deal, he tells the consigliere: “It’s good business, Tom.” Trying to avoid a gang war, Sollozzo insists: “I don’t like violence, Tom. I’m a businessman. Blood is a big expense.” In short, Sollozzo wants to replace blood feuds with economic calculation.
Hagen learns Sollozzo’s lesson and tries to convince Sonny Corleone to react calmly to the attempts on his father’s life; Hagen stresses: “This is business, not personal. . . . Even the shooting of your father was business, not personal, Sonny.” For the moment, Sonny still reacts in personal terms to the attack on his father: “Well, then, business will have to suffer.” When the Corleone family later plans the murder of Sollozzo and McClusky, they toss the terms “business” and “personal” back and forth. As soon as Michael offers to do the shooting, Sonny jokes with him: “You’re takin’ this very personal. Tom, this is business and this man is takin’ it very personal.” In reply, Michael for the first time reveals his true colors: “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” The man who will succeed Vito Corleone as godfather has set his course for the future. The process of replacing personal with business considerations culminates in the death of Vito’s old friend, Sal Tessio. When he is revealed to be in the process of betraying Michael to Don Barzini, Tom Hagen has him seized. Tessio says to Hagen: “Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked ’im.” Making a last-minute plea for his life, Tessio asks Hagen: “Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old time’s sake?” But having just admitted to elevating business over personal loyalty himself, Tessio can hardly expect Michael to let him live for personal reasons.
As we have seen throughout The Godfather I, the times are indeed changing, and Michael has fully adapted to the new era, which allows no room for nostalgia or any other archaic Old World traditions.[55] Paradoxically, for Michael to Americanize and modernize the mob is to make it more unfeeling, ruthless, and brutal. In his drive to run the mob more efficiently, on the model of an American business, Michael centralizes command and never lets his personal feelings interfere with his business decisions. Michael’s crime empire operates more like a corporation than a family business, and Michael is its CEO.[56] In Coppola’s vision, the more modern the Mafia becomes, the more inhuman and monstrous its operations turn out to be.
We get only a glimpse of Las Vegas in The Godfather I, but it is enough to show how it differs from the world of the Corleones in New York. Las Vegas is a land of hotels, not of homes. It is a totally artificial community that has been conjured up in the Nevada desert.[57] In Hyman Roth’s moving tribute to Moe Greene in The Godfather II, he says that the New York gangster “invented” Las Vegas.[58] There is nothing natural about Las Vegas; it had to be invented. It seems nobody lives there on a permanent basis. Nobody puts down roots. They are all visitors. That makes Las Vegas the quintessential American city, a tourist paradise for a people perpetually on the move. As Michael’s car drives down the Las Vegas strip, we see one hotel after another, with their neon lights: the Desert Inn, El Rancho Vegas, the Sands. There is something unreal about the city—it is a world of billboards and marquees, advertising the casinos’ entertainment. The Corleone family will exploit its connections with Hollywood via Johnny Fontane to bring big stars to its casinos and thus attract customers. Culturally, Las Vegas is about as far as one can travel from Corleone, where Vito’s journey began. In Corleone, the people have no local entertainment; the young men can only dream of the big stars they have seen in American movies (they reel off names like Clark Gable and Rita Hayworth as American GIs ride by them). In Las Vegas, the Mafia succeeds in making big stars available in person for the masses. Corleone is the epitome of the small town; Las Vegas is a totally artificial city with no ethnic neighborhoods and a totally transient population. In Corleone everybody knows everybody else. Las Vegas is where you go to be anonymous and be free of all moral accountability. When the mob sets up Pat Geary for a false charge of murder, Tom Hagen is able to reassure the bewildered senator that the incident will be covered up: “The girl has no family—nobody knows that she worked here. It’ll be as if she never existed.” What happens in Carson City, stays in Carson City.
To portray the full contrast between Nevada and New York, and to show what it means for the Corleone family to Americanize, Coppola begins The Godfather II with a scene that is clearly meant to be juxtaposed with the opening of The Godfather I.[59] The family is now living in a compound on the shores of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. As the film opens, they are once again celebrating a joyous family occasion, this time the first communion of Michael’s and Kay’s son, Anthony. As many observers have noted, the two parties are carefully counterpointed to reveal how things have changed for the Corleone family under Michael’s leadership. In The Godfather I, the opening party is, as we have seen, saturated with Italian ethnicity. But in The Godfather II, the Corleone family has been thoroughly deracinated.[60] There is nothing much Italian about this second party; it reflects Michael’s attempt to assimilate into America. In honor of his son’s first communion, Michael is making a gift to charity, but, unlike a traditional mafioso like Don Fanucci, Michael is not giving to the Catholic Church, but rather to a secular state university in Nevada. This time a prominent politician has shown up at the party—Michael has achieved at least that level of respectability for the Corleones[61]--but Senator Geary, in private, speaks to him with nothing but contempt for Italian-Americans. The number of Italian-Americans in attendance at this party is drastically reduced, if only because Michael has killed off so many of his father’s mob associates. By this time, the three surviving children of Don Corleone (Michael, Fredo, and Connie) are each married or engaged to a non-Italian.[62] The warm family feeling that permeates the opening sequence of The Godfather I is absent at the corresponding point in The Godfather II. Summing up his party, Antony Corleone says: “I got lots of presents; I didn’t know the people who gave them to me.” With strangers, not family, giving the gifts, this time it is the money, not the thought, that counts.[63]
Frankie Pentangeli, who has replaced the recently deceased Clemenza in running the Brooklyn branch of the family, is the representative of Old World ethnicity at the party, and he is bewildered by what he sees. He has wandered into the Land of the WASPs. Most of the guests, we learn, are from Kay’s family—the Adams family of New England.[64] Frankie comments on the absence of traditional Italian fare at the party; he finds waiters offering him fancy canapés, which he pronounces “can of peas.” He searches in vain for Italian peppers and sausages, and has to ask for red wine in place of the Champagne cocktails being served. Frankie sees a band of musicians and is amazed that there is not a single Italian-American among them. He tries to lead them in a tarantella, but all the band can come up with is “Pop Goes the Weasel”—much to Frankie’s humiliation.[65] This party is serenaded, not by an Italian crooner, but by the Sierra Boys Choir, who look as if they might be auditioning for the not-too-distant Mormon Tabernacle. In The Godfather I, the Italian guests dance spontaneously among themselves; in The Godfather II, the guests are entertained by a professional dance team with their slick moves. In this opening sequence of The Godfather II, we see that Michael has succeeded in moving the Corleone family into the American mainstream, but we also see the price he has paid for that. His family has almost completely lost touch with its Italian roots and he has cut them off from their past connections. The party that begins The Godfather I is a joyous occasion, one that celebrates family ties. The party that begins The Godfather II seems devoid of joy and drained of all emotion. As a family, the Corleones seem to be a shadow of their former selves.
Pentageli has traveled all the way to Nevada to complain to Michael about the situation back in New York. The suggestion is that Michael has lost touch with his roots and is now too distant from his own crime family.[66] Frankie is upset that evidently he now needs a “letter of introduction” just to talk to the head of his family. Pentageli says to Michael: “You’re sitting high up in the Sierra Mountains,” while the family’s foot soldiers battle it out unaided in the Bronx trenches. To Frankie, Michael appears too business-like; he seems to be betraying his personal loyalties and siding with another crime family, the Rosato brothers, against his own family. Still attached to the Mafia’s old ways, Frankie complains that the Rosato brothers have lost all moral scruples: “They do violence in their grandmothers’ neighborhood.” Vindicating Vito’s reluctance to go into the narcotics business, Pentangeli blames the gangsters’ moral decline on the fact that the Rosato brothers are now dealing in drugs. The Rosato brothers are allied with Hyman Roth, one of Vito’s old associates. Pentangeli cannot understand why Michael is taking the side of Roth, a Jew, in his struggle with Michael’s old Italian-American comrades: “You’ll give your loyalty to a Jew before your own blood.” In what becomes one of the major plot lines in The Godfather II, it turns out that Michael has indeed allied himself with Roth. His willingness to make common cause with a Jew, even at the expense of a Catholic paisan, is another sign of how alienated Michael has become from his traditional family and ethnic loyalties.
