The Godfather: "I Believe in America..."
"I believe in America." Undertaker Amerigo Bonasera's opening words from The Godfather, draped in shadow while he speaks, ties American prosperity to Death. Acculturating oneself in America means sacrificing ethnic values: the New World is at war with the Old. Bonasera’s introduction, a plea for Don Corleone to avenge the undertaker’s daughter after she was raped and beaten—and then released with a suspended sentence after conviction—establishes the pertinent themes, in addition to a sense of atmosphere, as he’s surrounded by shadow, silence, and framed in a close-up that slowly zooms out. There are two Americas in the world of The Godfather: the “public” one of government and big business, and the private one of heritage, blood, family, and tradition. As much as southern Italians have tried to assimilate into the larger canvas of a nation, they are still pointedly detached and Othered, an ethnic tribe separate from the mass.
“Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first?” asks the shadowy figure with his back to the camera. Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) lays out this division between paison of his private circle and the American public system. Bonasera, believing in the system, wants to “buy” a favor from the godfather, but Don Corleone is trying to say that a favor is symbolic, with debt and repayment based on reciprocity and not money. “I’ll give you anything you ask,” Bonasera pleads.
Cut to a wide shot of the office, the don at his desk. To the godfather’s right is his son and protégé Santino, or “Sonny” (James Caan), drink in hand. Closer to the foreground and sitting with his back to us is the consigliore-in-training, adopted son Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall). The three Corleones are stationed like chess pieces, their movements perfectly blocked as the pressure of darkness weighs down on the tremulous undertaker. The don is cradling a cat (one of the film’s many wonderful on-set improvisations). “We’ve known each other many years, but this is the first time you ever came to me for counsel or for help. I can’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for a cup of coffee.” This is a clever psychological ploy the godfather uses to establish power in his favor. He continues, “But let’s be frank….You found paradise in America. Had a good trade, made a good living. Police protected you and there were courts of law. You didn’t need a friend like me. But now you come to me and say, ‘Don Corleone, give me justice.’ But you don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship. You don’t even think to call me ‘Godfather.’ Instead, you come into my house on the day my daughter’s to be married and you ask me to do murder, for money.”
“I ask you for justice,” Bonasera tries to clarify. “That is not justice. Your daughter is still alive,” replies Corleone. “They must suffer then as she suffers. How much shall I pay you?” Corleone gathers his thoughts and the pieces on the board move, Hagen setting his drink down and Santino shuffling. “Bonasera,” the don begins. “What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully. If you’d come to me in friendship, then the scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies then they would become my enemies.” He lifts his finger. “And then they would fear you.” Bonasera humbles himself. “Be my friend?” he asks. Corleone shrugs. “Godfather?” Bonasera bows and kisses the godfather’s ring.
“Good,” the don nods. He puts his arm around Bonasera and leads him to the door. “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But…until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.” “Grazie,” Bonasera says, happily exiting. A flute from the outside whistles into the scene, the celebratory exterior world flowing in the dark chambers of illicit alliances, almost like how the cabaret drifts into the backstage area of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. The godfather, smelling the flower on his tuxedo, looks to Hagen and issues instructions for avenging Bonasera’s daughter. “We’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker says.” It’s a funny line, given that Vito Corleone is introduced as a man so powerful that he makes the tradesman of Death, an undertaker, tremble.
The godfather values “friendship” and “family relations” instead of cold or impersonal capital exchanges. “The Godfather” – a title denoting both a spiritual and familial relationship – offers something that the impersonal systems of governing control cannot give to Bonasera. Buying into America’s paradise is, in the context of the scene, putting one’s faith in the system that have betrayed Bonasera. As Michael (Al Pacino) tells Senator Pat Geary (G.D. Spradlin) in Part II, “We’re both a part of the same hypocrisy,” and then later speaking of the political bodies combating him in Part III/Coda, “Italian politics have had these men for centuries. They’re the true mafia.” The opening of The Godfather, Romance though it is, speaks the same sentiment as the prologue in the more anthropologically-correct dramatization of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, where Henry Hill narrates, “What the organization is offering is protection for people who can’t go to the cops. That’s what the FBI could never get. Like a police department for wise guys.”
This is where the prodigal son, Michael, enters the story and why he weighs heavily on Vito’s mind. Vito won’t take the family photo at Connie’s wedding without Michael, though it would be expedient to just get it over with. Michael is the family’s black sheep, having turned away from the family business in the interest of certain ideals: he enlisted after Pearl Harbor, which greatly upset his father (“Your country ain’t your blood” is the father’s philosophy, voiced by Sonny), and he is openly in a relationship with a WASP, an outsider from the comfortable homogenous suburbs of New Hampshire, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton). We see Michael and Kay enter the wedding, both somewhat out of place as he’s in his military uniform and she’s in bright red. For most of the picture, cinematographer Gordon Willis shoots old Vito Corleone with the whites of his eyes somewhatburied. But when we see him from outside his window, peering between the blinds at Michael and Kay dancing, his eyes are fully lit.
