The Godfather and its godchildren

Months later, Coppola delivered the version we know today.

Coppola’s (first) masterpiece is so influential, in so many ways, that it requires some historical imagination to grasp how innovative it was for its time. Every hushed interior scene in Breaking Bad, with the shades drawn and miserly streaks of light barely scraping through the slats, owes a royalty check to The Godfather’s Caravaggio cinematographer, the “Prince of Darkness” Gordon Willis (whose work was not even nominated for the Oscar). Even the best American crime films of the era, such as The French Connection and Bonnie and Clyde, were action movies. The other mob movie of 1972, The Valachi Papers, starring Charles Bronson, was, despite being based on a memoir, sloppy and trite, with thin characters and moronic dialogue, hence Bronson’s peevish review of the competition: “The Godfather? That was the shittiest movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” It stands out even compared to other director-driven, artistically committed films of that Easy Riders, Raging Bull era of cinema in which colorful rebels fought the system in various ways and were usually crushed by it in the end (Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc.).

In Coppola’s vision, the criminal antiheroes wielded the actual power and bent the American system (typified by the arrogant but corrupt senator in The Godfather, Part II) to their will, paying with their souls. Those who saw themselves as outlaws could be forgiven for taking the film as more of an instruction manual than a warning.

As was true of Jaws three years later, The Godfather’s source material was shameless pulp, a drugstore novel, and few pictured the screen version transcending its genre. “In Coppola’s hands,” wrote Martin Amis, “the [Mario] Puzo novel is, so to speak, rewritten by Nabokov, and the penny dreadful becomes an operatic masterpiece.” The lush atmospherics, the utterly committed acting by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, and the Russian-novel pacing led American cinema into a new age when Hollywood could be confident enough in its own genre stories to raise them to art with the ambition, intelligence, and depth of the European art-house offerings held at the time to be far superior to the Hollywood slate. Coppola merged the austere, hushed elegance of a Michelangelo Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman film and the thrilling shock value of bursts of fantastically gory violence, the likes of which had seldom been seen in the five years since the collapse of the Production Code ignited a new realism in movies. The Godfather was beautiful yet lurid, leisurely yet nerve-wracking, mass-market Shakespeare.

Evans’s push to expand the film to 177 minutes was radical; such a stately pace was reserved for historical dramas and sometimes musicals. In 1971, Fiddler on the Roof was the only major Hollywood film that approached three hours; in 1972, The Godfather was by far the longest Hollywood movie released. Hence, Coppola’s initial cut.

The Godfather creates a profound, albeit illusory, sense of authenticity by sealing us in a closed system, never offering an outside point of view from FBI investigators or honest citizens, never insulting the audience’s intelligence with contrived expository dialogue but merely expecting us to pick up on unfamiliar terms such as “caporegime” and “consigliere.” The gravitas with which Coppola approached what was, at its core, a nest of vipers, created an enduring and intoxicating myth. His criminal demimonde was at least as honorable and rule-bound as corporate America, yet with more loyalty, more respect for tradition, and infinitely more style. Coppola’s gangsters wear beautifully tailored suits, sometimes tuxedos. They hold meetings in what look like boardrooms, where they expertly steer the country like captains of industry. Yet Willis’s gorgeous chiaroscuro serves an ugly, toxic, and cynical, though potent, interpretation of America’s meaning.

The opening words, “I believe in America,” uttered by an undertaker named Amerigo Bonasera who trades that faith for mob revenge against the men who attacked his daughter, get turned inside-out as the undertaker proves willing to live up, or rather down, to the literal translation of his name: Goodnight America. He agrees to Don Vito’s demand that he swear fealty to the Corleone tribe and thereby abandon the norms of the competing American project. In the scene in which the dons discuss whether to move into the drug trade, one boss vows, “In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people — the colored. They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.” The moviegoer inclined to dismiss the official version of our history as a coverup nods vigorously: Yes, exactly, this is why black America had so many problems — it was all a conspiracy imposed by casual racists from above.