Michael’s alliance with Roth marks the culmination of organized crime’s evolution from its small-town origins to something much larger in scope. We have already seen the mob go national; now it is going international. Under Roth’s leadership, the mob is striving to gain a foothold for its operations in a foreign nation: Cuba. In Nevada, the Mafia found a state willing to legalize gambling. But Cuba promises to become a gangster’s paradise—a whole nation willing to promote gambling and presumably also to allow the mob’s other nefarious activities. “This kind of government knows how to help business,” Roth proclaims and the Mafia will finally realize the crony capitalist’s dream: “a real partnership with a government.” Roth recognizes the historical significance of the moment; he tells Michael that the mob is entering a new phase of its evolution: “What we’ll do together in the next few months will make history. It’s never been done before. Not even your father would dream that such a thing could be possible.” Michael has indeed moved well beyond the world of Vito Corleone.
As negotiations with the Cubans proceed--in a scene that clearly echoes the boardroom meeting in The Godfather I--Michael sits down at a table in the presidential palace in Havana with a group that goes well beyond an assembly of all the Mafia chieftains in the United States. He is joined by the Cuban President himself and his military aides, together with the heads of a number of multinational corporations, clearly meant to represent the likes of United Fruit and IT & T.[67] The Corleone family has come a long way since Vito, Tessio, and Clemenza sat down around a humble dining room table to parcel out the money they made selling stolen goods. Michael is now like a head of state; at least he is meeting with a head of state and the great captains of American industry.
The meeting in Cuba marks the pinnacle of Michael Corleone’s ascent in the world and his Americanization—he literally gets to sit at the table as an equal with the CEOs of some of America’s largest corporations. Elsewhere, Hyman Roth speaks proudly of the mob’s ascent into the upper echelons of corporate America: “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” Coppola’s aim is not to elevate the mob in our esteem but to lower its partners—to show that the business executives are little better than gangsters themselves. When Roth has his birthday cake with a map of Cuba on it cut up for his guests, we see what big shots do—they carve up a country for their own benefit. Lee Strasberg does a brilliant job of playing Hyman Roth (a stand-in for real-life gangster Meyer Lansky). Strasberg deliberately underplays the part. His Roth is no maniacal, machine-gun-toting Scarface. Instead, Strasberg’s Roth comes across as a mild-mannered old and ailing man, taken care of in his declining years by his attentive wife, and calm and sweetly amiable in all his dealings. He seems more like a real estate developer than a mobster, which in a way is what he is, as he plans on creating a hotel empire in Cuba.
MICHAEL CORLEONE AND THE TRAGDY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
Having reached the peak of his power in Cuba, Michael quickly begins his descent into tragedy. At a nightclub he discovers a shocking truth: it was his brother Fredo who was the traitor in his organization and set him up for assassination back in Nevada. Treachery within the immediate family—that is something new and deeply disturbing in the world of the Corleones. Meanwhile, the Cuba deal turns sour. Michael had noticed the fanaticism of Castro’s rebels in Cuba, and his doubts about the viability of the Batista regime prove to be well-founded. Just when the deal is about to be concluded, Battista, unable to quell the Castro rebellion, flees the county, leaving the gangsters in the lurch. Another kind of mob violence breaks out in the streets of Havana—the Cuban people vent their anger after years of frustration by sacking the casinos and smashing their slot machines. The Mafia will not get its friendly government after all. Their Cuban venture turns out to be the Mafia’s biggest gamble, and ironically in the end the high rollers crap out. Michael, ever cautious and resourceful, manages to escape Cuba and return safely to the United States, but immediately his family life starts to fall apart.
Michael always claims to be a good family man, and views that as part of his American heritage. At the congressional hearing, he prides himself that his goal has always been: “to give my children their fair share of the American way of life.”[68] Michael inherits his concern for his children from his father, who always was a staunch supporter of the family. Vito’s conception of his manliness is intimately bound up with his sense of himself as the patriarch of a family. When Johnny Fontane comes to beg his godfather to help his career, he breaks down sobbing: “I don’t know what to do.” In a rare outburst of emotion, Vito slaps Fontane and shouts: “You can act like a man!” For Vito true manliness is manifested in the role a father plays in his family. He asks Fontane: “you spend time with your family?” and when he gets an affirmative answer, Vito explains why that is important: “Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” Being a real man is at the heart of all Vito Corleone’s struggles with the world. He turns to crime to protect his family. His masculinity is obviously at play in his dealings with his fellow criminals. Standing up to them is vital to his maintaining his status and power in the criminal world. But it is part of the richness of Coppola’s portrait of Don Corleone that his manliness is not simply a form of thuggishness; it is also a positive trait, which plays a role in his dealings with his wife and children and makes him a fuller human being.
Thus, in Vito’s last conversation with Michael, when so many other grave matters are weighing heavily on his mind, he still brings up Michael’s relation to his family: “Your wife and children, are you happy with them?” Vito is carefully going over with Michael how to deal with the threat from Don Barzini, but in this case he cannot separate business concerns from family concerns: “I spend my life tryin’ not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.” In one way this statement is patronizing, but at the same time it reflects Vito’s admirable sense of responsibility as a man to take care of his family. Throughout this powerful scene, Vito’s thoughts wander back and forth between business and family. He keeps asking Michael about his son, and the aging Don is pleased to hear that his three-year-old grandchild can already read the funny papers. To the end, Don Corleone’s sense of himself as a man is linked to his role as a father.
This proves to be a difficult act for Michael to follow. In The Godfather II, he insists that everything he has done has been to protect his family just as his father had done, but he begins to wonder if, in trying to protect his family, he has in fact destroyed it. The cruelty he has summoned to deal effectively with his enemies has dehumanized him. In a moving scene with his widowed mother, who has become the last bastion of Sicilian family values in his world, Michael speaks of his father as always “strong for his family,” but then he hesitatingly asks her: “but by being strong for his family, could he lose it?” Mama Corleone tries to reassure her son: “But you can never lose your family.” Yet that is exactly what happens to Michael in The Godfather II.