We learn that Vito turned to criminality because the ends justified the means, and that his dream rested on the youngest and most intelligent son to move the family towards social legitimacy, where the emblem of the family would have wide social respect and not just performative reverence (what difference does it make considering that all structures, “legitimate” or “illegitimate,” are innately corrupt in the world of The Godfather?) The Godfather trilogy is not Vito’s story but Michael’s, the father being the postulating echo that haunts the son’s thoughts and actions. In contrasting these two characters, we note how one lives and dies mostly happy and fulfilled, passing away in a moment of grandfatherly bliss long before his family will be spiritually ruined. The son has a more troubling fate.
In their first dialogue exchange in the film, Michael tells Kay a story about his father’s relationship to one of the wedding’s most prestigious guests, Johnny Fontane (Al Martino), a singer/actor that author Mario Puzo may have based on Frank Sinatra. Vito is Fontane’s godfather (in the non-mafia sense, mind you), and he is always eager to help him (“He’s a good godson,” Vito humors Tom Hagen after the consigliore says, “We haven’t seen him in two years, he’s probably in trouble again.”) Fontane was having trouble with a band leader who wouldn’t let the singer go on his own. Fontane went to his godfather for assistance. “My father assured [the band leader] that either his signature or his brains would be on the contract” – the famous offer that no one can refuse. Kay is hushed. “That’s my family, Kay, it’s not me.” Ostensibly, Michael’s being honest here. Rather than take what his father’s wealth and power can offer him, Michael’s gone to Ivy League college, then gone to war (not drafted but enlisting on his own initiative), and sought romance outside his hermetical tribe.
This is why Al Pacino’s casting was so essential. Coppola felt that the character needed to have a countenance that evoked the map of Sicily. Pacino is the most ethnic of the film’s main characters, which caused great frustration for producer Robert Evans and the other Paramount heads, who would have preferred Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal – a safer Leading Man look when compared to Pacino’s diminutive stature and distinctive features. Pacino’s ancestors came from the actual Corleone, Sicily, and Michael, though he is rebelling against his origins and reaching out to what the melting-pot has to offer, is nevertheless bound to something in his blood. He is an aberration, and yet a loyal son. His principles sew disastrous seeds, such as—in all three movies—his need to wrap up loose ends, even violating what is sacrosanct. “That’s my family, Kay, it’s not me” is a line that becomes more significant and ironic with every minute of Michael’s development over the course of the films.
Soon after this exchange, we look at the first son, the would-be successor Sonny. In contrast to Michael’s reserve and taciturn intelligence, Sonny is governed by instinct. We first see him smashing a photographer’s camera then, calming down, dropping a couple bills on the ground to compensate for the damage. He seduces a bridesmaid, Lucy Mancini, just as his wife Sandra is demonstrating to other women just how prodigiously endowed he is. Coming late to his father’s office after this rendezvous, Vito ostracizes him. “You spend time with your family?” Vito loudly asks Johnny Fontane. “Yes,” the singer answers. “Good,” and the godfather turns to Sonny before looking back to Fontane. “Because a man that doesn’t spend time with his family can never be real man.”
Such decorum and values are sacred for Vito (whose family was murdered, after all): family comes before business. Disloyalty to family makes the whole enterprise vulnerable. Vito blames Sonny’s blundering questions during the Virgil Sollozzo (Al Leiteri) meeting on his careless infidelity. When Tom Hagen suggests that Vito give an important role to his new son-in-law, Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), Vito is quick to say, “Never. Give him a living, but never discuss the family business with him.” This indicates that for his children’s families, in particular his youngest child, Connie (Talia Shire), he wants the illegality of organized crime to become diffused—something at odds with Carlo’s motives, as he probably married Connie to become a major player in the Corleone business. His dissatisfaction leads to domestic violence and assisting rival families in Sonny’s murder.
