Godfather, The (2 page)
Authors: Mario Puzo
The whole myth of America was up for grabs. Old-fashioned Westerns like
Gunsmoke
and
Bonanza
were still among the five highest-rated shows on network television, but the countercultural
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
was number one. The Western, in fact, was looking pretty long in the tooth. New cultural, social, and political movements were questioning the interpretations of American history, so many of which were embodied in the Western genre. The civil rights movement introduced the idea that manifest destiny was a holocaust inflicted by European settlers on Native Americans. The women’s movement made the macho ethic of the West seem grossly archaic. The war in Vietnam challenged the validity of the militaristic methods by which the West was won. American leaders like President Nixon were being openly challenged, and lawmen, like the Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention, were no longer always considered the good guys.
Gunsmoke
and
Bonanza
were still among the five highest-rated shows on network television, but the countercultural
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
was number one. The Western, in fact, was looking pretty long in the tooth. New cultural, social, and political movements were questioning the interpretations of American history, so many of which were embodied in the Western genre. The civil rights movement introduced the idea that manifest destiny was a holocaust inflicted by European settlers on Native Americans. The women’s movement made the macho ethic of the West seem grossly archaic. The war in Vietnam challenged the validity of the militaristic methods by which the West was won. American leaders like President Nixon were being openly challenged, and lawmen, like the Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention, were no longer always considered the good guys.
Four popular movies of 1969 revealed the degree to which the great American narrative was being contested.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, the biggest hit of the year, celebrated a pair of charming Western outlaws. Sam Peckinpah’s artsy
The Wild Bunch
also featured outlaws in a story, set in 1913, that essentially pronounced dead the myth of the West.
Midnight Cowboy
, which won the Oscar for best picture that year and was third in box office receipts, appropriated the name and the hat of the cowboy in an X-rated film set in New York City about a male prostitute. And the protagonists in
Easy Rider
were a couple of counterculture cowboys who rode hogs instead of horses and did drugs instead of driving dogies. Even
True Grit
, a more traditional Western, featured John Wayne as an over-the-hill marshal. The Western form was still very much alive in 1969, but it was being transformed almost beyond recognition.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, the biggest hit of the year, celebrated a pair of charming Western outlaws. Sam Peckinpah’s artsy
The Wild Bunch
also featured outlaws in a story, set in 1913, that essentially pronounced dead the myth of the West.
Midnight Cowboy
, which won the Oscar for best picture that year and was third in box office receipts, appropriated the name and the hat of the cowboy in an X-rated film set in New York City about a male prostitute. And the protagonists in
Easy Rider
were a couple of counterculture cowboys who rode hogs instead of horses and did drugs instead of driving dogies. Even
True Grit
, a more traditional Western, featured John Wayne as an over-the-hill marshal. The Western form was still very much alive in 1969, but it was being transformed almost beyond recognition.
It was into this contested cultural environment that
The Godfather
introduced another myth.
The Godfather
introduced another myth.
THOSE FILMS OF 1969 reflected a shift in the role of the hero in American popular culture. The events of the late 1960s challenged the unambiguous nature of good and bad. Besides the authority of the military, the police, and the established order of race and gender roles, even parental authority was quivering in the face of more casual sexual mores and the power of rock ’n’ roll. To many citizens, things seemed out of control. Popular culture had retained a grip on its respect for authority for years, ignoring the cold war and civil rights in most of its entertainment, but that grip was loosening. America seemed ready for a new type of protagonist, one who embodied the ambiguities of the times.
The Godfather
provided not only a new set of protagonists but also a whole new code of living. Like Butch and Sundance, they were on the other side of the law. As the effectiveness of the traditional models of authority were proving vulnerable in the public eye, the Corleone family offered up a different model. Based on an unbreakable code, a solid sense of family, and an ability to bypass bureaucratic loopholes and inefficiencies, the Mafia of
The Godfather
presented a seductive alternative world. These people could get things done, and while some of those things were horrible, most of their victims deserved what they got and were usually outlaws themselves.
provided not only a new set of protagonists but also a whole new code of living. Like Butch and Sundance, they were on the other side of the law. As the effectiveness of the traditional models of authority were proving vulnerable in the public eye, the Corleone family offered up a different model. Based on an unbreakable code, a solid sense of family, and an ability to bypass bureaucratic loopholes and inefficiencies, the Mafia of
The Godfather
presented a seductive alternative world. These people could get things done, and while some of those things were horrible, most of their victims deserved what they got and were usually outlaws themselves.
The mob story as Mario Puzo envisioned it provided some terribly satisfying elements lodged deep in the American heart. It included a rags-to-riches immigrant story and tales of social and neighborhood benevolence, but it linked these with narratives of revenge, vigilante justice, and machismo. Part of the thrill of the book was the intimate look it afforded us into a dark and violent demimonde, a delicious taste of a dangerous lifestyle that most readers would, it would be hoped, never encounter up close. But more important, it provided a strikingly tempting alternative to the official and legal authorities of the day.