Appalled by Michaels’ cold-bloodedness and his unceasing lies to her, Kay decides to leave him and take their children with her. With all his power, Michael is able to prevent Kay from getting custody of their children. Still, Kay is able to deliver a mortal blow to Michael’s consciousness of himself as a family man. While he was away from home pursuing his plots with Roth, Kay lost the baby she was carrying. Michael acknowledges that his absence constituted dereliction of his duty as a father, and he tells Kay that he will make up for it. Michael was told that the loss of the baby was from a miscarriage, but at the height of her anger with Michael, Kay reveals that it was an abortion. She knows that an abortion is the one outcome Michael could not accept. In the strongest words in either film directed against the Old World heritage, Kay speaks to Michael with contempt for “this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for two thousand years.” Enraged, Michael strikes Kay and with this act of violence against a member of his immediate family—a woman—he has crossed a line from which he can never pull back.[69]
It is a short step from this crime against the family to Michael’s ultimate familial sin—he has his brother Fredo murdered. To be sure, Fredo almost became responsible for Michael’s being murdered when he breached the security of the Corleone compound in Nevada by giving inside information to agents of Hyman Roth. Many commentators become sentimental about Fredo because he is such a pitiful figure, and he did not think that he was involved in actually getting his brother killed. Still, Fredo’s motives in helping out Roth were base—a combination of petty ambition, selfishness, envy, and spite. Michael views having Fredo killed as an act of retributive justice, yet another example of settling the score with his enemies. Nevertheless, in having Fredo killed, Michael kills something in himself and he realizes that he has gone too far by attacking a member of his own family.[70] Michael participates in what he himself regards as the moral degeneration of the Mafia. He complains bitterly to Frankie Pentangeli that the assassination attempt on him in Nevada endangered his family: “In my home! In our bedroom, where my wife sleeps! Where my children come and play with their toys. In my home.” As we saw in The Godfather I, traditionally the Mafia had tried to keep family and business separate, designating non-combatants off-limits to mob violence. But in The Godfather II, Michael and his family are attacked in his own home. Yet Michael turns out to be no better. First in hitting Kay and then even moreso in having his brother Fredo murdered, Michael is guilty of bringing violence into his own family.[71]
Like his father, Michael ends up a victim of the American dream, particularly as it presents itself to the immigrant. Although coming from an immigrant family, Michael tries to grow up as an all-American boy. He goes to a good college, he enlists in the armed forces the day after Pearl Harbor, and he becomes a decorated war hero. Early in The Godfather I, when he is describing to Kay some of his father’s more nefarious activities, Michael reassures her: “That’s my family, Kay; that’s not me.” Michael hoped to show that in the second generation, immigrant families can completely assimilate in America. He planned on staying clear of any involvement in mob operations, and on pursuing some form of honest career on his own. His father actually concurred with this plan, as he explains in their last conversation together: “I knew Santino was goin’ to have to go through all this . . . . But I never—I never wanted this for you. . . . I thought that—that when it was your time—that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, somethin’.”
Having failed at successfully combining his family life with his life in crime, Vito hoped that Michael could escape the cycle of violence in which the gangster inevitably gets caught. But unfortunately, Michael’s determination to save his father’s life gets him entangled in exactly the kind of criminal activities he had hoped to avoid. One moment he is Christmas shopping with his girlfriend; a little while later he is shooting a New York police captain in cold blood. Although Michael does many horrific things as godfather, we should never forget that he is drawn into Mafia life as the direct result of a decent aim—trying to protect his father. Once enmeshed in gang warfare, he is driven from one violent act to another by the sheer logic of the situation. In a way Michael’s problem is that he becomes too good a mob chieftain—he adapts too well to the new American setting for crime, and by making his crime operation more efficient, he makes it more deadly and corrupts his own soul in the process.
In the end, what the Godfather films say about the American dream is disturbing. The American dream rests on an optimistic premise—that Americans can have it all. They can have successful family lives, while also being successful in business. The two activities need not be in tension. Decades of sitcoms offered this vision of America, even though we rarely knew exactly what business the fathers in these shows were in. To get technical, one might say that Americans believe that they can happily combine Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft. Americans can take the best of the Old World and synthesize it with the best of the New. They can enjoy the kind of tight-knit, tradition-bound community epitomized by the family and the village, but they can also enjoy the economic benefits generated by the extended community embodied in a nationwide market. One might call this a kind of ethical federalism, in which Americans hope to combine the virtues that work at the local level with those that work at the national level.
In different ways, both Vito Corleone and his son Michael try to be true to the Mafia and true to America at the same time. In some ways, their achievements are impressive—neither is an ordinary man. In striving to be somebody, to make a difference, each is being profoundly American, but their ambition also leads them into distinctly un-American activities—the kind that have to be investigated by Congress. Vito and Michael build, but they also destroy. Michael ends up destroying the family life he tries to build. Vito and Michael are mirror images of each other, together illustrating the dilemma of the American immigrant. Vito prospers in America, but to the extent that he clings to his Old World habits and principles, he cannot keep up with the changing nature of crime in America, a reflection of the fast pace of change in general in the United States, with its entrepreneurial spirit and dynamic marketplace. As a result, Vito is in effect squeezed out of organized crime and forced to retire, but at least he has his family to retreat to, and he enjoys a peaceful death. Michael is not so fortunate. As a second-generation immigrant, educated in America, Michael Corleone is more adaptable to the ways of America and rises to new heights in the criminal world. Unlike Vito, he is able to defeat all his enemies, but in the process, Michael loses his soul and the family he claimed to be working for. He ends up in total isolation, with all the vitality evidently drained out of him, as we see in the final shot of The Godfather II. Both Vito and Michael are exemplars of the American dream but also its victims, and thus they end up as tragic figures. In telling their stories, the Godfather films explore the more general tragedy of immigration in America, tracing the ways that the American dream may draw newcomers to its shores and lead them into a self-defeating and self-destroying struggle to combine family and business.
APPENDIX
Godfather Hermeneutics
“I’m gonna make him an interpretation he can’t refute”
Interpreting the Godfather films raises all sorts of thorny hermeneutical issues that I can discuss only briefly. In this chapter, I have chosen to analyze The Godfather I and The Godfather II together as a unified work of art, and in a kind of shorthand, I refer to the shaping force behind the films as “Coppola.” Both decisions need to be explained and justified.
Film is a collaborative medium; despite the claims of the so-called auteur theorists of cinema, no one person—not even a great director--is responsible for everything that ends up on the screen (or the soundtrack). Francis Ford Coppola deserves—and generally receives—credit for the Godfather films. But the question of authorship is unusually complicated in this case. The Godfather I and significant portions of The Godfather II are based on a novel written by Mario Puzo. This novel contributed the basic plot line and created almost all the major characters that appear in the films. Many people who have seen the films first are surprised to discover how much of the dialogue is taken directly from the novel. This should in fact not be so surprising, since, in a rare case of a novelist being allowed to write the screenplay for a film based on his work, Puzo was chosen to collaborate with Coppola on writing the scripts for the Godfather films. As a result, these films are rooted in their precursor written text to a degree unusual for Hollywood productions. Mario Puzo had a major say in the form that The Godfather I and even The Godfather II took, and he deserves credit for this role.
Moreover, as in any film production, many other people played a significant role in creating the Godfather films. Those involved in the production, as well as those who have studied it, give a great deal of credit to the Director of Photography, Gordon Willis, and the Production Designer, Dean Tavoularis. And who can imagine the Godfather films without Nino Rota’s music? The magnificent cast of actors did a great deal to make the Godfather films what they are. They often improvised material that we now think of as integral to the film’s original conception (such as Marlon Brando’s use of a cat in the opening sequence and an orange peel in his last scene). It comes as a shock to learn that one of the most memorable lines in the films—“Leave the car. Take the cannolis”—was a last-minute improvisation by the actor Richard Castellano, and one of the greatest scenes in either film—the final meeting of Vito and Michael Corleone—was written, not by Coppola or Puzo, but by the script doctor Robert Towne (he was brought in at the last possible moment; he did, however, draw heavily on material in Puzo’s novel and on the dialogue in several deleted scenes).
The magic of cinema is more mysterious than most people realize. We tend to think of artistic production on the Romantic model of the solitary creator. A single consciousness is supposed to be responsible for a work of art coming into being, and the process is supposed to happen according to a comprehensive plan, fully worked out in advance, and perfectly executed without deviation from the original intentions. As applicable as this model may be in some cases, it does not work in studying film and television. In these fields, collaborative work is the norm, rather than the exception. Studies have shown that the proverb “too many cooks spoil the broth” is not a good guide for understanding film and television production. On the contrary, frequently a group of artists working together can create films and television shows greater than any one of them could have come up with working in isolation. Because the production of films and television shows takes places over long periods of time, their creation requires mid-course corrections, and, as a result of improvisation and feedback, a film or a television show can be improved by departing from the original production plans. I discuss the distinctive demands of interpreting popular culture in the Introduction, “Popular Culture and Spontaneous Order, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tube,” in my book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 1-22, 356-64. For a detailed case study of multiple authorship in the case of a famous Hollywood screenplay, see my essay “‘As Time Goes By’: Casablanca and the Evolution of a Pop-Culture Classic,” in Political Philosophy Comes to Rick’s: Casablanca and American Civic Culture, ed. James F. Pontuso (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), esp. 16-22.
