Godfather Ad Infinitum

Don’t Goodfellas and Casino in a sense combine to reveal Scorcese’s own agon with the Godfather? In other words Goodfellas could be the more gritty NY aspect of Godfather rewritten whereas Casino would correspond to the Vegas bit. Continuing this speculation Gangs of New York would then be this ‘repressed’ past of Scorcese’s contemporary gangster films standing in for the Sicily (a trope for memory) of Puzo’s work.

I also find Godfather (both parts) to be technically among the more important films of Hollywood history (I would possibly give the palm to the first part). I also think that the film could in a sense be titled ‘The Education of Michael Corleone’ or even ‘The Tragedy of Michael Corleone’. The film is really about the evolution of Michael’s character. He is the only one we discover through the films. He also has the greatest footage and personally I think on re-viewing that Pacino’s is also the performance of the film (comparing him to Brando and De Niro). The Godfather is in a sense ‘stabilized’ in the story and what we learn about Brando’s past ‘verifies’ the present in many ways but does not really render the character of Vito Corleone more complex. Michael on the other hand can be refracted through his family associations, his romantic interests, and most of all the unexpected nature of his ‘accession’ to power. But there is always a tragic sense to Michael’s success that there is not to Vito’s. In fact the latter in a sense represents the success of the American Dream while the latter, already having benefited by being part of the post-Dream generation, is nevertheless forced to revert back to relive the trauma of the dark side of this Dream. This is why it is entirely appropriate why the penultimate scene in the second film is Michael’s reflection on a scene from his past when he proclaims his intentions of getting into the armed forces much to the anger of Sonny. But of course the film is constantly about memory in many other ways as well. To this extent the examination of memory is simply more profound in Leone’s great work, not least because it is structurally built into the film and therefore the film is as destabilizing as memory itself is because the narrative turns here are less ‘reliable’ than in the Godfather where memory though it haunts the present can yet always be neatly separated from it and always accounted for in some ways. I honestly don’t think as I suggested above that parts 1 and 2 should be referred to as separate films simply because one cannot work without the other.

Godfather 3 incidentally, certainly a less rich work than its predecessors, is still important for continuing their themes and inasmuch as the Godfather can be read as an allegory of modern America the third part is not unimportant. Because the ‘education’ as I see it of Michael continues to its rather devastating (if somewhat moralistic and cyclically neat) conclusion. In addition where the first two parts address the themes of immigration, the American Dream, the aftermath etc the third part takes up the idea of the ‘criminal family as multi-national corporation’. It is surely ironic that Michael in this new world of imperial corporations wants to make his own enterprise precisely such and hence totally ‘legal’. There is also the theme of the new entrepreneur as a constantly threatening presence, the idea of the Church as a heavyweight and at the center of all negotiation (the finale in the Vatican is appropriate) and so on. And of course there is now Atlantic City (where the major hit occurs by the franchisee/new enterpreneur) in place of Vegas itself symbolizing the shift (proportionately Atalantic City has for years brought in far more revenue than Vegas).

Lastly I would also suggest that the Godfather offers in some ways a fruitful comparison with Visconti’s Leopard (Once Upon a Time In America also bears some reation to this) as well as Kurosawa’s Bad
Sleep Well (the influence of Kurosawa is profound on Coppola anyway but these films are also thematically related and the brilliant opening scene of Kurosawa’s work can be compared with Coppola’s scene in ways that have been commented on by many critics).