Camera And Action, page 31
The Godfather set connects to and departs from the traditional gangster genre. The urban criminal was typically romanticized as a tragic hero during the thirties in such films as Little Caesar (Melvyn LeRoy, 1930), The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931), and Scarface (Howard Hughes, 1932). The classic gangster was a self-reliant, big-city criminal, the individualist resisting conformity who is eventually gunned down on city streets. In the conventional ending, the gangster's death restores law and order and reaffirms "community morality. 1117 The Godfather, on the other hand, invites viewers to ignore the criminal element in the Corleones and identify with them.
Rather than respect for the law, a private, personal code of honor determines the worth of the characters in The Godfather.18 The convention Coppola was after had to do with making the subtle switch from characters who played Italian gangsters to people who personalized Italian codes on screen. Coppola insisted on Italian actors, but Paramount disagreed. It was the generic Italian executives wanted. Better still, why not transform a Ryan O'Neil or a Robert Redford into a Northern Italian? Coppola pressed to put Al Pacino in the lead role as Michael Corleone, a second-generation Sicilian American, but when Pacino auditioned, what executives saw was a short Italian with a big nose. "He was too short, `too Italian,' and so low-key that on first appearance he seemed listless" to those involved. As casting director Fred Roos remembered, "He wasn't a star, which was not pleasing to the executives at that time." Even Evans was unimpressed. "Why the hell are you testing Pacino again? The man's a midget," he complained. Mario Puzo's Michael "was supposed to be the American in the family. He had to look a little classy, a little Ivy League."19
Coppola fought for his ideas, eventually convincing the studio he was right. As he noted, "When I read The Godfather, whenever I would see the character of Michael, I saw Al's face." Pacino's features were not Hollywood's idea of star material even in the multicultural seventies, but he had performed on Broadway and had talent. Italians - unmelted and authentic - would bring the film in line with contemporary taste for novelty and candor.20 Pacino himself recognized the importance of Coppola's vision. Later he commented, Coppola's "tenacity ... got me in there."" It was Evans who eventually agreed, "He's Italian, he's as written."22
By the fall of 1970, the idea of authenticity turned into a marketable commodity. At a press conference in September, the studio exploited the idea of Italians playing themselves. "We're going to cast real faces, people who are not name; nor are we going to have Hollywood Italians." Producer Evans explained, "We would rather go with unknowns than bigname actors and actresses" because "we want it to be authentic." Everybody who was remotely interested applied for parts. A multitude of hopefuls wrote letters. "I'm an unknown." "I'm dark-haired." "I weigh 235 pounds." "My father is the Godfather in Cleveland, and he can make things easy for you." "If you are looking for an unknown who has never done any acting, I might fill the bill. Granted I'm no All MacGraw, but what do you expect for an Italian?" Even flashy San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli alerted management he was available. Some "sent a picture of themselves holding a pizza saying they would be perfect for a part," as executive producer Al Ruddy remembered. Others auditioned in full "mafia" regalia. James Caan remembers, "They talked in deze and doze."23
Those who had fashioned themselves into Hollywood Italians were typically turned down - except for one onlooker in Little Italy, Lenny Montana. Montana, an ex-professional wrestler, attracted executives and got the part of Luca Brasi. Another unknown, Gianni Russo, played Carlo Rizzi after Ruddy saw a video tape Russo sent.24 Coppola's wish to do something different depended completely on his "very conscious decision" to pay attention to "the details." As he commented, "I've almost never seen a movie that gave any real sense of what it was like to be an Italian-American."25 In Coppola's words, viewers should "feel what these people were feeling."26 With an "insider's" eye, Coppola turned the sights, smells, sounds, and textures of Italianicity into a major film. In his words, it was "the biggest home movie in history. 1121
No doubt, viewers received a little taste of Coppola's Italian American family. He took audiences to a wedding, a funeral, a baptism, a grandfather's garden, and family meals with the Coppola family producing, directing, scoring, and acting in the film. Francis's ItalianAmerican father, Carmin Coppola, collaborated with Nino Rota on the soundtrack. Talia Shire, Coppola's sister, played Connie and Francis' daughter and sons played extras. As Talia remarked, both films were "textured or perfumed in a way with the memories of our Italian American family."28 The effect worked for one film commentator, who enthused the film was one of those rare experiences that feels perfectly right from beginning to end - almost as if everyone involved had been born to participate in it."29 Film scholar Vera Dika agreed, "The Godfather brings to us, like perhaps no other film before it in American film history, the notion of `authenticity' when presenting Italian Americans as an ethnic group."30