Thus when I refer to “Coppola” as the creator of the Godfather films, the term is shorthand for “Coppola and all the other talented people who contributed to the genesis of these masterpieces.” This kind of question of interpretation comes up throughout this book. For the record, only in my chapter on Huckleberry Finn can I speak of a single author--Mark Twain. In the case of W. C. Fields in Chapter Two, we see the downside of an artist not being able to create his works singlehandedly. We know from Fields’s correspondence that he often complained bitterly about studio interference in the production of his films, and he lamented the fact that he did not have creative control over them. In my chapter on Breaking Bad, I often use the phrase “Gilligan and his team” in recognition of the fact that, as Vince Gilligan is the first to admit, he worked with a remarkable writing staff and others in crafting the series. With The Walking Dead in Chapter Five, we are back to a situation almost as complicated as in the case of the Godfather films. The television series is based on a precursor written text in the form of a comic book with the same name, and the creative force behind these comics, Robert Kirkman, is also one of the principal creators of the television episodes.
I mention these matters here in order to reassure readers that I am aware of the complexities of interpreting film and television when it comes to questions of authorship. I have written elsewhere on the subject. See, for example, my discussion of the relation of Edgar Ulmer’s film Detour to the Martin Goldsmith novel on which it is based, in Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, 262-68. Although I am fully conscious of these difficult hermeneutical issues, I have not let them paralyze me when it comes to interpreting the works I cover in this book. It may be difficult to pin down exactly whose intentions are at work in these films and television shows, but I think it is still possible to speak of intentionality in the works themselves. They all look as if they have been carefully planned, even if they may be the result of improvisation or last-minute revision. However these works may have come into being, they have ended up having an artistic shape, and they form more or less coherent aesthetic objects, which we can analyze for their patterns of meaning. Of course no one can ever come up with an interpretation that cannot be refuted, but one can make a sincere effort to consider all the evidence and search for aesthetic patterns in the works one is discussing, and that is what I have tried to do in this book.
Now to explain why I am analyzing The Godfather I and The Godfather II together, as if they formed one larger coherent work of art. The alternatives would be to include The Godfather III, or to discuss the first two parts separately. Many critics have chosen to analyze the Godfather Trilogy (see, for example, Freedman in Hollywood Crime Cinema) and to integrate their analysis of the third part into their analysis of the first two parts. These critics can point to the fact that the three films have been released on DVD as the Godfather Trilogy, and Coppola sanctioned this decision. I would agree that The Godfather III is unified thematically with I and II. But for me, the gap in quality between III on the one hand and I and II on the other is just too great. III has its moments—it is after all still by Coppola--but as even many of the proponents of analyzing it together with I and II would admit, III is clumsily edited by comparison with the earlier films, the performances of the cast (especially in one notorious case) do not measure up to the standard of the first two films, some of the scenes go over the top in a way that does not happen in I and II, and so on. Above all, III never develops the kind of dramatic momentum that energizes I and II and makes them two of the greatest movies of all time. I admire the work of my colleagues who have discussed the Godfather Trilogy as a unit, and at a few points I too draw on the third film in analyzing the first two. If anything, the third film confirms what I claim about the way the first two trace the movement from archaic village life to globalized modernity. I just cannot bring myself to dwell on a film that I believe tarnished Coppola’s reputation and that I wish had never been made.
Moving in the opposite direction, some critics resist the idea of discussing The Godfather I and The Godfather II together as one larger work of art. Instead they view The Godfather II as a revisionist take on The Godfather I. As one of the most intelligent of these critics, Thomas Ferraro, says of The Godfather II: “the film offers a very different perspective on the Corleones than either the novel or the first Godfather film. . . . In the standard interpretation, the film strips the Mafia of its sentimental familial wrappings and reveals it for what it is and perhaps always has been: capitalistic enterprise in its most vicious form” (Ethnic Passages, 39). This interpretation is solidly based in remarks Coppola has made about The Godfather II. He was upset that audiences had rooted for the Corleones in The Godfather I and said: “I wanted to put a stop to that” and “What I tried to do in Part II is at least turn it around to a very harsh ending. This time I really set out to punish Michael” (Biskind, Godfather Companion, 82). I respect critics who take this view of the two films and I am tempted to defer to Coppola’s authority about his own work, but I would counter that, as I have shown in this chapter, together the two films offer a historical take on the Mafia. They do not present two different views of the Mafia in two different films, but rather one consistent view of the Mafia at two different stages of its history. My point is that together I and II trace the development of the Mafia over time from a comparatively sympathetic family-based enterprise, rooted in Old World values, to an ugly corporatized form, more suited to the impersonal society of modern America.
Thus, while acknowledging alternate ways of talking about the Godfather films, I stand by my approach in this chapter. I believe that together The Godfather I and The Godfather II tell a consistent story about the Mafia, a kind of historical chronicle of its development in America. My own narrative in analyzing the films basically follows this historical arc, from Corleone in Sicily to Little Italy in New York to the sleek hotels of Las Vegas and Cuba—a movement from the local to the global and from the archaic to the hypermodern. I confess that I have often worked from The Godfather Epic, the seven-hour reconfiguration of the story that Coppola prepared for television broadcast, which follows the tale chronologically, from Vito Andolini’s childhood to Michael Corleone’s final round of executing his enemies. This version incorporates the multitude of deleted scenes that were rightly cut from the theatrical releases of the films for the sake of pacing, but that do add to our understanding of the grand narrative as a whole. The existence of The Godfather Epic is evidence that Coppola acknowledges the validity of treating the story in pure chronological order—in a way that creates continuity between The Godfather I and The Godfather II.
Anyone who writes about the Godfather legend faces a bewildering embarrassment of riches: Puzo’s original novel, the two “canonical” Coppola films, all the scenes deleted from those films that have since been resurrected on the DVD versions, as well as in The Godfather Epic, and finally The Godfather III, which may or may not be part of the “canon.” I decided to concentrate on The Godfather I and The Godfather II, but I have not been dogmatic in my approach. When it seemed useful for interpreting the two films, I have drawn on the Puzo novel, on The Godfather III, and on some of the scenes deleted from I and II. My aim has been to illuminate the larger significance of the Godfather story from as many angles as possible, while still keeping my focus on the two theatrical releases that constitute the major incarnations of what has become one of the great myths of American popular culture.
Notes
[1] As quoted in Tom Santopietro, The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me (New York: St. Martin’s, 2012), 58-59.
[2] All quotation from the Godfather films, including deleted scenes, have been transcribed from the DVDs, and sometimes checked against other sources.
[3] For an excellent and extended analysis of this opening scene along similar lines, see Paul A. Rahe, “Don Corleone, Multiculturalist,” Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 16 (1997): 133-39.
[4] This contrast was formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies in his 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. For an English translation, see Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957). Fredric Jameson brings up the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft contrast in his discussion of the Godfather films in his famous essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), 44.
[5] The idea of the “movement from Status to Contract” was first formulated by Sir Henry Maine at the end of Chapter V of his famous book Ancient Law (1861).
[6] In a review of the return of The Godfather I to movie theatres in 1997, Edward Rothstein summed up its core theme: “The Godfather hit upon one of the great themes of American life in this century, the challenge of becoming American. . . . How is the passage to be made from family to society, from ethnic culture to American life, from the bonds of blood to bonds of citizenship?” (“Chilling Balance of Love and Evil,” New York Times, March 23, 1997).
[7] On this point, see Carl Freedman, Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema: Studies in Ford, Wilder, Coppola, Scorsese and Others (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2013), 30-31.
[8] See Jon Lewis, The Godfather (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 68 and Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 31-32.