Vito’s credo would seem to be simply “Don't make a mess.” As regards Connie and Carlo, this is somewhat problematic. Vito has a Stoic disposition of non-involvement in his daughter’s abuse. Contrast this to Sonny, who kicks the shit out of Carlo after seeing his sister’s bruises. Sonny is a heroic protector with explosive furor, and yet neglectful of his own household. Shortly before his hot-fused anger puts him in a careless position resulting in his death, we see Sonny leaving Lucy’s apartment, his downfall connected to his infidelity. In Part III, Sonny’s bastard son born from this liason, Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), will stage the murder of a rival gangster (Joe Mantegna) during an Italian festa, Coppola paying close attention to the traditional religious icons being shattered and destroyed. This is a destabilizing event, “the wrong decision,” according to aging Michael. Compare the chaos to a similar festa in Part II, as the young Vito (Robert De Niro) carries out his righteous workers’ revolt with the murder of the “Mustache Pete” Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin). Vito is polished in his execution, not disrupting the sanctity of the ritual as he kills Fanucci in the closed quarters of the mafia chief’s apartment building.
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We first meet the Corleones right after World War II. New Deal policies have fostered the construction of an America where more people can be educated and incorporated into the larger American portrait, ghettos dying out in favor of something homogenous and liberating from the past's relegations. The college-educated war veteran, Michael, represents the future. But in The Godfather the past is not really past.
For one thing, racial categories remain; to cover his tracks in helping a baker’s assistant named Enzo get citizenship so that he can marry the baker’s daughter, Vito instructs Hagen to make sure the political strings are not pulled with “our paisan,” but rather with “a Jew congressman in another district.” Later, Hagen sends apologies from congressmen and judges who regret that they cannot attend Connie’s wedding – “They said you’d understand,” Hagen says, but we can assume it has just as much to do with Corleone’s syndicate status as much as it does to his ethnicity; the wedding exudes tradition, something tribal and separate from the rest of America. When Hagen confronts Jack Woltz (John Marley), the belligerent producer who refuses to give Johnny Fontane an important role in an upcoming war picture, Woltz fires at him, “I don’t care how many Dago Guinea Grease-balls come out of the woodwork!” Hagen calmly replies, “I’m German-Irish.” Woltz vituperatively responds, “Well let me tell you something my Kraut-Mick friend! I’m gonna make so much trouble for you, you won’t know what hit you!” Entrenched values of rustic chivalry remain in place.
The changing times are manifest in the question that emerges because of Sollozzo: should the Corleones get into the big business of narcotics? Sollozzo is seeking syndicate protection as he expands his business; he owns poppy fields in Turkey and factories that do heroin processing in Sicily, and for the Corleones’ protection he can offer immense capital growth. Vito asks Sonny and Hagen for opinions. Sonny oafishly shrugs, “There’s a lot of money in that white powder.” Hagen is more articulate. “I say yes…Narcotics is a thing of the future. If we don’t get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. Not now, but ten years from now.”
Sollozzo pitches his idea to Vito as an offer that the old don himself can’t refuse. Yet here’s where Vito makes the fateful choice of siding with his principle and his dreams as opposed to the demands of changing economics and technology (mass heroin production cannot help but effect the underworld economy). It’s a moment that weirdly mirrors the film’s opening, where Vito derides Bonasera’s focus on capital exchange as opposed to the symbolism of the “God-Father” relationship.
“I must say ‘no’ to you, and I’ll give you my reason,” Vito says, sitting next to Sollozzo after pouring him a drink. “It’s true. 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.” For Vito, drugs are dirty in a way that gambling and prostitution aren’t. During this round table discussion, as the don is joined by Sonny, Hagen, caporegimes Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda) and Pete Clemenza (Richard Castellano), and middle-child Fredo (John Cazale), he is probably the only person in the room who carries this sentiment, stubborn in his refusal to buy into a new paradigm that endangers his dream of social legitimacy.
Aided by the rival Tattaglia family, Sollozzo has two gunmen shoot Vito as he buys fruit (one of the first appearances of the trilogy’s ominous symbol of death, the orange), kidnaps Tom Hagen, and has the most feared Corleone soldier, Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana), garroted in a bar – a triple front assault that puts the Corleones on heightened alert. Sollozzo reminds Hagen of how Vito must have been “slipping.” “Ten years ago, could I have gotten to him?” he asks, knowing that Hagen agrees with him about how narcotics are the future. Sollozzo’s plan is to get Sonny, presumably the new don, to go ahead with the drug operation. After all, money trumps tradition. “I don’t like violence, Tom,” Sollozzo remarks. “I’m a businessman. Blood is a big expense.”
Blood is indeed expensive: most of the Corleone family’s interests rest in Vito being alive. “We lose the old man,” Tom says, “we lose half of our political contacts and strength.” Personality goes a long way. If his father dies, Sonny would either have to make the deal with Sollozzo or launch an all-out war. Riding on instinct, Sonny goes to war, first killing suspected turncoat Paulie Gatto (John Martino), Vito’s bodyguard and driver. Paulie’s execution is memorably carried out in front of amber waves of grain with the Statue of Liberty in the background. The American Dream overlaps with violent specters of death.