Like Robert Altman, who had his cast and crew live in tents in the rainy Northwest to internalize the sensation of frontier times, Coppola prepped his troop with "character-reinforcing tools" such as "thin Italian cigars ... prop pistols, Italian wine and food, cooking utensils, silverware, newspapers, and other personal items." They met for dinners as the Corleone family at local restaurants. Coppola believed these outings would "inspire the spark of character development."" He indeed enlightened his cast and took the crew in that direction. This provocative director "knew the way these men ate their food, kissed each other, talked. He knew the grit."32
The movie's co-screenwriter and the book's author, Mario Puzo, also knew the "grit." As the second-generation son of Italian-born parents noted, during his childhood in the "heart of New York's Neapolitan ghetto," Hell's Kitchen, he "never heard an Italian singing." Nor were "the grown-ups ... charming or loving or understanding." Those he remembered "seemed coarse, vulgar, or insulting." Puzo's novel responded to "all the cliches of lovable Italians, singing Italians, happy-go-lucky Italians" and therefore the Hollywood that constructed them. As he commented, "I wondered where the hell the moviemakers and story writers got all their ideas from."33
If the ethnic touch was to function as more than a simplistic reference point, it had to start with a definition of place. High on Evans' and Coppola's list of demands was on-location shooting in New York. Set designer Dean Talouvaris had a keen eye for creating an Italian American neighborhood. His crew constructed the "urban village," the "Little Italy" of the immigrant generation. The neighborhood was essential to Coppola's focus on the Italian family drama as an American story told through an ethnic eye. The texture of those neighborhoods in the film displayed the lifestyle of Europeans' pre-suburb exodus from the city and the "grip ... of ... family."34 Little Italy on Mott Street served as Mulberry Street in the film and Bruno Tattaglia's nightclub in the Edison Hotel hosted Luca Brasi's murder.35
Representing the gangster's domestic life was not new in film, but personalizing Italian culture was. Typically, in classic tradition the gangster-loner shows a "deep devotion to family" by projecting that value onto a sidekick. This "every-man" sort of character eventually "abandons the gangster in favor of traditional society."36 Such a split is not central to The Godfathers' personae because of both films' dependence on ethnic identity.
Part I establishes that fact instantly. The Godfather opens with a father-to-father plea: "I believe in America," a mustached Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) tells Don Corleone who is receiving guests asking for his family's help. "America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in American fashion but I taught her never to dishonor her family," Bonasera continues. "She found a boyfriend, not an Italian." In traditional fashion, Bonasera asks for the Godfather's help to avenge the brutal beating and rape of his daughter by two American boys. "I went to the police like a good American," Bonasera explains. The "boys were arrested" and sentenced, but the judge "suspended the sentence." The opening scene locates Bonasera's peripheral position within dominant society and justifies the Corleone means of violence as retribution, as a form of resistance. "Murder is justice" for the ethnic outsider, as filmmaker Roger Corman pointed out, because America failed them and not the reverse. 37
The ethnic neighborhood in Godfather: Part II (1974) was essential for the film's focus on ethnic America (Photofest).
The Corleones offer Bonasera friendship and a promise of help, but Don Corleone leaves business behind to enjoy himself as father of the bride. He dances with his daughter, Connie Corleone, then his wife (Morgana King), and later toasts to his godson, the Hollywood star Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino). He insists on a family photo that includes everyone. Mother, father, brother, children, bridal party, and friends surround bride and bridegroom. The portrait captures the depth and width of the Corleone extended family with twenty-some people posing for Godfather audiences. From the beginning, the film characterizes Don Corleone as an endearing elderly man who runs a tight Mafia family but who will play with his grandchild, stop at grocery stands to buy fruit for his family, and pass fatherly wisdom to those around him. He counsels his godson. "Spend time with your family?" Vito asks. "Because the man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man." The wedding places the family at the center of the story of power. Connie Corleone, Vito's only daughter, marries Carlo Rizzi and the film indulges in an Italian-style "backyard" celebration at the Corleone estate. In several camera pans of the guests, viewers see them enjoying homemade wine, Italian delicacies, and traditional folk music of mandolins, clarinets, and accordions. They dance and sing to handclapping, clink glasses until the bride and groom kiss, drop money into the wedding basket, and gather for the wedding-cake march. Children and adults, family and friends mingle and participate.
The early scenes define the Corleone identity as Italians first. They are godfather, husband, grandparent, brothers, sons, daughters, and mothers, the ethnic family that gathers for special occasions and believes in America. The film's story is not the Don's story but the struggle of his family to realize the vision of both passing on tradition and seizing the opportunity for a new future. The film therefore moves beyond the formulaic model of the gangster film and invites audiences to connect with the characters first as Italian Americans, ordinary and unique, defiant and human.
