Godfather (22 page)

On its release,
The Godfather
was criticized in some quarters for subtly encouraging the audience to admire the breathtaking efficiency with which organized crime operates and for celebrating the violent means by which the mafiosi achieve their goals. Coppola counters in his commentary that it was never his intention to present a cosmeticized study of organized crime or to glamorize violence. “In fact, there's very little actual violence in the film. It occurs very quickly,” he maintains, as when Carlo Rizzi is murdered while he is sitting in the front seat of a car. He is garroted by an assassin who is in the back seat. The camera watches impassively as his shoes flail about and finally smash through the windshield as he dies.

Moreover, Coppola feels that he was making an especially harsh statement about the Mafia at the end of the film, when Michael makes a savage purge of all of the Corleone crime family's known foes. He points out that the violence in this scene was derived from real-life gangland killings. The death of Moe Greene, for example, was suggested by the murder of Las Vegas racketeer Bugsy Siegel, who was the target of a Mafia hit. In Coppola's defense John McCarty contends that Coppola was correct in not portraying the mafiosi as obviously menacing criminal types: “The members of the underworld are not all eye-rolling, saliva-dripping goons,” like the stereotypical mobsters in the old gangster pictures.
⁴⁹
The film rightly shows how the Mafia has become comfortably ensconced in a veneer of respectability, says Andrew Dickos. Thus the Corleone crime family has adopted “a sophisticated capitalistic approach,” as crime organizations like the Mafia operate more and more “like a corporation in a corporate society.”
⁵⁰

Coppola's status as an auteur is confirmed by the fact that his ongoing theme is clearly evident in this movie (i.e., his continuing preoccupation with the importance of family in modern society is once again brought into relief in the present picture).
⁵¹
As a matter of fact, the thing that most attracted Coppola to the project in the first place was that the book is really the story of a family. It is about “this father and his sons,” he says, “and questions of power and successions.”
⁵²
In essence,
The Godfather
offers a chilling depiction of the way in which Michael's loyalty to his flesh-and-blood family gradually turns into an allegiance to the larger Mafia family to which they, in turn, belong, a devotion that in the end renders him a cruel and ruthless mass killer.

The family, John Cawelti states, is the unifying principle of the film. It is a tale of a family, recounting the rise of Michael as son and heir “and reaching a climax with his acceptance of the power and responsibilities of godfather.” Most of the characters are members of the Corleone family, and the key scenes are events in the family history: the marriage of a daughter, the death of a son and then of the father. But the movie extends the family symbolism beyond the actual progeny of Don Vito's immediate family “to the members of the organization of which he is leader,” and they constitute his extended family. In brief, family is the thematic core of the entire film.
⁵³

With this film Coppola definitely hit his stride as a filmmaker. He tells the story in a straightforward, fast-paced fashion that holds the viewer's attention for close to three hours. Under his direction the cast members, without exception, give flawless performances, highlighted by Brando's Oscar-winning performance in the title role. His performance lends strength and coherence to the film and transcends genre.
The Godfather
also received Academy Awards for the best picture of the year and for the screenplay, which Coppola coauthored with Puzo. Furthermore, the picture was an enormous critical and popular success.

Later on, the picture received Italy's David Donatello Award as the best foreign film of the year. As Italy's top prize for an international motion picture, the Donatello Award demonstrated that Italy itself had no quarrel with the fashion in which Italian Americans were represented in the movie.

The Godfather
went on to set box-office records that are among the highest in cinema history. By the time its first run was completed, the movie had amassed an unprecedented $134 million in domestic rentals alone.

Pauline Kael speaks for the majority of critics when she calls
The Godfather
a groundbreaking film that raised the gangster picture to the level of cinematic art. As William Pechter puts it,
The Godfather
is “bigger, longer
and more richly upholstered than any other treatment of its subject.”
⁵⁴
Moreover, when the American Film Institute honored the best one hundred American films made during the first century of cinema in 1998,
The Godfather
headed the list.

Still, despite the hosannas lavished on the film, Coppola was disturbed at the time of the film's release by the notices that unfairly chastised him for celebrating and sentimentalizing the Mafia. If some reviewers and moviegoers missed the point he was trying to make about organized crime, he looked upon the sequel, which Paramount had asked him to make, as “an opportunity to rectify that,” for in the sequel Coppola would see to it that Michael was shown to be manifestly more cold-blooded and cruel than his father had ever been.
⁵⁵

I grew up in a neighborhood where organized crime was a way of life. I never knew these people as criminals. To me they were fathers and sons, childhood friends that I went to school with and sat next to in church.

—Bo Dietal, a policeman in the film
One Tough Cop

I no doubt deserve my enemies.

—Walt Whitman

When
The Godfather
became a runaway hit, Coppola's earnings from the film's profits amounted to a small fortune. So he could now afford to move the offices of American Zoetrope, his independent film production unit, from the old Folsom Street warehouse in San Francisco to more ample quarters. He took over the eight-story Sentinel Building at 910 Kearney Street, which had survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The edifice, which was painted sea green, was topped by a blue and gold dome that he christened “Coppola's cupola.” He remodeled the new home of American Zoetrope to encompass a penthouse office-studio, from which he could look out on the Golden Gate Bridge, and a high-tech postproduction facility, not to mention an espresso machine (no more instant coffee as in his austere,
pre-Godfather
days).

