Camera And Action, page 34
Coppola's "home movie" prepared the way for a 1970s hope of regeneration. His films revitalized the value in the ties that bind if seen as a cautionary tale. These films brilliantly reconciled both conservative and liberal views of American society. On the conservative side, the films offered a means for preserving these ideals. As one critic commented, "They are not destroyed because they are inadequate per se; family ties, social mobility, quest for security, male companionship, and even religious values all relate and correspond to real universal human needs for community, love, respect, support, appreciation." On the liberal side, it is the "the social institution ... upon which the Corleones relied to provide and protect these values [that] withered before the irrational, destructive forces of capitalism, the main goal of which is profit, not the meeting of human needs. 1170
Such ideological significance in representing an extended family with authority resonated with one film critic at the time. "I think the film affected me so powerfully even after several viewings," he commented, "because it presents and plays on most of the now-threatened bourgeois values - family ties, social mobility, the quest for security and respectability in a competitive world, the friendship between men engaged in the same work, the importance of religion, and individualism -which I was taught to believe in and respect." His enthusiasm grew not from identifying as an Italian but as a member of "a large, newly urbanized, upper-middle-class Pennsylvania German family whose religion was Mennonite." Like the family in The Godfather, he was "surrounded by relatives" in his formative years. This "positive and comfortable" experience stayed "deep inside" and its ideals "remain[ed] intact," even though he left the family in his early adult years.71
Ethnicity, therefore, functioned as a way to negotiate the 1960s "free spirit" identity and the 1970s fondness for roots. This kind of multicultural discourse encouraged mutual appreciation rather than the generation gap. Group identity, not autonomy, was the aim. Distrusting anyone over thirty now seemed disingenuous. Reevaluating the integrity of authority and reassessing the meaning in profound individuality led to questioning the result of autonomy. A common answer was a mediated identity, a reconciliation based not on renouncing one's cultural heritage but on transcending parochialism. A subtle but important shift showed the process of subjectification as one that forms the individual out of the group rather than the reverse.
The Godfathers measure the distance American society had come from the time when immigrants appeared as "alien" creatures, carriers of disease, or threats to American society. The progressive aspect of the films lies in their Italian revival - in sanctioning speaking, looking, acting, and individuating as American and ethnic success. The Godfather I & II change the position, the image, and the kind of Italian American that movies had constructed. They also speak to seventy years of social angst fed by language repression and the treatment of differences as contemptible. Instead of skin color, foodways, and personal lifestyle as something to despise, they were now celebrated as examples of American diversity.72
The Coppola pair, some have argued, "can be seen as an inflated wish for [the singular, white, male subject's] reconstitution, and it has been the Italian-American criminal, with its connotation for a nostalgic form of power, that has been utilized to construct this fantasy." During "this particular construction of ethnicity ... white racial and ethnic purity was being seriously threatened by nonwhite peoples." Thus the fantasy is the wish for exclusive control through "an all-white militant group."73 Italian American men hold the reins of power in these films. Their incorporation into American society as part of the wealthy elite adds an ironic twist to the American dream and the defining features of multiculturalism. The question is whether the nature of dominance for white ethnics during this period is also a nostalgic wish for self-glorification and uninhibited power.
At a glance, the way both films treat women seems to confirm that argument. Italian American women in this film are either silent or psychotic. Vito's wife in Part II, for instance, is a figurehead. She speaks occasionally to her children in both films ("times are changing"), but her role closely compares to stereotypical renditions of women in aprons who take care of children. Moreover, Connie represents women in an abusive marriage. Instead of rebelling against that form of subservience, by Part II, she shuns her role as mother, wife, and daughter. Glamour and allure hide her self-hatred. Connie sweeps into the Tahoe celebration (a week late, her mother tells her), "rushing through tables, waving an arm jangling with gold jewelry, and carrying several gift-wrapped packages." At her side she brings "a blond and wrinkled-handsome escort named Merle" (Troy Donahue), a "pimp" according to Michael.74 Connie's exaggerated glamour represents the inverse side of autonomy and raises the question of paternal benevolence. Her attraction to Merle is neither an act of defiance nor a statement of independence but a sign of poor judgment or an inability to desire anyone but abusive, controlling men. Rather than being a resourceful woman, Connie literally falls onto her knees in Part II, begging for Michael to be her keeper. "I think I did things to hurt myself," Connie tells Michael in their moment of reconciliation, "so that you'd know that I had hurt you." Her return humanizes Connie and brings her back to a functional role within the family and keeps her dependent on Michael's protection at the same time.