[9] On the chaperones’s importance, see Santopietro, Godfather Effect, 57.
[10] The shooting script describes this scene as a ritual moment: “There is a bridal procession into the street of the village, the same in feeling and texture as it might have been five hundred years ago. . . . We present the entire bridal procession and ceremony with all the ritual and pageantry as it has always been in Sicily” (Jenny M. Jones, The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay [New York: Black Dog and Lewenthal, 2007], 107).
[11] In Puzo’s novel, Michael comes to understand his father’s destiny only when he visits Sicily and observes the horrific conditions there: “For in Sicily he saw what they would have been if they had chosen not to struggle against their fate” (Mario Puzo, The Godfather [Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1969], 324).
[12] In its heyday, Little Italy consisted of “two dozen square blocks” in Lower Manhattan (Santopietro, Godfather Effect, 78).
[13] These questions are answered in summary fashion in Book III of Puzo’s novel, which, among other matters, goes into Vito’s successful gang war with Salvatore Maranzano and even his relations with Al Capone. The picture of Vito’s career given in the novel is as a result much darker than what is shown in the films.
[14] Vito also tries to appeal to Roberto as a fellow Sicilian, only to learn that the landlord is from the Calabria region of Italy. Earlier, Don Fanucci complains to a theater manager that his shows feature Neapolitan rather than Sicilian songs. In the minds of these Italian-Americans, Italy is not a nation-state; they are still in the grip of their Old World regional loyalties.
[15] See Lewis, Godfather, 39. For an overview of the history of the gangster movie, with detailed plot summaries of the major examples, see Marilyn Yaquinto, Pump ’Em Full of Lead: A Look at Gangsters on Film (New York: Twayne, 1998). For Little Caesar, Public Enemy, and Scarface specifically, see 26-47. For a more analytic study of the gangster movie as a genre, see Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1981), 81-110; for the “big three” films specifically, see 86-95. See also Santopietro, Godfather Effect, 101-103. For a broader treatment of the Mafia in popular culture—from opera to movies to television—even to video games, see Roberto M. Dainotto, The Mafia: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2015). Dainotto goes beyond American popular culture to study Italian representations of the Mafia as well.
[16] Given the pressure of public opinion and even government censorship at the time, these 1930s mob movies make a point of denying that they are glamorizing the gangsters they portray. They typically call explicitly for greater efforts by the government to fight organized crime. In an unusually self-conscious moment, Scarface actually reflects on the genre of the gangster story and compares it unfavorably in moral terms with the Western. At a police station, a reporter asks for more news of the mobster Tony Camonte, insisting: “The public’s interested in him. He’s a colorful character.” The reporter could be speaking for the audience of the film; he is sharply rebuked by the police representative: “Colorful? What color is a crawling louse? . . . That’s the attitude of too many morons in this country. . . . They think those big hoodlums are some sort of demigods. What do they do about a guy like Camonte? They sentimentalize him. Romance. Make jokes about him. They had some excuse for glorifying our old western bad men. They met in the middle of the street—high noon—and waited for each other to draw. But these things sneak up and shoot someone in the back and then run away.” Rarely has a movie audience been so rebuked by the very film they were watching. For the parallels between gangster movies and Westerns, see also Clarence Darrow’s comment: “Gang pictures are action pictures. The screen has played them for years. It called them westerns when they stole horses instead of booze” (quoted in Lewis, Godfather, 41). For more on the condemnation of gangsters in these films, see Dainotto, Mafia, 57-58. For a good discussion of Scarface and the American dream, see Marilyn Roberts, “‘Scarface,’ ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and the American Dream,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 34 (2006): 71-78. For more on this subject, see Dainotto, Mafia, 73-80.
[17] Coppola used a striking analogy to explain this point: “If you were taken inside Adolf Hitler’s home, went to his parties and heard his stories, you’d probably have liked him. My point is that you can’t make a movie about what it’s like inside a Mafia family without their seeming to be quite human” (quoted in Peter Biskind, The Godfather Companion [New York: HarperPerrenial, 1990], 117).
[18] As Roger Ebert wrote: “The Don seems more like a precinct captain than a gangster, intervening on behalf of a poor widow who is being evicted from her apartment” (quoted in Yaquinto, Gangsters on Film, 142).
[19] In an early review of The Godfather I, William Pechter identified Coppola’s strategy for creating sympathy for Vito: “Even were we given some more detailed picture of what the Corleones’s business entailed, it must surely modify our admiration for their success that it involves, if it is not actually based on, killing people, but, fascinating as is a depiction of how the family’s fortune was acquired and how its businesses are run might be, virtually nothing of this sort is presented (aside from the family’s unlikely decision not to become involved in heroin traffic, the effect of which—like that of the family’s victims being only other gangsters—is merely to make the Corleones more acceptable to us)” (William Pechter, “Keeping Up With the Corleones,” in Nick Browne, Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather Trilogy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 169; this review originally appeared in Commentary, July 1972).
[20] For Francis Ford Coppola, the Godfather films became a family business. In a deleted scene in The Godfather II, Coppola had originally thought of inserting his own father into the grand Godfather narrative. Vito, together with Clemenza and Tessio, seek aid from a gunsmith named Augustino Coppola. He asks his son Carmine to play his flute for the proto-gangsters, thus displaying the musical talent that was to propel the director’s father into a career as a successful orchestra musician and composer. The real Carmine Coppola actually appears in The Godfather I playing the piano in the gang war montage sequence. Although Nino Rota wrote most of the music for the Godfather films, Carmine contributed to the score. The director’s newborn daughter, Sofia Coppola, appears for Michael Francis Rizzio in the baptism scene at the end of The Godfather I. For a complete list of Coppola’s relatives who were involved in the films in one capacity or another, see Biskind, Godfather Companion, 44-45. See also Santopietro, Godfather Effect, 188.
[21] On how the Corleone family “re-creates southern Italian village life in the New World,” see Santopietro, Godfather Effect, 86.
[22] Similarly, when Sollozzo kidnaps Tom Hagen in The Godfather I, he reassures him that he will not be harmed: “I know you’re not in the muscle end of the family.”
[23] Without delving too deeply into the complicated issue of the actual history of the Mafia, it is fair to say that Puzo and Coppola invented the notion that, as late as the 1940s, gangsters were still debating whether to go into the drug trade. Evidence shows that Joseph Profaci, one of the models for Vito Corleone, was involved in drugs as early as the 1930s (see Dainotto, Mafia, 123-24) . Perhaps the greatest romanticizing of the Mafia in the Godfather stories is the claim that it was initially reluctant to deal in drugs. In defense of Puzo and Coppola, they were under no obligation to produce a truthful documentary about the Mafia. The changes they made in Mafia history are of the kind that Shakespeare made in English history in his plays. For the record, Joseph Profaci was in fact in the olive oil business and was known as the “Olive-Oil King.” For those who find implausible Michael Corleone’s hope to turn his family’s operations into a legitimate business, it is worth noting that Joseph Profaci’s son, John J. Profaci, eventually partnered in 1978 in founding the well-known (and legitimate) Colavita Olive Oil Company. In 2009, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Culinary Institute of America. His Harvard-educated son Joseph R. Profaci was named the executive director of the North American Olive Oil Association in 2017. See https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-business/north-america/olive-oil-importers-name-new-director/59006. Joseph R. Profaci’s brother, John Profaci Jr., as an executive in Colavita Olive Oil, never sponsored anything more violent than a well-known and successful women’s cycling team, which featured such stars as multiple-time National Champion Tina Pic, Jamaican Olympian Iona Wynter-Parks, and Route de France stage winner Andrea Dvorak. According to a 2010 New York Post story, law-enforcement sources confirmed John Jr.’s claim: “We’ve gone so far, our family has, since those days. We all went to good colleges and got good educations. We are businessmen. . . . That’s so far removed from our past.” See https://nypost.com/2010/12/12/godmother-of-real-estate/. In a notable case of truth being stranger than fiction, in the real world at least part of the family that served as models for the Corleones did succeed in becoming legitimate and respected businessmen.