As the Western pioneers carved a system of justice out of the wilderness, the Corleones create one within the chaos and corruption of the city. Though the glory of the American experiment is its laws, courts, checks and balances, and deterrents to abuses of power, these things often don’t make for satisfying storytelling. In the world of
The Godfather,
no guilty person ever got off on a technicality.
The Godfather,
no guilty person ever got off on a technicality.
Take the case of Amerigo Bonasera. His first name, which evokes the Italian explorer for whom our nation is named, is the first word of the novel. Amerigo is an American, working hard and doing his best, playing by the rules of his new nation. His good citizenship has brought him to grief at the opening of the book, however. Two young men who have viciously attacked his daughter have been released on a suspended sentence by a New York judge. While his daughter lies in a hospital, her assailants are back on the street. As a last resort, he comes for help to Don Corleone, who reprimands him for bothering with the courts in the first place:
“Why do you fear to give your first allegiance to me? . . . You go to the law courts and wait for months. You spend money on lawyers who know full well you are to be made a fool of. You accept judgment from a judge who sells himself like the worst whore in the streets. . . . If you had come to me for justice those scum who ruined your daughter would be weeping bitter tears this day. If by some misfortune an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies . . . and then, believe me, they would fear you.”(p. 28)
The Don and his associates see themselves as more than an excessively proactive neighborhood watch group, however. There is in what they do an appealing, if ultimately unworkable, political philosophy. When discussing the inevitable “war” between the Tattaglia and the Corleone families, one associate theorizes:
“These things have to happen every ten years or so. It gets rid of the bad blood. And then if we let them push us around on the little things they wanta take over everything. You gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they shoulda stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they were just asking for big trouble when they let him get away with that” (p. 134)
Michael Corleone, Don Vito’s son, recalls his own father making a similar observation back in 1939: “If the Families had been running the State Department,” Michael muses to himself, “there would never have been World War II” (p. 134).
THE GODFATHER
is an American story, Horatio Alger for big boys. Caught up in a feud that leaves his father dead, twelve-year-old Vito Andolini, like so many immigrants before and after him, finds the old country no longer hospitable. He is sent to New York with little more than the name of his village, with which he is baptized into his new identity as an American, Vito Corleone. He secures work in a grocery store, marries a Sicilian woman as fresh from the boat as he is, and starts a family. When a notorious neighborhood extortionist causes him to lose his job, Vito supports his wife and two children by joining a gang that specializes in hijacking trucks filled with silk dresses. When the same extortionist demands a piece of the hijacking action, Vito kills him with ruthless, premeditated efficiency.
is an American story, Horatio Alger for big boys. Caught up in a feud that leaves his father dead, twelve-year-old Vito Andolini, like so many immigrants before and after him, finds the old country no longer hospitable. He is sent to New York with little more than the name of his village, with which he is baptized into his new identity as an American, Vito Corleone. He secures work in a grocery store, marries a Sicilian woman as fresh from the boat as he is, and starts a family. When a notorious neighborhood extortionist causes him to lose his job, Vito supports his wife and two children by joining a gang that specializes in hijacking trucks filled with silk dresses. When the same extortionist demands a piece of the hijacking action, Vito kills him with ruthless, premeditated efficiency.
His reputation in the neighborhood established, Vito becomes an urban Lone Ranger. Rather than take over the extortionist’s rackets, Vito chooses as his first act as “a man of respect” to save a widow and her dog from the nefarious greed of an evil landlord. About to be evicted from her apartment, Signora Columbo, as a poor woman, has no recourse to the usual channels of authority. It will, in fact, be the police who will put her out of the building if she doesn’t leave voluntarily. She comes to Vito’s house to ask for help and he arranges it: same rent as before and the yapping dog stays.
The Don’s role as a Lone Ranger becomes legendary, as evidenced years later at the wedding that opens the book. We first meet Don Corleone, in fact, in his role as a fixer of problems, not as a mobster. A trio of protagonists, each with a personal difficulty, appeals to the Don for help, which he will deliver with colorful effectiveness. His philosophy—on the surface based on friendship and neighborly barter, like that of a country doctor who is paid in chickens or fresh produce—has a certain American appeal:
Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you,
you yourself
, proclaim your friendship. And then, no matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution to that man’s woe. His reward? Friendship, the repectful title of “Don,” and sometimes the more affectionate saluation of “Godfather.” And perhaps, to show respect only, never for profit, some humble gift—a gallon of homemade wine or a basket of peppered
taralles
specially baked to grace his Christmas table. It was understood, it was mere good manners, to proclaim that you were in his debt and that he had the right to call upon you at any time to redeem your debt by some small service. (p. 11)
Don Corleone’s ability to deliver implies that he is not just the Godfather, but in fact God. In his son Michael’s assessment, “He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes” (p.138).