By contrast, Vito's mother (Maria Carta) at the beginning of Part II embodies the ideal center of the family. She desperately tries to avenge her husband's death by pulling a knife on his murderer while trying to save her son. This characterization echoes portrayals of female ancestors as strong, resourceful, and in the words of one writer, exuding "a zest for life" and the strength to "triumph over adversities." In America, Michael's duty to the Mafia family is based on a patriarchal control keeping women outside its core. Only one woman has a measure of choice. Kay, a New England WASP, is the nonethnic who desires the dark-haired Italian. For Michael she is both "remedy" and obstacle. Kay's "outside" status signifies the guarantee of passing, especially for children to enter the dominant culture.75 Yet, a contemporary relationship based on mutual understanding comes with Kay. When that does not materialize, she aborts her pregnancy and divorces Michael. This film selectively characterizes Kay's "outside" status as her means of agency. While the films personalize the power to speak from the inside, combating former ethnic stereotypes by contrasting the Corleones to the Mafia men, their power to reconstruct ethnicity is limited to Puzo's deconstructed singing Italian and The Brotherhood's gangsters. A film extending the same critical comment to ethnic domination of women would have to wait.
Obliquely, the films decode a final image. In the famous horse-head scene in Godfather I, filmmaker Jack Woltz, who refused to give a movie role to Vito's godson, wakes up to the bloody head of his prize racehorse buried between the sheets of his bed. By targeting the Hollywood producer of the classic age, this scene speaks specifically to the violence of the cinematic past that collapsed Italian culture into stereotypes. If, as Lester Friedman and others have written, producers and directors "buried their immigrant roots, as they ruled over one of American's largest and most influential industries," their "ferocious, even pathological embrace of America," their reinvention of the "idealized America" that would require "one ... to cast off `foreignisms,' religious observances, names, and traditions," came back to haunt them in the image of Woltz, a Jewish filmmaker. Severing old stereotypes meant confronting Hollywood head on (no pun intended).71
At the same time, culture is sometimes a stronger determinant of politics than economics. If so, then ethnic visualization (like ethnic resurgence outside of film) had a power and a price. Ethnicizing the gangster genre through the grittiness of gangster and Italian culture in New York City obviously risked making Italianicity generic and stereotypical or emboldened and imposing, both consumables ready for the marketplace. Italians from Coppola's and Puzo's points of view narrowed representations of the ethnic to the city streets, idealizing ethnicity at the same time it empowered viewers with new authority of ethnic identity. City Italians and Mafia men, as if the complete authentic Italians, led viewers out of and into contradictions.77 Visualizing ethnicity in the two films proved appealing and socially empowering. The new reality of cultural roots legitimized by the celebrity appeal of Brando, Pacino, and Caan generated a new resource of distinctiveness. Noticing ethnicity on screen, however, ultimately deepened the impact of Hollywood and its culture of production.78
Mutual appreciation of cultural difference had an exchange rate, a cultural advantage for many immigrants' offspring. With the turn to multiculturalism in the 1970s, to be able to celebrate the past and turn ancestors' struggles into a success story suggests agency and priv- ilege.79 As some critics have suggested, if ethnic grievances were over legitimacy, their struggle was less economic and political than social. Those who aspired to and experienced the American dream by graduating from college and entering into the political, entrepreneurial, and professional realm, experienced a more open and less contentious environment. The expression of a collective identity was possible because ethnic Europeans were able to claim a different history and status from racialized groups such as African Americans. Celebrating ethnicity to shed oppressive social conditions became an opportunity for a new avowal of whiteness in relation to multicultural discourse emanating from a separation of race. Thus, Southern and Eastern European descendants asking for self-respect vis-a-vis the past seemed to some disingenuous and ironic.80 It would be difficult to claim the harsh history of oppression and pine for the past at the same time.