It was from the new office complex of Zoetrope that Coppola continued to develop film projects, which he arranged to finance and release through the distribution setups of various major studios in Hollywood. Thus
The Conversation
was a Zoetrope production, financed and distributed by Paramount (see
chapter 3
),

At the outset, Coppola was not enthusiastic about making the sequel to
The Godfather
. It seemed to him too much like reheating last week's stew. He joked that he would only direct the sequel if he could make it along the lines of a farce called
Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather
(a reference to the series of Abbott and Costello comedies like
Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein)
. He was inclined to return to making small personal films like
The Conversation
, even if he was reduced “to making them on Super 8.”
¹

Charles Bludhorn would not hear of any other director but Coppola taking on the sequel, Coppola says in his DVD commentary on
Godfather II
. Bludhorn told him, “Francis, you've got the recipe for Coca-Cola, and you don't want to manufacture any more bottles of Coke!” Paramount offered Coppola a handsome salary and a generous slice of the profits, but Coppola was especially interested in artistic control of the production. In negotiating with the studio he demanded that Robert Evans, with whom he feuded constantly on
The Godfather
, was to have “zero to do with the film” at any phase of the production. This stipulation was not a problem, since, as Biskind states frankly, Evans “was getting deeper into drugs” and eventually “stopped coming to the office.”
²

An early scenario proposed to Coppola dealt with the death of Michael Corleone, and he declined to consider it. “I did not want to see him assassinated by his rivals or go to jail,” he explains. “I wanted to take Michael toward what was in fact his destiny… . After winning all the battles and overcoming all of his enemies, I wanted him to be a broken man, a condemned man.”
³

What finally convinced him to take on the project was his conviction that the public had not morally condemned Michael at the end of
The Godfather
. He got to hear that some filmgoers actually applauded when the door of Michael's office was slammed in Kay's face at the film's final fadeout. Showing Michael Corleone to be the ruthless, cold-blooded criminal that he has become would provide Coppola with the lead-in to the sequel. He decided to call the film
The Godfather
Part II
, a title that occurred to him when he remembered Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's
Ivan the Terrible
Part II
(1945). “
Godfather II
was the first American film that did not have a special title for the sequel,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. For example, a sequel to
In the Heat of the Night
(1967) was called
The Organization
(1971).
“Calling the sequel to a Hollywood film
Part II
began with
The Godfather.”

Once Coppola had finally agreed to do the film, Paramount gave him a fairly tight schedule to work on because the studio wanted this movie to open during the lucrative Christmas season in 1974. A novelist takes two years to finish an ambitious novel, Coppola says. “I looked at the calendar and realized that I had three months to write a two-hundred-page screenplay for
Godfather II
, and then go right into pre-production.”
⁴
He was making a $13 million movie as if it were a quickie for his former boss Roger Corman (see
chapter 1
).

In approaching the screenplay, Coppola explains, “I believed that the family would be morally destroyed, and it would be a kind of Götterdämmerung. Moreover, I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose the ascension of the family under Vito Corleone with the decline of the family under his son Michael,” to show in flashback how the young Vito Corleone was building this crime family in America, while his son in the present is presiding over its disintegration.
⁵

In the documentary that accompanies the
Godfather Trilogy
on DVD, Coppola notes, “I had always wanted to write a screenplay that told the story of a father and a son at the same age. They were both in their thirties, and I would integrate the two stories.” Young Vito Corleone's early life as an Italian immigrant would be set during World War I, while the later life of the Corleone family presided over by his son Michael would be updated to the 1950s. The modern story would depict the family as “beset by Byzantine intrigues, marital discord, fraternal rivalry, and internal decay.”
⁶
Consequently,
Godfather II
covers nearly sixty years of American history, from the immigrants coming to America in the early 1900s all the way up to the post-World War II period. It is evident that he definitely did not want
Godfather II
to be a rehash of
The Godfather
: “In order not to merely make
Godfather I
over again, I gave
Godfather II
this double structure by extending the story in both the past and in the present “He was fascinated by the concept of a movie that would move freely back and forth in time. In short, he was interested in making a sequel that was “more ambitious, more advanced than the first.”

Paramount had commissioned Mario Puzo to prepare a preliminary draft of the screenplay before Coppola came on board, and Coppola incorporated some incidents from it in his version of the screenplay. Puzo also
contributed some additional material to the shooting script along the way, but the bulk of the screenplay was composed by Coppola. By burning a lot of midnight oil, he finished the script on time.

Most of the events in the modern story were invented by Coppola. Some of them were suggested by contemporary newspaper accounts. There is, for example, the incident in which Michael frames Nevada Senator Pat Geary by having a dead prostitute found in his bed in a sleazy bordello run by the Corleones in order to ensure the Senator's continued patronage of the Corleone enterprises. This episode was inspired by a sensational newspaper exposé of Nevada brothels.

The flashbacks to young Vito's life in New York's “Little Italy” were drawn from material left over from Puzo's novel—historical background for which there had been no room in the first film. In fact, Book III of the novel is a thirty-page description of the roots of the Mafia in Sicily and Vito Corleone's subsequent rise to power as a Mafia leader when he immigrates to the United States.
⁷
Puzo chronicles how Vito becomes a Mafia godfather who is a sort of Italian-immigrant entrepreneur in Little Italy. Coppola simply plucked historical incidents from Book III of the novel and wrote them into the script.

These flashbacks in essence depict the experiences of immigrants like Vito Corleone coming to this country and trying to realize the American dream of success in their lives. But they were reduced to laboring in sweat shops and dwelling in slums, so they found self-esteem and cash by joining street gangs, which they saw as brotherhoods.

The immigrants had a tradition of violence born of their resistance to the rural landlords who had exploited them back in Sicily. When they came over to America they formed gangs and secret societies, just as they had done in the old country. As historian Luc Sante states in the ABC-TV documentary
The Real Gangs of New York
(2003), “Crime became a necessary means of survival in the lawless slums,” which were therefore a fertile ground for the growth of gangs in the United States.