How The Godfather Changed the Gangster Genre

Ethics and The Family

Devyani Sawant

The reason the first two Godfather films (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974) are so universally beloved—heralded by academic and popular audiences alike—is because they concern the universal ambivalence of family. By extending “symbolism of the family beyond the actual progeny of Don Vito Corleone to the criminal organization of which he is the leader,” Coppola makes a significant departure from earlier fictional representations of mob violence and creates a new, more appealing mythology of crime.[1] Unlike other gangster films, like Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), the Corleones of The Godfather are not portrayed as murderous Mafiosi whose only goal is to attain as much individual wealth and power as possible. Rather, everything that the Corleones do is for the health and prosperity of their family; more often than not, villains in the Godfather universe are people whose pursuit of individual gain threatens that health and prosperity. Audiences forgive the Corleones’ depraved acts—even applaud them—because they are performed in the name of family. That both plot and theme revolve around the Corleone family reinvents the gangster film by allaying the guilt of identifying with criminals and permitting audiences to freely admit their love for the mobsters at the genre’s core.

Furthermore, The Godfather I and II reinvented family for the world. The term was originally used in place of “Mafia” to avoid the negative connotations it implied about the Italian-American community. This formation of a new euphemism—using Family as a point of identification for neutral audiences—produces the grounds on which The Godfather films assumed their pop culture prominence:

In suppressing the actual meaning and substituting a neutral, even positive, word to describe what was laden with negative, cultural insinuations, the “Family” becomes central to the discourse of The Godfather and constitutes the trilogy’s most distinctive narrative convention. […] Instead of structuring the story around the rise and fall of an individual gangster within his syndicate, the overarching plot of [the film] revolves around a poignant story of filial succession: The son, Michael, accepts the domestic leadership of the “family” from his father, Vito, as much as he takes responsibility for the leadership of the “Family” as a business organization.[2]

It is important to note the distinction here between lower-case family and capital Family: one refers to blood relations while the other stands in the for the pejorative term mafia. In print, the distinction is obvious, but when spoken in a film, it becomes invisible; audiences are allowed to attach their own feelings about family to the larger Family represented in the Corleone crime syndicate. Both biological and organizational meanings of the term play significant roles in developing of characters, plot, and theme in The Godfather movies. Family is the essence from which audience sympathy for criminal characters develops.

Part I opens with Connie’s wedding—a set piece that establishes the tone for the franchise. The audience is carried from the dark interior of Vito’s office (where hard decisions are made that build and maintain community relations) into exterior shots full of motion and light (where viewers, like Vito, can enjoy the warm atmosphere of the wedding ceremony those hard decisions created). The references to Sicilian history and culture—such as the Italian musicians playing the tarantella, or Carmela singing “Che La Luna”—stress the importance of family to the Corleones. From the relative safety of the celebration, the audience is able to properly contextualize the film’s opening scene: Vito’s interview with Amerigo Bonasera. Vito performs four major actions during this meeting: (1) he denies Bonasera’s request to kill the young men who attacked Bonasera’s daughter, (2) he rebukes Bonasera for attempting to resolve his problem with the police instead of immediately coming to see him, (3) he makes Bonasera pledge his loyalty to the Corleone family, and (4) he offers to pay back the wrong done to Bonasera’s daughter by ordering his employees to hunt down her attackers and have them equally beaten. Each of these decisions connects to the scene transpiring outside; the audience understands that Vito’s dedication to his family (and his Family) is what makes the celebration possible. The contradictions between the exterior and interior; dark and light; the public and private face of the Don; the domestic “family” inclusive of women and children. and the official “Family,” an exclusively male domain; are all bridged by the film’s opening sequence.[3] The Godfather films romanticize mob violence by legitimizing it with the love Vito has for his family.

Inventing family as the means through which law-abiding viewers can suture themselves to the lives of vicious gangsters is all the more impressive because Coppola does it with an adaptation of a novel often accused of lacking emotional depth. Critics have attacked Puzo’s exposition specifically for the flatness of the characters responding to their environment:

Since [Puzo] cannot penetrate beyond the surface of his characters, he piles along their path fact after fact, to which they must react, thereby manifesting themselves. The character is thus empirically inferred piece after piece as the sum of diverse reactions. But he never manifests himself as a whole.[4]

While this is true of Puzo’s writing, Coppola’s directing takes advantage of the visual medium to represent the characters’ emotions through paralepsis. In The Godfather movies, actions speak louder than words, as characters’ physical deeds circumscribe the unrepresented depth of their interior space. Vito’s love for his family can be inferred from the way he treats them. In the flashbacks of Part II, the audience infers that he turned to a life of crime only to support his wife and son. Viewers easily interpret the meaningful miscommunications apparent in a scene of a young Vito holding Michael in his lap and saying, in Italian, “Michael, your father loves you very much.” The language barrier between English-speaking audience and Italian-speaking Vito metonymically doubles the maturity barrier between the Don and his offspring: Michael only slowly comes to realize—through Godfather I and II—the importance of the hard decisions his father makes, and how they serve to protect and enrich him as a member of the Corleone family. Additional emphasis is added when Vito kills Don Ciccio, the man who killed his mother and forced him to flee to a new country at the tender age of nine. As Vito stabs his enemy, he whispers, “My father’s name was Antonio Andolini . . . and this is for you!” Coppola has Vito use his family name for the first time since his exile, effectively “turn[ing] a brutal crime into an act of honor, thus eliciting a sympathetic response from the viewer.”[5] While the Corleones on the page may lack the necessary inner life to excite readers, Coppola’s Family elicits identification through what is unsaid (Vito’s family name during his exile) or misunderstood (Vito’s declaration of love for his son) on the screen.