Ethnic revival was caught in the space between liberation from a derogatory image and romanticizing immigrant experience by presenting it as quaint. The challenge was to take advantage of the current popularity of ethnic pride without preying on the cultural space of others or reinventing another pigeonhole. At the same time, to be meaningful, the new ethnicity needed to be more than just an appreciation of food, language, and appearances. Awareness was valuable only if the result was collective reinvigoration and if there was a recognition of cultural identity as a "life-support" rather than a "colonizer." The new ethnicity had to be founded on the knowledge of others, the "liberty from assault," and a release from the "stigma of foreignness." Rather than "melting," disappearing, and subordinating family identity, the new ethnicity needed to offer cultural reclamation. If diversity were to become the dominant model of American society, then living it (without self-glorification) was "crucial for mutual understanding."" A new ethnicity that did not answer real issues would soon turn up an empty vessel.
Coppola's films encouraged ethnic identification by posing a narrative that affirmed rather than denied culture, experience, custom, practice, and heritage. The filmmaker and the novelist implanted a possibility for ways that archetypes and traditions in American narratives could include ethnicity. 82 Through reaffirmation one could legitimate personal identity within a collective ancestry and American experience without deferring to either one. Ethnic resurgence during the 1970s redefined the conditions of whiteness. Its makeup changed. Rather than just sliding into a unified dominant group, third-generation ethnics weighted it with their own objections and additions.
The 1970s regeneration of ethnicity seemed like a refuge at a time when Americans in general were coming to terms with Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. Puzo placing the endearing Corleones in bookstores across America in the late sixties offered exciting drama, but Coppola's 1970s screen magic made the ethnic presence specific and memorable. Through images of Sicily and its village-scapes that defined cultural identity, the film placed, as one writer put it, "Vito and Michael Corleone ... among the best loved and most well known in the history of American film."83 These elements helped interrogate the "bleached" Burt Lancaster image of dominant culture. Looking too Italian was finally acceptable, intriguing, and fascinating. If expressing ethnicity drew popular interest, Michael's story of destruction tapped into popular desire for humanizing cultures through family imagery. Michael's tragedy expands and exploits the popular desire for multiculturalism as a cure for the ills of American society at the time. This alternative imagination addresses the pattern of cultural denial and rejection experienced by immigrants by legitimizing heritage. If nothing more, the attempt to move from Hollywood Italians to Italians in Hollywood conveyed a sense of "dignified difference" by mere public endorsement of the films.84
Coppola has forever made an Italian crime family a part of American identity. The Godfathers combined the experimental with the classical, the romantic with realistic, and broke box office records set by Robert Wise's family picture The Sound ofMusic nearly a decade earlier. Compared to Wise's 1965 cast with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker, Ben Cartwright and others, Coppola's line-up -Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Richard Casagliano, Al Martino, Alex Rocca, Tony Giorgio, Salvatore Corsitto, Franco Sitti, Blachard Caragliano, and others - makes the cultural significance of his pair of pictures difficult to ignore. The Corleone family sat as an unlikely contender for attention from those who grew up on Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriett, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, and other such serials promoting functional relationships in a relatively democratic household where children had rights. To find the extended, ethnic family in familiar American ideals took the 1970s social context of multiculturalism. Popular films such as The Graduate and Love Story critiqued family inconsistencies, but they did not redraw the basic unit of the family established in the well-known television programs.