In its ethnic imprint, the Corleone family contrasted to a 1970s trend of family restructuring. Known as Zero Population Growth (ZPG), this movement sought to reconstruct perceptions and to influence attitudes about family size. Promoters distributed buttons and other paraphernalia with the words "STOP AT TWO." Middle-class American men and women had to justify (to themselves and others) having children. To some, this new development seemed like "procreative inhibition," as Life labeled it, but to others the notion of limited families seemed liberating. When childbearing became a choice, regeneration no longer sufficed as reason enough for reproduction. As one proponent argued, having children "to please ... parents, or perpetuate your name or image" is not doing "the rest of [society] a favor." Popular psychology urged against the "oversized" household. Doctors informed the public that "children from small families are, on the whole, more intelligent, more creative, more independent, taller, more energetic and healthier mentally and physically-all because the parents have the leisure and resources to take good care of themselves as well as their children."38
Juxtaposed with ZPG, this old-fashioned Italian clan accentuates heritage, ancestral loyalty, and succession. A new cast with Italian names and a screen alive with the texture of Little Italy brought, as one critic remarked, "a true Italian-American voice, an insider's view, as it were" to the mainstream screen.39 The shift from a generic "Brotherhood" to an inside voice of heritage established a subject position, a point of connection with which ethnic groups in general could identify. Whether through experience in everyday practice or memory and stories about the immigrant-American past, identification brought the turn-of-the-century Southern European rural lifestyle into present dialogue about ethnicity. The films raise issues in the 1970s about the ways millions of immigrants wrestled with the balance between integration into American culture and maintenance of local customs. Most of these groups were unschooled and untrained for modern America. As Italian American writer Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino noted, many immigrants from Italy "came into direct contact with an opposing culture, the enlightenment-centered Anglo-American social mores that frame the dominant American ethos." Direct contact also portrayed the experience of other European ethnics.40
The Godfather had to pass through the eye of the assimilationist model to construct the new shape of ethnicity. The film revealed the fact that the end product of an inclusive society is not necessarily "dignity, or satisfaction, or moral pride, or political potency." Coppola added the personal touch of ethnic families to a "WASP sense of reality, stories, and sym- bols."41 Adjustment to that representation occurred after antiestablishment stirrings of the late sixties and early seventies promoted a fuller realization of the ideals of autonomy and individualism. Coppola countered that emphasis on the individual with a more appropriate model stressing tradition. American society was imagined as a kaleidoscope, tapestry, and multilayered design with interwoven entities, each contributing a strand here and a color there.
A story about gangsters certainly provided the dramatic conduit and ethnicity clearly contributed an original element to the formula picture. Ultimately, however, Coppola's turn to classic narrative structure tied ends together. With the focus on the family established, the story brings Michael Corleone into the center. The favored son, the third-born Corleone played by Sicilian American Al Pacino, is not the rugged individual of urban crime dramas. He is the ideal core, the family's hope, the reason the film moves beyond Coppola's "home movie" and introduces the classic theme of power.
Michael is an American soldier, educated at Yale, dating an Anglo-American woman, and being groomed for higher aspirations than the family business. "Senator Corleone; Governor Corleone," his father tells him, but, in the tradition of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Michael is dealt another fate. Coppola will create a character with the trappings of a classic, tragic hero to provide the narrative transition into the critical commentary on the underbelly of the American dream.
Connie's wedding provides the space within which to begin constructing Michael as the subject of the narrative and a representative of Italian culture in contemporary society. Through Vito's eyes, viewers first see Michael escorting Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) to the family function. As Vito peers through the blinds in his office, he watches Michael walk in between the cars in the parking lot into the crowd at Connie's wedding. The young Corleone appears in his army uniform and sits secluded from the family, courting Kay, his beautiful, fair-haired girlfriend.42 Kay asks Michael about his family. After resisting for a few minutes, Michael relents and tells the story of his father helping Johnny Fontaine by making a Hollywood director Jack Woltz (John Marley) "an offer he couldn't refuse." Kay is stunned when she learns that meant "either his brain or his signature would be on the contract." Michael comforts her, "That's my family, Kay. It's not me."
This sequence singles out Michael's position in the family. In the midst of festivities, he and Kay are literally separated from the Corleones while Michael establishes his version of who he is. He does not appear in a tuxedo but in a military uniform. Before he sees his parents and siblings, Michael shows Kay he is interested in her alone. Fredo (John Cazale), the oldest brother, interrupts the intimate moment, meets Michael's girlfriend, kisses Kay on the cheek, and figuratively brings her into the family. Yet it will not be the calm, endearing model of the time-honored American family. The issues are different, the experiences worlds apart.
In The Godfather (1972) Kay (Diane Keaton) is Michael's (Al Pacino) measure of legitimacy in America (Photofest).
Though the film begins in the early 1950s and Michael Corleone is second generation, he functions as a voice for third-generation-Southern Europeans who attended universities, spoke English instead of the native language, dressed fashionably, fell in love with the dominant culture, and selectively disconnected themselves from ethnic identity without severing ties. The assimilation process often proved that cultural conversion was the logical conclusion to the immigrant generation's search for a better life. By contrast, a multiculturalist focus meant developing a sense of "ethnic belonging," something that would provide "a person's sense of reality," as sociologist Michael Novak explained it. One approach encouraged telling stories in "the symbols that move him."43 Thus, many immigrant descendants in the seventies reconciled Americanization by "returning" to the past - telling family stories, recording oral histories, and renewing interest in the immigrant experience. College campuses created ethnic studies departments in colleges, promoted folklore classes, and encouraged students to write grandparents' stories and fill libraries with records of immigrant experience. The new design of interlocking bits and pieces constructing new Americana clearly meant ethnic identity could newly be imagined as an advancement in one's life, not a dilemma.44