[24] This idea is expressed in slightly varying form by Don Barzini to the mob syndicate and by Don Tomassino to Michael in Sicily in The Godfather I and by Michael to his mother in The Godfather II. The point is also made in Puzo’s novel by Sollozzo in his conversation with Michael in the restaurant: “Your father is an old-fashioned man. He stands in the way of progress. The business I am in is the coming thing, the wave of the future. . . . But your father stands in the way because of certain unrealistic scruples” (Puzo, Godfather, 149). The novel indicates that Sollozzo is speaking here in “rapid Sicilian” and that is how some of this speech appears, without subtitles, in The Godfather I.
[25] Don Corleone expands this argument at a later meeting of the mob syndicate: “I believe this drug business is gonna destroy us in the years to come. I mean, it’s not like gambling or liquor. Even women, which is something that most people want nowadays and is, too, forbidden to them by the pezzonovante of the Church. Even the police departments that’ve helped us in the past with gambling and other things are gonna refuse to help us when it comes to narcotics.”
[26] Puzo’s novel portrays Vito as morally conservative, and attributes his unwillingness to go into business with Sollozzo to an aversion to his involvement in prostitution: “He was notoriously straitlaced in matters of sex” (Puzo, Godfather, 73). Later the novel attributes Vito’s displeasure with his middle son’s behavior in Las Vegas to similar reasons: “The Don was straitlaced about sex. He would consider such cavorting by his son Freddie, two girls at a time, as degeneracy” (389).
[27] In Puzo’s novel, Michael makes this point about his father in a conversation with Kay: “He doesn’t accept the rules of the society we live in because those rules would have condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force and character. . . . He refused to live by rules set up by others, rules which condemn him to a defeated life” (Puzo, Godfather, 365).
[28] Quoted in Lewis, Godfather, 36.
[29] In an essay entitled “Crime & the American Dream,” Norman Podhoretz offers an interesting twist on the idea that stories like The Godfather identify businessmen with gangsters. He argues that such gangster stories actually celebrate capitalism, or at least the capitalist virtues that used to be celebrated in America. He speculates that in an intellectual climate that has become increasingly hostile to capitalism, popular culture can no longer offer old-style Horatio Alger stories, in which hard work and entrepreneurism are rewarded with substantial wealth. Wondering why gangster novels and movies have been so successful, Podhoretz writes: “The delight we take in this literature is very similar to the delight people used to take in biographies of successful businessmen and in romantic novels about them. For the gangsters who fascinate us today are not the straightforward thugs [of the 1930s]. . . .They claim our attention not primarily by virtue of their brutality but by virtue of their worldly success; they are self-made men who have started from nowhere and managed to climb to the top. . . . We still want to read about self-made men with the will, the energy, the daring, the boldness, and the ruthlessness to claw their way to the top. But so powerful has the animus against business and commerce become in our culture—and, by now, every level of our culture—that no legitimate businessman could possibly serve as the hero of any such story. Only an illegitimate businessman could; which is to say a gangster. . . . We grant them heroic status because they are in a certain sense rebels against society” (Commentary, January 1, 1972). This is a highly speculative argument but a fascinating one.
[30] I cannot think of one. Even in the case of a minor character—the policeman on his beat who interrupts the murder of Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather II—his good deed is just an accident of timing. For the absence of any good representatives of the law in the Godfather films, see Vera Dika, “The Representation of Ethnicity in The Godfather” in Browne, Godfather Trilogy, 90-91.
[31] For an excellent overview of crony capitalism in recent years, see Hunter Lewis, Crony Capitalism in America, 2008-2012 (Edinburgh, VA: AC2 Books, 2013).
[32] Alessandro Camon argues that the Mafia portrayed in the Godfather films is not an example of capitalism: “From a socio-economic standpoint, the Mafia represents in fact a confluence of aristocratic and proletarian interests. The organization flourished in Sicily, which was at the time a distinctly non-industrialized, precapitalist area where the economy (and the social struggle) revolved around the land. . . . And owning the land, rather than owning stock or commercial concerns is what drives both the peasant and the aristocrat”(“The Godfather and the Mythology of Mafia,” in Browne, Godfather Trilogy, 167).
[33] To se the difference between the operation of a free market and the operation of the mob in the Godfather films, one need only look at Don Corleone’s signature line: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” In a free market, an “offer you can’t refuse” involves a product that is priced to move—the quality is so high and the cost so low that people rush to buy it. Don Corleone means something entirely different when he speaks of an “offer you can’t refuse”—he means putting a gun to someone’s head until he signs a contract. Despite the claims of Marxist critics of capitalism, this is not how markets routinely work. Although some force and fraud are occasionally involved in market transactions, in the overwhelming majority of cases, free markets operate on the principle of exchange, in which both parties in their own perception profit from the bargain; otherwise the exchange would not take place. In the ordinary course of business, nobody puts a gun to your head; that is why the gangster stands out and is of such dramatic interest. Marxists will no doubt accuse me of naiveté, but I do not see them feeling compelled to carry guns with them when they go to their local supermarkets.
[34] Another revealing point of contrast with Vito Corleone in The Godfather I is provided by the movie studio head, Jack Woltz. Many of the men who founded the great Hollywood studios were Jewish immigrants (or their sons). Thus Woltz is another example of the immigrant pursuing the American dream. From presumably humble beginnings (suggested by his coarse manner of speech), he has built himself into one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood. In typical American fashion, he has used his great wealth to imitate European aristocracy. When Tom Hagen visits Woltz’s estate—a junior version of William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon—the Hollywood big shot immodestly says of one of the statues in his garden: “It used to decorate the palace of a king.” He then shows off to Hagen a prize horse he bought for six hundred thousand dollars, adding: “I’ll bet Russian czars never paid that kinda dough for a single horse.” Puzo’s novel adds the fact that Woltz has achieved a social status high enough for his children to wed into European aristocracy: “His daughter had married an English lord, his son an Italian princess” (Puzo, Godfather, 56). Woltz seems to have achieved the American dream—an immigrant becoming the modern-day equivalent of a European aristocrat.
A crack in Woltz’s aristocratic façade is that no true aristocrat would show off his possessions to brag about his aristocratic status. In fact, The Godfather I portrays Woltz as a low-minded, mean-spirited vulgarian. He is prejudiced against Italian-Americans, speaking of “dago, guinea, wop, grease-ball goombahs” and referring specifically to Johnny Fontane’s “olive-oil voice and guinea charm.” In many respects Woltz seems morally inferior to Don Corleone. At a time when Vito is hesitating to go into the drug business, Woltz’s studio is already deeply involved. Tom Hagen points out: “one of your top stars has just moved from marijuana to heroin.” Woltz exercises tyrannical power at his studio and is trying to run Fontane out of the entertainment business. Woltz is so morally obtuse that he thinks that he can justify his actions to Hagen by claiming that sexual jealousy is the motive behind his vendetta against Fontane. He blames Fontaine for seducing a studio starlet when Woltz was enjoying her favors: “She was the greatest piece of ass I ever had, and I’ve had ’em all over the world!” Woltz turns out to be a sexual predator, exploiting his power at the studio to prey on underage actresses. In a deleted scene, we learn that even while Hagen is visiting Woltz’s home, a sixteen year-old actress is living with him (with the consent of her mother). In another deleted scene, when Vito learns this fact from Hagen, he is deeply disgusted and calls it an “infamia.” The Godfather films are largely confined to the corrupt world of crime, police, and politics, and we see little of alternate ways of life. But when we do get a glimpse of an alternative—the supposedly glamorous world of Hollywood—it turns out to be more corrupt than anything we see of the Mafia.
