Camera And Action, page 32
Like many descendants, Michael's burden is to prove to the larger society that Italians are smart enough to attend Ivy League schools, loyal enough to serve in the military, and assimilated enough to marry successfully outside the group. Similarly, Michael Corleone separates from his roots and negotiates his life as an American with ethnic ties. His struggle throughout the film will be "to achieve one goal: to become legitimate," as one writer put it.45
Yet, legitimacy proves to be a double-edged sword because it involves much more than graduating from college or attracting an educated, sophisticated American woman. He is pulled into the crime world against his will and thus begins the process of reinventing both his family and himself. The film follows two plot lines at this point, one placing the Corleones within a Mafia struggle for power and the other following Michael's personal battle with his designated purpose. Michael walks into his father's hospital room where the senior is recovering from multiple gunshot wounds after an assassination attempt on his life. Intending just to visit, Michael discovers a set-up and moves quickly to save his father's life. Father and son are alone and Michael pledges, "I'm with you now, I'm with you." He rubs his father's head, kisses his hands, and Vito tearfully smiles back. It is a bittersweet moment, for they both know fate has short-circuited opportunity. Vito accepts Michael as the proper successor to the family business. Unlike the irrational, temperamental older son Santino (James Caan), the younger one is the respected, clean hero, who has "never been busted," as one policeman in the film put it.
The visit at the hospital successfully deflects the murder of his father and Michael begins to gain authority within the Corleone organization. He spars with his brother Sonny when they try to decide what to do with the most powerful syndicate head, Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), nicknamed the Turk after his dealings in the Turkish drug business. Sollozzo has called a meeting with Michael but Sonny doubts his brother's capabilities. "Hey, what are you gonna do? Nice college boy, huh?" Sonny ridicules Michael. "Didn't wanna get mixed up in the family business?" and "now you wanna gun down a police captain because he slapped you in the face a little bit?" Sonny derides his brother and ridicules the naivete with which it appears Michael has entered into the pact. "What, do you think this is the army where you shoot 'em a mile away? You gotta get up close.... Blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit."
Michael proves his worthiness by devising a plot to kill both Solozzo and the corrupt police captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden). He looks straight into Sonny's eyes and tells him, "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business." Michael explains that the Solozzo operations would not be gratuitous killings. He would get both the crime head and the corrupt cop at one time. "I'm talking about a cop that's mixed up in drugs," he argues. "I'm talking about a dishonest cop, a crooked cop who got mixed up in the rackets and got what was coming to him." The young son's insularity dissolves and he becomes Vito's progeny.46
The Corleone henchmen have decided to go along with Michael's plan to root out Solozzo and send Michael on the assassination assignment. In one of Pacino's stellar moments in the film, Michael alone meets the Turk and McCluskey at Louis' Restaurant in the Bronx. Solozzo immediately engages Michael by brushing McCluskey aside and speaking directly to Michael in Italian. While the Irish police captain eats his Italian meal, Michael listens to Solozzo, answers with a few words here and there, but what Michael understands is not clear since this scene provides no subtitles. Solozzo's intent to bond through language suggests the distance between Michael's generation and the older one. Corleone's lack of fluency in Solozzo's discussion separates more than connects the two. Michael excuses himself, retrieves a planted gun, calmly returns, and shoots McCluskey and Solozzo in cold blood while the two eat their dinner.
Once Michael accepts the burden of the family, he dominates the film's narrative. Here the film becomes a national story that transcends ethnic references. Through Michael, the film follows classic themes of power and succession similar to medieval epics and classical tragedies. To America's families - the Vanderbilts, Kennedys, Rockefellers - Coppola adds the Corleones. The classical turn surprised the studio.47As Coppola said, "I knew they were not happy with what I had done. The kind of classic style that I chose in rushes maybe didn't impress them but I just wanted to survive it."48
Following the Sollozzo scene, Michael flees to Sicily. In contrast to Michael's previous scene in the night setting of Louis' Restaurant, the pure, bright countryside is breathtaking. The wide-angle, long shot shows off goat herders taking their flocks through the hillsides of Italy. The camera offers a panorama of the rocky hills dotted with rock and plaster, red-tileroofed huts. Michael walks with two bodyguards up the narrow paths and into the village called Corleone perched on the side of a mountain. For a twenty-minute sequence, viewers see village pathways, men in black vests and wool caps, tavernas serving homemade wine. They hear Italian in this simple, beautiful place.
While in Sicily for over a year, Michael immerses himself in the intimacy of peasant life, La Via Vecchia, the "ancient" society or, in the words of one writer, the "ways of behaving, of thinking, and of organizing one's life." Villagers help fill in for Michael the images and behaviors of his heritage. They show him his father's compatriots and embrace this American as one of theirs. Viewers hear him speak Italian while they read subtitles. Away from America, he retrieves a new sense of genealogy and Sicilian history. "This pastness," as one writer explains, is defined by "the diction and the gestures of the characters ... either by speaking Italian in the dialect of southern Italy, or when in America, an English often marked by the accents of the recent immigrant."49 Michael has returned to his roots, newly empowered by the strength of a heritage built on collective identity. Sicily also transplants passion into Michael's heart and awakens him to beautiful Appolonia (Simonetta Stefanelli), the tavern owner's daughter. He approaches her father according to the code of the village and seeks permission to court his daughter. He begins his negotiation in Italian but frustrated with his lack of fluency, he turns to one of his bodyguards, Fabrizio (Angelo Infanti) to translate. The father and villagers alike require Michael to meet all concerned parties before he receives approval. Michael marries Appolonia, but danger follows and the young bride is killed soon afterwards.