Of course, we know that the activities of the Corleone family are not good ones. We know that ultimately a system like theirs cannot take the place of laws and courts, and we need look no farther than the Don’s hometown for evidence of this. By the time he left Corleone as a child, the village was tormented by violence, danger, and feuds brought on by the Mafia, which served as the village’s “second government, far more powerful than the official one in Rome” (p.183). The techniques Vito Corleone continues in America are the very ones that made it necessary for him to leave Sicily.
But still, on a purely visceral level, there is something oddly attractive about the world presented in
The Godfather
and about the ubiquitous control over that world that the Corleone family holds. In 1969, this must have been a striking fantasy to readers who felt that the traditional institutions of power and authority in America were seriously in question. Or to today’s readers, for that matter. Deep in our hearts we probably all long for the ability to mete out swift and effective justice to those over whom we have no power. We may all know someone we’d like to see sleeping with a horse’s head, if not with the fishes. In our popular stories, we continue to want a Western hero, but not a sanitized one.
The Godfather
was a modern story, in which the dark side and justice were elided and confused.
The Godfather
and about the ubiquitous control over that world that the Corleone family holds. In 1969, this must have been a striking fantasy to readers who felt that the traditional institutions of power and authority in America were seriously in question. Or to today’s readers, for that matter. Deep in our hearts we probably all long for the ability to mete out swift and effective justice to those over whom we have no power. We may all know someone we’d like to see sleeping with a horse’s head, if not with the fishes. In our popular stories, we continue to want a Western hero, but not a sanitized one.
The Godfather
was a modern story, in which the dark side and justice were elided and confused.
THE GODFATHER
SPENT nearly seventy weeks on bestseller lists, and more than twenty million copies of the book have been sold. Many more people know of the story, however, through its first two film adaptations, both of which won the Academy Award for best picture. The first film was the top-grossing movie of 1972, and the top-selling video of 1980, the first year in which
Billboard
published such a list. Mario Puzo cowrote the screenplays for all three of the
Godfather
films, the first two of which won Oscars as well.
SPENT nearly seventy weeks on bestseller lists, and more than twenty million copies of the book have been sold. Many more people know of the story, however, through its first two film adaptations, both of which won the Academy Award for best picture. The first film was the top-grossing movie of 1972, and the top-selling video of 1980, the first year in which
Billboard
published such a list. Mario Puzo cowrote the screenplays for all three of the
Godfather
films, the first two of which won Oscars as well.
The mob movie genre had been around for a long time, but until 1972, most of these films were moral tales about the nasty doings of gangsters. One could, of course, read between the frames and see the characters in films like
Little Caesar
(1930) and
The Public Enemy
(1931) as romantically attractive, as did many young boys, who added gangsters to cowboys and Indians as part of their playground repertoire. Still, these were clearly stories meant to expose the unmitigated evil of the bad guys. On TV, starting in 1959,
The Untouchables
told the story of Prohibition-era gangsters from the standpoint of the heroic, incorruptible federal agents out to get them.
Little Caesar
(1930) and
The Public Enemy
(1931) as romantically attractive, as did many young boys, who added gangsters to cowboys and Indians as part of their playground repertoire. Still, these were clearly stories meant to expose the unmitigated evil of the bad guys. On TV, starting in 1959,
The Untouchables
told the story of Prohibition-era gangsters from the standpoint of the heroic, incorruptible federal agents out to get them.
As the novel had, the movies about the Corleone family transformed the genre. The first two
Godfather
films are among the most critically acclaimed in the history of American movies, and other acclaimed movies, most notably
Goodfellas
(1990), have built on the new tradition. One cannot imagine
The Sopranos
without the
Godfather
films, to which characters in the HBO TV series occasionally make reference.
Godfather
films are among the most critically acclaimed in the history of American movies, and other acclaimed movies, most notably
Goodfellas
(1990), have built on the new tradition. One cannot imagine
The Sopranos
without the
Godfather
films, to which characters in the HBO TV series occasionally make reference.
As was the case with other spectacularly popular American novels, such as
Huckleberry Finn
and
Gone With the Wind
,
The Godfather
, and the genre it inspired, has been attacked for the nature of its ethnic portrayals. These concerns became more pronounced with the release of the films. The objections of the Italian-American community were not unfounded. In fact they were a testament to the power of the myth wrought by
The Godfather
. Images of Italian-Americans as mobsters, the argument went, had dissolved every other cultural image of Italian-Americans, including Columbus Day.
Huckleberry Finn
and
Gone With the Wind
,
The Godfather
, and the genre it inspired, has been attacked for the nature of its ethnic portrayals. These concerns became more pronounced with the release of the films. The objections of the Italian-American community were not unfounded. In fact they were a testament to the power of the myth wrought by
The Godfather
. Images of Italian-Americans as mobsters, the argument went, had dissolved every other cultural image of Italian-Americans, including Columbus Day.
In the end, however, the mob story is as popular as it is because it represents a larger American story. This nation has a long tradition of throwing off one authority in favor of another, sometimes with violence, and many of our ancestors came here as fugitives from the law. America is a rowdy culture, and both its history and its present are filled with wise guys.
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