[35] Roger Jellinek said something similar of Puzo’s novel in his New York Times review: “The victims of the Corleone ‘family’ are hoods, or corrupt cops—nobody you or I would actually want to know. . . . You never glimpse regular people in the book, let alone meet them, so there is no opportunity to sympathize with anyone but the old patriarch, as he makes the world safe for his beloved ‘family’” (quoted in Harlan Lebo, The Godfather Legacy [New York: Fireside, 1997], 6). Strictly speaking, this claim is untrue, since we do see ordinary people in characters like the undertaker Bonasera, the baker Enzo, and the widow Colombo. But of course it is precisely these people whom Vito helps, thus earning our sympathy.
[36] On Castellano’s improvisation, see Jones, Annotated Godfather, 98.
[37] Puzo’s novel goes further, imputing to Michael the opinion: “If the Families had been running the State Department there would never have been World War II” (Puzo, The Godfather, 142). On the war theme in the Godfather films, see Dainotto, Mafia. 131.
[38] On this development in the actual history of the Mafia, see Dainotto, Mafia, 62.
[39] Jones, Annotated Godfather, 182.
[40] Puzo’s novel raises this issue concretely in terms of Benito Mussolini’s famous war on the Italian Mafia in his determination to impose the will of his fascist central government on any recalcitrant elements in the polity: “The dictator had known that the Mafia would be a threat to his regime, forming what amounted to a separate authority from his own. He gave full power to a high police official, who promptly solved the problem by throwing everybody into jail or deporting them to penal work islands. In a few short years he had broken the power of the Mafia” (Puzo, Godfather, 277-78). Totalitarian regimes carry the logic of the nation-state to its ultimate conclusion, trying to eradicate any pre-political forces that seek to resist their power, including the family. Puzo concludes his account of Mussolini’s crackdown on the Mafia: “[he] also brought ruin to a great many innocent families.”
[41] The issue of family versus country is so important in the Godfather story that it surfaces at several stages of the project. The dialogue between Michael and Sonny that ends The Godfather II was originally supposed to take place between Michael and Vito. Paramount had hoped to get Marlon Brando to reprise his signature role for a brief moment at the end of The Godfather II, but he wanted too much money and the scene had to be rewritten with Sonny substituting for his father. As originally written, Don Corleone was supposed to show up on screen for the birthday party and challenge Michael’s decision to enlist: “you would risk your life for strangers?” Michael replies: “Not for strangers; for my country.” Vito remains true to his village ethic and expresses his contempt for the nation-state: ”Anyone not in your family is a stranger. Believe me, when trouble comes, your country won’t take care of you.” It is a shame that this dialogue never made it to the screen, because Michael’s reply to his father goes right to the heart of the matter: “That’s how it was in the Old World, Pop, but this is not Sicily” (Biskind, Godfather Companion, 115). A variant of this dialogue did make it into The Godfather I, but only as part of Genco Abbandonando’s macabre deathbed scene—which means that it was deleted from the final cut. Waiting in the corridor to enter Genco’s hospital room, Vito questions Michael’s medal-bedecked military uniform: “What are all these Christmas ribbons for?” Michael answers: “For bravery.” Vito replies: “What miracles you do for strangers” (Jones, Annotated Godfather, 55). In yet another scene deleted from The Godfather I, Vito in conversation with Michael gets to develop further his argument for family and against the nation-state: “Believe in family. Can you believe in your country? Those pezzonovante of the state who decide what we should do with our lives? Who declare wars they wish us to fight in to protect what they own? Do you put your faith in the hands of men whose only talent is that they tricked a bloc of people to vote for them? . . . Believe in a family; believe in a code of honor, older and higher. Believe in roots that go back thousands of years in your race” (Jones, Annotated Godfather, 181). One sees from all these deleted scenes how deeply rooted the Godfather films are in the contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between family and the nation-state, between a community of neighbors and a community of strangers.
[42] This point is explicit in Puzo’s novel, when it discusses a pre-war agreement Don Corleone secured among the mob families: “Like the Constitution of the United States this agreement respected fully the internal authority of each member in his state or city” (Puzo, Godfather, 224).
[43] As shown in this scene, the Mafia is more like a cartel than a corporation operating in a free market. Today we constantly speak of drug cartels.
[44] The Cold War threat of communism hovers in the background of the Godfather films. In a deleted scene in The Godfather I, we get a brief glimpse of Italian communists marching behind a red banner in Sicily. And of course Fidel Castro’s communist revolt in Cuba plays an important role in the plot of The Godfather II. In his Marxist interpretation of the films, Fredric Jameson makes much of the spectral presence of communism, especially in the appearance of the Cuban Revolution (Signature of the Visible, 45). On the importance of Cuba, see also Freedman, Hollywood Crime Cinema, 36-37.
[45] In a deleted scene, Michael worries about the way Vito has peacefully acquiesced in the gangsters’ agreement: “Won’t they take that as a sign of weakness?” Still acute in his ability to assess a situation, Vito replies: “It is a sign of weakness.” In Puzo’s novel, in a conversation just before his death with Michael and Tom Hagen, Vito says: “I’m old-fashioned, you’re the modern generation, don’t listen to me” (Puzo, Godfather, 404). The novel draws the contrast between Don Corleone and Don Barzini on just this issue: “He was a man much like Don Corleone, but more modern, more sophisticated more businesslike. He would never be called an old Moustache Pete and he had the confidence of the newer, younger brasher leaders on their way up” (285).
[46] This point is made explicit in Puzo’s novel by Mama Corleone when she describes the aging Vito working in his garden “as if he were some peasant still” (Puzo, Godfather, 393). Later the novel says of Vito’s garden: “It brought back his childhood in Sicily sixty years ago” (408).
[47] William Pechter writes: “the one single thing that most distinguishes The Godfather from other gangster films is that Don Corleone is not a doomed overreacher but a man who dies, in effect, in bed” (Browne, Godfather Trilogy, 170). Little Caesar provides the standard arc of the gangster’s story; a policeman says of its protagonist: “Meteoric as was Rico’s rise from the gutter, it was inevitable that he should return there.”
[48] These words are part of the magnificent scene between Vito and Michael written by Robert Towne, who was called in at the last minute as a script doctor to give father and son an appropriate last moment together. Vito’s words are based on an eloquent speech he gives in Puzo’s novel at the Mafia board meeting: “We are all men who have refused to be fools, who have refused to be puppets dancing on a string pulled by the men on high” (Puzo, Godfather, 292). This long speech, only small sections of which appear at the corresponding moment in the film, is worth studying as a whole—it goes to the thematic heart of the Godfather story in all its incarnations. On Towne’s role in the scripting of The Godfather I, see Jones, Annotated Godfather, 204-205, Lewis, Godfather, 24-28, and Lebo, Godfather Legacy, 161-68.
[49] All speculation on this subject goes back to the pioneering essay by Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” in the collection of his writings, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 97-103. Writing in 1948, Warshow of course does not discuss the Godfather films; he focuses on earlier cinematic incarnations of the gangster, such as Little Caesar and Scarface.
[50] Quoted in Jones, Annotated Godfather, 133.
[51] In The Godfather III, this movement is reversed. Retracing his family’s steps, Michael moves back to New York and finally back to Sicily. The wheel has come full circle. On this point, see Santopietro, Godfather Effect, 255.
[52] This issue does come up explicitly in Puzo’s novel. When Vito sends friends to Nevada to check out the background of his daughter’s fiancé, “they also came back with detailed information on legal gambling in Nevada which greatly interested the Don” (Puzo, Godfather, 19). Later in the novel, a character is unconcerned about any conflict breaking out when Michael starts to muscle in on the casino business: “He knew there was no chance of any violence, not in Vegas itself. That was strictly forbidden as fatal to the whole project of making Vegas the legal sanctuary of American gamblers” (387).