The major storyline of Part I is the passage of power from Vito to Michael; it is therefore a movie primarily concerned with patrilineal inheritance. It focuses on the events that turn Michael’s from a law-abiding war veteran to the new Don of the Corleone family. The narrative constantly stresses family as the motivating factor in Michael’s decision to revoke his stated intention to avoid the Family business. He first gets embroiled in the world of the Five Families of New York when Sollozzo and the Tattaglias attempt to kill his father Vito—twice. His love for his father (an unspoken echo of Vito’s Italian declaration of love for his son) propels Michael to volunteer for the task of assassinating Sollozzo, and thus begins his journey on the dark path that eventually leads to his destruction. Michael’s loss of innocence is unmistakable as he shoots Sollozzo in the head. The entire assassination scene is accompanied by non-diegetic noise that sounds initially somewhere between an industrial fan and wind through tree branches. Coppola intensifies the noise twice, in moments where Michael hesitates in his murderous task. The first occurs in the bathroom, as the sound clarifies enough to determine it is undoubtedly something mechanical. The second occurs in the moment immediately before he pulls his gun and kills his dinner partners—this time the noise is unmistakable: it is the sound of a subway car screeching on the tracks. Michael is clearly speeding away from his life as a sweet American hero, and into his life as the future Don of the Corleones. He too has made tough decisions that sacrifice his status as an innocent citizen in favor of his family’s health and wellbeing.

It isn’t until The Godfather Part II that the audience knows for sure just how ruthless Michael has become in his quest to make the Family prosperous. The opening scene emulates the wedding sequence from the first film with important changes; Anthony’s First Communion lacks the warmth and coziness of Connie’s wedding. The celebration in Lake Tahoe is devoid of family members having fun on the dance floor, and Italian musicians playing the tarantella are nowhere to be found. There is no sign of Johnny Fontane, and no Carmela singing “Che La Luna.” Instead showgirls entertain the guests, and a choir group performs as a “special gift” from Senator Pat Geary, who manages to mispronounce the Corleone name within ten seconds of the character’s introduction. The lack of Sicilian history and culture, so apparent in the first movie, signifies the degeneration of the Corleone Family. Michael is portrayed as a paranoid man whose drive to protect his family has caused him to forget what that family means: he disowns Connie in the film’s first ten minutes (she screams “you’re not my father!” to foreshadow that Michael is not as good a Don as Vito was). [6] The story arc that drives home how Michael’s hunger for power has ruined the family loyalty Vito spent decades building is Fredo’s betrayal. Michael loses all audience sympathy and emerges as a villain when he orders Fredo’s murder—an action impossible to imagine Don Vito taking. His relationship with Kay and his children also suffers through the course of Part II. Michael’s failure to keep his promise of making the family business legitimate prompts Kay to have an abortion—a grim legacy to the declaration of love made by Michael’s father when he was young.

However, it is not Michael’s crimes that cause him to lose audience support, but rather that his crimes no longer serve the greater good of the Corleones. The viewer who supports Michael’s murder of Sollozzo and rejects his murder of Fredo experiences no whiplash because s/he is sutured through the film’s central theme of family. The passionate loyalty of mobsters to their own blood remains the trilogy’s most unique and memorable convention.[7] Vito Corleone embodies this loyalty in both Part I and Part II. And by the end of Part I the audience is made to think that Michael is the next Vito. The second film disparages this notion; while Vito was the epitome of the Italian-American Mafioso, Michael was the cautionary tale insisting that only a true dedication to family can forgive the sins inherent to organized crime. In his decision to uphold the empire that Vito built at the expense of his blood relations, Michael lost sight of what made Vito such an effective and beloved Don.

The Godfather films thus define both sympathetic anti-hero and self-destructive villain through analysis of a character’s motivating desire. The audience supported Michael only so long as his actions were for the sake of his family. The minute he lost sight of that and steered away from his Sicilian roots, Michael paved the path for a self-destruction the audience finds just. The Godfather I and II establish a popular ethics beyond common calls for legality and universal nonviolence that continues to entice media consumers to this day.

[1] John G. Cawaleti. “The New Mythology of Crime.” (Boundary 2.3, 1975) 328.

[2] Phoebe Poon. "The Corleone Chronicles: Revisiting The Godfather Films as Trilogy."

(Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.4, 2006) 189-90.

[3] William Simon. “An Analysis of the Structure of The Godfather, Part One.” (Studies in the

Literary Imagination 16.1, 1983) 78.

[4] Giovanni Sinicropi. “The Saga of the Corleones: Puzo, Coppola and ‘The Godfather’: —

An Interpretive Essay —.” (Italian Americana, vol. 2, no. 1, 1975) 84.

[5] Poon 193.

[6] Todd Berliner. "The Pleasures of Disappointment: Sequels and the Godfather, Part II."

(Journal of Film and Video, vol. 53, no. 2/3, 2001) 113.

[7] Poon 191.