The Godfather - Ethnography with a Side of Bullet Squibs

Mar

6

The Godfather - Ethnography with a Side of Bullet Squibs

≡ Category: Art, Drama, Essential, Movie Reviews By Country, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Year: 1972

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

When The Godfather was released in 1972, it was meant to be a mainstream melodrama, not an art film. Yet, 35 years later, that’s what is has become for all intents and purposes. In most critical and popular lists, The Godfather is ranked among the top ten films ever made.

So, why am I reviewing it on a site devoted to Trash Cinema?

Well, for one thing, The Godfather is deliriously entertaining. For another, some of the violence, particularly a machine gun death, still has the power to shock. In it’s intimacy, that scene almost plays like horror. How did director Francis Ford Coppola arrive at the decision to film the violence in this way? No doubt, Coppola was competing with other directors like William Friedkin, Sam Peckinpah, and Arthur Penn, who had already raised the bar for realistic screen violence. I’m sure Coppola was also inspired by the same films as his contemporaries, the European trash cinema of the period, especially from France and Italy.

So, even though The Godfather is a great film, maybe even an art film, it’s roots are still partially in the European trash cinema of the period.

So, what’s it about? Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), a war hero who is on track to live a law abiding life, gets dragged into the world of organized crime when his father Vito (Marlon Brando), the head of the Corleone crime family, is the victim of an assassination attempt.

There is all the excitement and action that you would expect from a mob flick, but director Francis Ford Coppola goes way beyond the call of duty in the level of detail in his depictions of the milieu. The opening wedding sequence could be home movies of an upscale postwar Italian wedding, it’s so convincing.

The feeling of authenticity, whether you’re talking about a produce market in New York City or the village of Corleone in Italy, verges on ethnography. The Godfather feels almost like a documentary at times. There’s one scene where Clemenza (Richard Castellano) is teaching another mafioso to make tomato sauce for spaghetti properly. This scene and others like it serve no narrative function, but it’s this level of detail and veracity that lift The Godfather out of the realm of melodrama and into the world of art.

Ironically, when Francis Ford Coppola turned in his directors cut, many of these scenes were left on the cutting room floor. It was producer Robert Evans who insisted that they be edited back in, making the theatrical cut nearly 50 minutes longer.

Another aspect that elevates The Godfather is the acting — mamma mia! Aside from Pacino and Brando, we’ve got James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Richard Conte, Al Lettieri, Diane Keaton, Abe Vigoda, and John Cazale in featured roles. And I’m not even going to start on the small army of wonderful character actors that play smaller parts. Coppola even got his sister Talia Shire to play a key part. He got lucky — she was superb. He wasn’t that lucky when he cast daughter Sophia Coppola in Godfather Part III (ironically, she appears as a baby in the baptism scene that climaxes The Godfather).

The script is a killer, too. Many bits of dialog have entered the English lexicon: “Leave the gun, take the cannoli;” “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer;” and of course the famous “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

The funny part is that nobody had any idea they were making a classic. In the early part of the filming, the studio suits objected to the miles of footage of the wedding that Coppola shot. They wanted to replace him with Elia Kazan. The only thing that prevented Coppola from getting fired was Brando’s vow to quit if Coppola were replaced.

It’s easy now to look back and chuckle at the studio’s interference, but this was the same Francis Ford Coppola who went on to make the tone deaf and ridiculous Godfather Part III. His artistic instincts are far from infallible.

Nonetheless, Coppola’s legacy is secure. The Godfather is an indisputable masterpiece that has already stood the test of time.