This way to Corleone, the old country, where Michael discovers his roots and Americans can find personal strength in heritage (photo courtesy of the author).
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone (shown here with Franco Cirri as Calo) in The Godfather (1972) learns the ways of "La Via Vecchia' in Sicily (Photofest).
Michael's old-world education allows him to mediate between La Via Vecchia and Americanization. He returns to New York more clearly connected to Sicily and his ancestor's history. During Michael's stay in Corleone, Sonny has been betrayed and murdered. Vito calls the families together and demands a stop to the feuding. He clarifies the Corleone position on the drug trade that threatens the Mafia code of honor and draws a line between drugs and acceptable organized crime. In contrast to the other syndicates, Vito refuses to let the sinister gangsterism of drugs contaminate his family. The drug argument allows the narrative to separate old-world ethics from new forms of American greed.
The last image of Don Corleone is as an elderly man, dressed in a faded, plaid flannel shirt and forties-style khakis. He and Michael are alone near the estate gardens. Vito sadly recognizes his failed mission. "I never wanted this for you," he tells Michael. "I work my whole life - I don't apologize - to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those big shots." In a close-up of the two faces, Vito continues, "I don't apologize ... but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string.... Well, it wasn't enough time, Michael. It wasn't enough time." Shortly thereafter Don Corleone dies in his garden while playing with his grandson, Anthony (Anthony Gounaris). This vulnerable father with gray stubble and crumpled clothing personalizes the Corleones and emphasizes their cultural place in American history. The Godfather prepares the way for a story that ends tragically, thus commenting on the possibility of ruin in the immigrant hope of a better life.
In one of Coppola's most artistic moments, during another family gathering - the baptism of Connie's son - brutal executions of the rival Mafiosi take place in restaurants, stairwells, and other public places while Michael serves as the baby's godfather. Viewers see close-ups of a priest's hands administering the holy sacrament of baptism, sprinkling and anointing the baby. Juxtaposed with the family gathered in church, Corleone hit men prepare machine guns, grip handguns, and execute rival mobsters. In Eisenstein-like juxtaposition and intercutting, sound overlays image. Viewers hear baptism water and a baby cry during the ceremony of rebirth as they watch men shoot rivals in the eye, the throat, and in between revolving hotel doors. "Do you renounce Satan," the priest asks Michael, "and all his works?" "I do," Corleone responds as two hit men machine-gun a couple in bed. Michael's ordered brutality, set in Coppola aesthetics of beauty in violence, is justified because he is fighting for the old order. Tessio (Abe Vigoda) is about to betray him. To maintain the Corleones' sense of order in an organization built on a code of loyalty, Michael officially begins his reign.
Michael is not the pathological gangster who is unaware of the nature of his own violence. The baptism/execution sequence states definitively Michael's legitimate ownership of his position as the Corleone head and identifies his struggle as valiant by comparison to the impurity of Mafia activity threatening his family. He inherits his father's duty. He will protect what Vito created and is justified in doing so by what one writer called "the masculinist ethic in defense of family."50 In that system of loyalty, "Fathers `do what they have to do' to grant their sons a better life; sons inherit the mantle to defend the achievements and the honor of their fathers." The emotional bond and financial security guarantee succession, but reproducing the organization requires replenishing the family."
The film closes with a powerful demonstration of an important issue about America and ethnicity. Michael has returned to Kay, who confronts him over his involvement in the violent killing of Connie's husband Carlo. When she asks, "Is it true?" Michael's patronizing reply-"this one time, this one time you ask me about my affairs"-defines their separation, and when he answers "no," he is like a father who keeps information from a child affectionately and indicates she has intruded into a traditional space, exclusive to men. Kay hugs Michael, leaves the room, and in a point of view shot watches Michael. Hands shake, men hug, and the door closes. He has shut Kay out of his world and the camera zooms to Kay's agonized look. The film invites empathy for her judgment of Michael. She is the objective observer, the third perspective. Through her, viewers learn that Michael is duplicitous in his method of keeping Kay out of the business. Here, he enters into a narrative that will objectify him and thrust him into a trajectory of descent. As he closes the doors in front of Kay, he entices interest in the conflict and drama of his new role as the don. Like Kay, we are excluded from family business and at once believe in and distrust Michael.