While accepting their Oscars for The Godfather: Part II (1974), the Coppolas show that filmmaking is a family affair. From left (in back): Francis Ford Coppola, wife Eleanor Coppola, mother Italia Coppola, and father Carmine Coppola; from left (in front): son Roman Coppola and unidentified. (©AMPAS/ABC/Photofest).
The turn to multiculturalism in the broader society offered American film a chance to examine the effects and meaning of assimilation in relation to immigrant cultures and experiences. If empowerment once meant accommodating Anglo-hegemony and melting ethnic cultures into dominant identities, The Godfathers' popularity suggests ethnic inflections tapped into rapidly changing attitudes and values about being American. These films both widened and narrowed the scope in imagining American identity. Playing "the ethnic factor" in the gangster genre proved a delicate balance between innovative embellishments and engrained stereotypes. Together with its sequel, Part I helped define a paradigm shift toward diversity as the appropriate ways of understanding American society. Coppola's films inscribed a new subjectivity for Italians in the midst of rising numbers of immigrant descendants' college attendance. How these offspring negotiated cultural identity conveys the degree to which American society had changed from the 1960s. Placed in the 1970s era of multiculturalism, the result for both films was an appeal across the spectator spectrum. The films changed ethnic engagement and helped viewers negotiate a different America. During the process, questions of gains and losses, identification, and "othering" surfaced. As American icons, The Godfathers helped make ethnic identity "completely legitimate" while warning about unbridled success.
Coppola's The Godfather changed forever the amount of money a film could gross. In just six months it earned twice as much as Love Story in the same amount of time and four times Airport's half-year run in 1970.85 To film critic Andrew Sarris, the film manifested "probably the first reasonably talented and sensibly adaptable directorial talent to emerge from a university curriculum in film-making."86 Coppola was now conspicuous. The young Italian American confirmed that a college-trained filmmaker could make it big.87
The 1970s brought experimental films such as Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) into the million-dollar box-office earnings range.88 Later moneymakers, including The Exorcist (1973), broke The Godfather's box office record and The French Connection won best picture of 1974. Despite being crowd pleasers, however, none of these films acquired the cultural status of The Godfathers. By December 1974, with Part Ifs release, it was clear that a new Hollywood had taken shape.
At the 1975 Academy Awards ceremony, it was "The Francis Ford Coppola Family Hour." With The Godfather: Part II collecting six Oscars of eleven nominations, the "family" dominated the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage that night. Coppola and his father each received an award as did the film for Best Picture and Robert De Niro for Best Actor.89 Indeed, Hollywood no longer dealt in the same abstract way with ethnicity. Real people walked to the center of the stage as the Coppolas claimed the Corleone success.
Sight & Sound's Top Ten films poll in 2002 listed The Godfather as "one of the enduring works of American cinema."90 The American Film Institute's best one hundred American films list placed The Godfather as number three and The Godfather: Part II number thirty-two. The gangster story that swept critics and viewers off their feet became a cultural icon.
What Coppola once worried may cheapen his artistic career and take him from San Francisco to Hollywood permanently turned him into the cinematic renaissance man. Not only did the visionary filmmaker convert a bestseller into a cultural emblem, but better than anyone at the time, he understood the power of the experimental trend. While not forsaking the potential to entertain, he brought the "now movie" in line with the traditional story of power and success. On many levels, Coppola's projects exemplify the changes in the industry between 1965 and 1975. The Godfather films confirmed that the studio system was now composed of both university- and industry-trained directors. With their new visual style, these films demonstrated the worth of the new ratings system. The post-Code era allowed filmmakers the creative chance to visualize the gritty elements of everyday life. Coppola also showed that unknown faces - Italian at that - could make the screen come alive. Like Nichols, Penn, and Altman, Coppola chanced the unproven cast. His foresight gave Pacino the break of a lifetime and satisfied viewers' taste for the "authentic" image. These details, along with exceptional timing, jump-started careers and transported film into its next artistic zone.
