The first character seen in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” is neither the title character, Don Vito Corleone (played to Oscar-winning perfection by Marlon Brando), his son and eventual successor Michael (Al Pacino, in his breakthrough role), nor, indeed, anyone from the brood at the story’s center. Instead, it is a decidedly secondary character, the undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), who also speaks the first line of dialogue, one of the most definitive opening thesis statements in the history of American cinema: “I believe in America.”
This is not where the story of “The Godfather” – first told by Mario Puzo in his novel, then adapted to the screen by Puzo and Coppola – begins. But it is where Coppola chooses to enter that story because in wrestling the mixture of tall tales, Hollywood gossip, and melodrama that made up Puzo’s bestseller, he had to find a through-line, a theme that would determine what stayed and what went. He found it in the idea of America, and more specifically, the jarring incongruity between its ideals and its realities.
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The story Bonasera tells is a horrible tale of violence and injustice, of how his daughter was assaulted, so “I went to the police, like a good American,” only to see the men who beat her go free “that very day. I stood in the courtroom like a fool, and those two bastards, they smiled at me. And I said to my wife, for justice, we must go to Don Corleone.” He intends to flatter the Don, who has been revealed in a long, slowly widening shot to be listening (as we are) to Bonasera’s story, a clever bit of camerawork and composition that makes this crime boss an audience surrogate. But the Don cannot be flattered. “You never wanted my friendship, you were afraid to be in my debt,” he shrugs. “I understand. You found paradise in America.” But once Bonasera kisses the ring, literally, Don Corleone says the men who harmed Bonasera’s daughter will pay. Lofty ideals are nice. But in America, they don’t get the job done.
Skepticism of American exceptionalism is far more commonplace now than it was 50 years ago, when “The Godfather” was first released. But the fragility of the American Dream, of the post-boom white picket fence (and the white family inside it) that had dominated the popular consciousness, was revealing itself as the illusion it had always truly been. By 1972, the long national nightmare of the Vietnam War was slogging on, the civil rights struggles of the previous decade had stalled, and after Kent State and the Hard Hat Riot, political protests increasingly felt like potential bloodbaths. Richard Nixon would sail into a second term that November, with barely a whisper of the Watergate break-in during that campaign, the scandal that would eventually topple him and mark yet another of America’s occasional “ends of innocence.”
But the cracks were showing long before then, and the films of the New Hollywood punched through them: the puncturing of heroic archetypes in “Easy Rider” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” the sullying of youthful nostalgia in “The Last Picture Show,” the suburban ennui of “The Graduate” and “The Swimmer,” the marital strife of “Faces” and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” the open mocking of blind patriotism in “M*A*S*H,” and the unflinching police brutality of “The French Connection.”
The latter is particularly present in “The Godfather,” which takes pains to remind us that respectable men (cops, politicians, religious leaders) are, in fact, no better than the story’s disreputable criminals; they’re often worse because they cloak themselves in the flag, or in the case of Sterling Hayden’s Captain McCluskey, the badge. Told that Michael is a war hero, he nevertheless instructs his subordinates to hold Michael immobile, and then McCluskey slugs the gangster’s son right across the face. He takes perverse pleasure in this abuse of power; he grins afterward, a twinkle in his eye. We’ve seen a similar response earlier, the slight smile that curls across Michael’s lips when he tells Kay, not yet his wife, how his father threatened the life of a bandleader. He stifles that smile, but the message is clear: he gets a kick out of telling the story, out of flexing his family’s power. McCluskey gets the same thrill. They’re two sides of the same coin, and neither law nor order nor morality matters. All that matters, all that will ever matter, is power.
And that principle is what’s quintessentially American about “The Godfather,” more than any outdated notions of family or hard work or any of the things we’re told, from the cradle, that America is actually about. Bonasera comes back because the check always comes due. Michael fails to make the family legitimate, at least in this installment, and he doesn’t have to make it respectable, because it already was. Don Corleone tells his son that he “refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those big shots,” and so he became one himself, and “I don’t apologize,” because men of his station never do. Why should he? He has a beautiful home, glistening cars, political connections, and more money than he can spend. And when we see, in “The Godfather Part II,” how far he’s come, how humbly he began, we cannot help but see his as a Horatio Alger story. From desperate poverty to limitless power; what could be more inspiring than that?
One of the most famous lines in “The Godfather” comes when Mob muscle Clemenza (Richard Castellano) instructs a lackey, after the murder of a former friend, to “leave the gun, take the cannoli.” This offhand instruction is such a concise summary of casual bloodshed that comparatively few focus on what’s happening visually at that moment. They’ve stopped their car on the outskirts of New York so Clemenza can empty his bladder while the dirty work is done; the car is framed against the tall grass, with the Statue of Liberty, in the distance, peeking up into the frame. It’s a loaded vision of Americana if there ever was one: Lady Liberty, amber waves of grain, and a dead thug.