[53] Al Capone said something similar of his illicit distilling operations: “Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patron serves it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality” (quoted in Dainotto, Mafia, 72).
[54] When confronted by Michael Corleone’s claim that Greene’s casino is losing money, Moe says defensively: “You think I’m skimming off the top, Mike?”
[55] On this point, see Lewis, Godfather, 44.
[56] The difference between Vito and Michael shows up in their contrasting attitudes toward the principle of contract. To the Old World Vito, contracts mean nothing. He makes people offers they can’t refuse. He successfully breaks Johnny Fontane’s service contract with a bandleader by having Luca Brasi threaten him with death. The New World Michael has more respect for contracts. When he shows up in Las Vegas to get Fontane to enter into a service agreement with the mob’s casinos, Michael has a briefcase full of written contracts for Johnny and his show business friends to sign—contracts drawn up, no doubt, by the fine lawyerly hand of Tom Hagen. The movement from status to contract is often offered as a measure of the civilizing process, but the Godfather films raise doubts about preferring the modern principle of contract. Jon Lewis provides an excellent formulation of the movement from Vito to Michael Corleone: “Coppola offers a capitalist parable expansive enough to chronicle a transition from the 30s-era entrepreneurial gangster to a more refined version of the post-war corporate capitalist, from Vito, who is essentially a shake-down artist (making offers one dare not refuse) to his son Michael, who is a takeover artist, a corporate raider who offers to buy out his rivals before he reaches for the heavy artillery” (Lewis, Godfather, 43-44).
[57] For more on the cultural significance of Las Vegas, see my essay “Postmodern Prophet: Tocqueville Visits Vegas,” Journal of Democracy, 11 (2000): 111-118. For Las Vegas and the American dream, see Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 164-67.
[58] In Roth’s speech, Moe Greene emerges as another embodiment of the American dream, another rags-to-riches tale. Roth tells the story of a younger Jewish gangster being mentored by an older: “There was a kid I grew up with; he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me, you know. We did our first work together—worked our way out of the streets. Things were good, we made the most of it. During Prohibition, we ran molasses into Canada—made a fortune. . . . Later on he had an idea—to build a city out of a desert stopover for GIs on the way to the West Coast. That kid’s name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn’t even a plaque, or a signpost, or a statue of him in that town!” In Roth’s telling, Moe Greene becomes the archetypal American entrepreneur, whose creative efforts went unrewarded and unrecognized by the very community he brought into existence. Once again, the American dream takes a tragic turn. Note the absence of a sense of history in America. Italy is littered with monuments, but Las Vegas has no marker even for its founder.
[59] For a good analysis of this juxtaposition, see Freedman, Hollywood Crime Cinema, 33-34.
[60] Here is how Coppola explained his intentions in this scene: “People tell me that they like the opening wedding party in the original film better than the opening (First Communion) party for Michael’s son in the sequel. Well, so do I. That was my point. I was trying to show how the family had lost its authenticity. I wanted to have scenes that would remind you of the first film and to show by their altered shape how much the family had changed” (quoted in Lebo, Godfather Legacy, 244). Lewis speaks of Michael’s “modern rootlessness, a loss of ethnicity that is for him and his family the price of assimilation”(Lewis, Godfather, 70). On this loss of ethnicity, see also Biskind, Godfather Companion, 113 and David Denby, “The Two Godfathers,” in Browne, Godfather Trilogy, 178-79.
[61] As a sign of the Corleones’s new-found respectability, at this party the police are assisting in the parking lot, rather than taking down license plate numbers as they do in The Godfather I. This time the police are almost guests at the party—they are handed drinks in the parking lot. A deleted scene provides additional evidence for the higher social status of the Corleone family under Michael. They can now marry into the upper echelons of the social world in America. Michael gives his blessing for one of his nieces to marry a very WASPy preppie-type. To explain why Michael need not worry about his niece’s financial future, the young man says: “I’m a major stockholder in the family corporation” (a neat parallel to the Corleone family). Michael has to tell the young man: “You shouldn’t be embarrassed by your wealth,” and goes on to recommend that he take a course in business administration in college to supplement his Art History major. We keep seeing signs of how the Corleones have entered the mainstream of American business life. At the congressional hearings, Michael tells the committee that he owns stock in IBM and IT & T.
[62] As Naomi Greene points out: “The bonds of family love and duty are disintegrating: Fredo, married to a blonde floozy, drinks; Connie ignores her children as she flits from one husband to another; Michael neither feels nor inspires the love for family that governed his father’s life” (“Family Ceremonies: or, Opera in The Godfather Trilogy” in Browne, Godfather Trilogy, 138).
[63] In accordance with the transition to a modern economy in The Godfather II, gifts become less important. Connie has brought a gift for her mother to Anthony’s party, but Mama Corleone virtually ignores it. In The Godfather I, Michael does his own Christmas shopping along with Kay, but in The Godfather II, he delegates that task to Tom Hagen. Returning from Cuba, Michael has to ask Tom about “his” Christmas present to his son: “What was it, so I know?” Not gifts but money is what binds the mobsters together in The Godfather II. To praise his boss, Johnny Ola need only say: “Hyman Roth always makes money for his partners.” Frankie Pentangeli shows how old-fashioned he is when he is insulted by the fact that the Rosato brothers slip him a hundred-dollar bill in confirmation of the deal they have made. Similarly in The Godfather I, Don Fanucci is willing to take less money from Vito as long as he shows him more respect.
[64] The one glimpse we get of Kay’s hometown is almost straight out of Currier & Ives. Michael has come to ask her to marry him. It is a crisp autumn day in New Hampshire (actually the scene was shot in Mill Valley, California; see Jones, Annotated Godfather, 187). Kay, who is now a teacher, appears shepherding a group of WASPy children. We see a dog running down the street and then a boy riding by on a bicycle, saying: “Hi, Miss Adams.” He might as well be Wally from Leave It to Beaver or Bud from Father Knows Best. This is not a Sicilian small town. In Puzo’s novel, Kay’s father is “the pastor of the town Baptist church” (Puzo, Godfather, 231).
[65] In a deleted scene, the band is playing not Old World traditional Italian music but patriotic American numbers, such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.”
[66] This kind of distance is characteristic of modern society. In The Godfather II, Pat Geary laments at the Corleone party: “We see Nevada so seldom”--an odd statement from a senator from Nevada, but par for the course in modern politics. In Corleone and Little Italy, the oppressed people at least knew who their oppressors are and can see them every day. In a modern nation-state, the big shots become increasingly remote from the people whose lives they affect. That is one price people pay for vastly extending the bounds of the communities they live in.
[67] See Freedman, Hollywood Crime Cinema, 34-35.
[68] Puzo’s novel puts more emphasis on Michaels’ desire to Americanize his family. When he is trying to persuade Kay to marry him, he insists that he will take the Corleone family legitimate for the sake of the children he and Kay will have: “I want them to grow up to be All-American kids, real All-Americans, the whole works. Maybe they or their grandchildren will go into politics. . . . But I’ll settle for my kids being doctors or musicians or teachers. They’ll never be in the Family business. . . . And you and I will be part of some country club crowd, the good simple life of well-to-do Americans” (Puzo, Godfather, 363). Michael is so obsessed with Americanizing his children that he is upset when Kay converts to Catholicism: “He would have preferred the children to be Protestant, it was more American” (441). That may have been the basis of Michael’s attraction to WASPy Kay in the first place.
[69] In The Godfather I, Sonny in effect gives up his life because he will not tolerate a husband striking his wife in the case of his sister Connie and her husband Carlo.
[70] We learn in The Godfather III that, of all Michael’s sins and crimes, he regards having Fredo murdered as the most heinous and the most unforgivable.
[71] On the subject of violence against women in the Godfather films, see Dika, “Representation of Ethnicity,” 90-91.