In recent years, large proportions of Americans, on both Left and Right, have become eager customers of any narrative that says nefarious elite forces shielded from view are destroying us. Confidence in most of our institutions has plummeted: We hold in low regard big business, organized religion, government, and the media, whose principal goal it is to drive down respect for the other institutions and which have been stunned to observe faith in itself fall concurrently. America’s confidence in itself has collapsed the way Bonasera’s did, and so The Godfather is one of the few films of its era that continues to occupy a central place in the national psyche.

Subsequent mob movies had to answer Coppola’s model one way or another, seek to match its allegorical weight, its vision, its sly undermining of accepted history. Written by Oliver Stone, Brian de Palma’s Scarface (1983) was an ecstatic, cocaine-frenzied, greed-is-good vision of how a gangster empire gets built, with the emphasis on the dazzling rewards of beautiful women, flashy jewelry, and luxury apartments. Pacino’s Tony Montana was the loutish, loudmouthed progeny of Pacino’s Michael Corleone, his goal to live fast and die fierce, not to build an IBM of crime. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) merged the two visions, clarifying the Scarface thesis that, yes, money and not honor or tradition is the primary reason to join in a criminal enterprise, along with maybe the thrill of being able to kill with impunity and a choice table at the Copa. Yet Goodfellas wittily undermined Coppola’s fantasy mafia.

Far from pursuing old-world tribal solidarity, the Goodfellas gang ruthlessly dispatches associates, such as Samuel L. Jackson’s Stacks, for no other reason than suspicion that they might get arrested and reveal information. Far from being weighed judiciously around a boardroom table, life-and-death decisions get made haphazardly, on the fly, as when a few minutes of conviviality convince Jimmy the Gent to call off the murder of the annoying Morrie. Sticking closely to a true story, Goodfellas amounts to a bracing cinematic fact-check of mob mythology. These are not men of honor. They’re not a masterful secret society headed by a pope of misrule who pulls America’s strings as in The Godfather’s famous marionette logo. The mob officer played by Paul Sorvino in the film is not a czar of the dark arts, but a nervy, suspicious fellow, living a life no more glamorous than a plumber’s, so afraid of capture that he doesn’t own a phone (but gets caught anyway and would die in prison). Scorsese’s mobsters are squalid opportunists so lacking in anything like a team rulebook that they’ll kill an innocent young bartender because of a little ribbing. Michael “Spider” Gianco was actually murdered by mobster Thomas DeSimone (the Joe Pesci character) for the horrifyingly trivial reasons depicted in the film, according to Hill.

With Scorsese’s career-capping Netflix film, The Irishman, which figures to be his last word on the mafia, Scorsese signals an attempt at synthesis by bringing together the two most important mob-movie actors of all time, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, for a three-and-a-half-hour saga in which murder leads to friendship and friendship leads to murder. De Niro’s hit man, Frank Sheeran, impresses Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa with his reputation: “I heard you paint houses” the union boss jauntily tells the assassin, that decoration being the brains of his shooting victims.

As Sheeran claimed to have been involved not only with Hoffa’s murder but also the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy’s assassination, and Watergate, not to mention the murder of mob boss Joey Gallo, his story amounts to a sort of Forrest Gump of mob movies — The Gumpfather? Gumpfellas? — an alternate history of the third quarter of the 20th century in which all roads lead to the mafia.

It’s the largely-unloved The Godfather, Part III that echoes most loudly in The Irishman, whose impact is strongest in its closing minutes. A haunting epilogue poses the question: What happens to the surviving mob man, he who lives long enough to be forgotten? The close of Goodfellas deflects the question with comic irony, as Henry Hill, ordinary schmuck, laments the spaghetti-with-ketchup cuisine of life among the squares. De Niro’s Sheeran continues to live with his perfidy for decades, having betrayed his longtime friend and, like Michael in Godfather III, lost his daughter, who spends most of his life refusing to speak to him. Scorsese is not about to turn sentimental at this point in his career, though, and Sheeran refuses to acknowledge remorse. He rusts away in a nursing home, a man cut off from even his own conscience. As in many other films, Scorsese concludes with a cosmic shrug. Michael Corleone’s life also ends in anticlimax, as the master criminal falls off a chair, unnoticed by anyone except a dog, and here Scorsese joins Coppola: The greatest of sinners end their lives as lonely chumps.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.