In The Godfather: Part II, Vito's struggle for family "success" turns into Michael's personal project. Coppola rectified the prequel's glamorization of Michael." Part II begins with Coppola's intent to build and then destroy the power of the Corleone family. The narrative flows as two parallel stories, one the sequel and the other the preface to the first film. The preface fills in Vito Corleone's life from the time he was a ten-year-old boy witnessing the murder of his mother to his immigration to America and his evolution into the Godfather. Vito (Robert De Niro) is the Italian immigrant who stops at nothing to protect his family from New York street violence. The story of a young man's success weaves in and out of Michael's reign as the family Godfather, covering the early 1900s to 1959. Coppola contrasts Vito's empowerment with Michael's indulgent and exaggerated American success story.
The opening sequence places a preadolescent Vito at Ellis Island where he sings a village hymn in Italian and gazes at the Statue of Liberty. He establishes the connection to Italian immigration and the impersonal process of quarantine in America. A dissolve shifts viewers' attention to the Corleone Lake Tahoe manor where Anthony (James Gounaris), now ten years old, celebrates his first communion, and the parallel stories begin. On "the lawns of this great estate," hundreds of guests dance to a thirty-piece orchestra, swim in the pool, water-ski on the lake, and drink champagne.
The celebration sanctions Michael's legitimacy according to American standards of wealth. A thirty-piece band at a first communion is impressive, but the Tahoe event also introduces the film's stance on ethnicity and Americanization. Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), a family friend, a "via vecchia man," arrives and searches for Italian delicacies. He asks Fredo, for example, "Hey, what's with the food? Some kid in a white jacket brings me a Ritz cracker with some chopped liver. `Canapes,' he says," and Pentangeli replies, "Go get me a salami sandwich and a glass of wine." Later, he leads Michael's mother to the dance floor and chastises the musicians, "Out of thirty professional musicians, not one of you is Italian.... C'mon, give us a tarantella," he yells at them. The band confuses the traditional song with "Pop Goes the Weasel" and Pentangeli leaves the dance floor, disgusted and clearly out of place. The garish party recalls Part Is wedding reception at the Corleone estate in New York when viewers saw close-ups of Italians drinking homemade wine, eating Italian cheese, and dancing to the tarantella.
Pentangeli's objection to the Tahoe lawn party suggests not only that it is a different time but that an acculturation process has taken place between the two films. The Tahoe estate juxtaposed with Vito's immigration cubicle represents the inverse side of success, portending the real American story, one that is a bittersweet product of gains and losses. On one side, Vito's view of America from a small square window reinforces the belief in the land of opportunity. On the other, the flashy, extravagant lawn party inserts the sequel's new critical perspective. Where ethnicity and its specific sense of tradition and custom defined the Corleone family within a larger society, by Part II, wealth overpowers their identity.
The story begins and ends in Nevada, a western state contrasting to New York's ethnic neighborhood filled with diverse languages, businesses, and surnames that once reflected the degree of ethnic identity in Vito's community. This "village-centered Southern Italian culture" provided a means of cultural identification and relationship. By contrast, Lake Tahoe is the contemporary West, a resort built with new money. Houses are secluded in mountainscapes. Here, Michael is a loner, outside the community of ethnics. He has been handed a complex destiny: to construct a world where the power he has amassed legitimates and protects his family while not destroying the core of what means most - all without the support system of ethnic culture. Halfway through the story, the agitated son turns to his silent mother and asks "if ... father ever feared he would lose his family by being strong for it," and she replies, "times are changing." In amassing wealth, he honored his ethical duty to protect the family business, but the task changes from a clear defense against enemies outside the family to combating enemies within. By the movie's end, he is abandoned and betrayed by two brothers and his new wife Kay. Corleone wealth brings agency and legitimacy, but this elusive empire becomes the site of personal and familial destruction.
In Part II profit and gain shape and pervade American society. Nevada's U.S. Senator Pat Geary (G. D. Spradlin) is a common hood who makes casino deals with the mob. Michael's road to success is contingent on these connections. Through the senator, the film links the Mafia to everyday business practices, making ruthlessness a normal part of enterprise. Brutality, business, and violence are synonymous in the real world of money. The Godfathers portray an ironic version of making it in America. Like Easy Rider, the films show that the dream costs.53 Michael justifies his father's activities to Kay by comparing Vito to senators, businessmen, and other officials. Kay replies that Michael is naive since these officials do not kill people. Michael's answer -"Who's being naive?"- argues that the corruption of the gangster is part of a larger force that stems from the abuses within a system of free enterprise that markets "cars and cigarettes and pollution," as Marlon Brando put it.54
Violence, on the other hand, justifies violence in another way. Since these films revisit the gangster genre in the post-Code era, aesthetic innovation gives the film its agency as a subversive tool. Visually, the extreme violence - an ice pick jammed through Luca Brasi's hand, a bloody horse head in between silk sheets, a woman stabbed and mutilated in bed - is justified. If the realism of brutality exists in the "legitimate" world and the film uses the Mafia as metaphor for American capitalism, brutality exaggerated represents that part of the American dream that has been hidden. The gangster of popular culture, not the businessman, held mythic power in American cinema. Generally, the "animus against business and commerce" at the time, as one commentator suggested, precluded the "legitimate businessman ... from serv[ing] as the hero of any such story." Gangster brutality is offset "by virtue of their worldly success: they are self-made men with the will, the daring, the energy ... to claw their way to the top."55
