Is The Godfather a feel-good movie?
A quiz about the movie, and about us
I like old movies, and one I have in my DVD collection got dragged out this evening for an old, nostalgic wallow: The Godfather. It was made in 1972 and, rated X, it was a film I was unable to see for some time until it got suitably cut and shown on television. It was first shown in the UK as celebratory holiday fare, for Christmas, ironically enough; that is perhaps fair, since there are some Christmas scenes towards the beginning of the movie: Kay (Diane Keaton) and Michael (Al Pacino) come out of Macy’s loaded with Christmas presents, wrapped and all; and Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) is shopping for fruit in the snow when he gets shot, for instance, five times.
I once sat down of an evening with friends in Brussels to watch one of the Sylvester Stallone films about the character Rambo and we joshed with one another as to how many folk get killed in this movie, and I grabbed a figure out of nowhere and said (I can’t even remember what it was, but let’s say it was) 359. Throughout the movie, we then totted up the death toll, sometimes having to agree aggregates where entire busloads got blown up or an entire bamboo shack full of baddies got torched. As the last lives were extinguished in the final frames of the film, lo and behold, the total came up to … 359, or whatever the figure was that I’d said.
Now, you may think that that’s bizarre, but my friends accused me of having already watched the film in question and done the calculation, so I had already known what the answer would be. That’s how much trust a friend can have in you when you win a bet.
When I sat down to watch The Godfather, I did a similar exercise, this time with myself (to avoid any arguments): how many deaths are there in this movie? I’d seen it before and knew there were quite a few, but couldn’t think exactly how many, so I drew up a grid, and filled in the details as the story unfurled, and your first guessing game before you scroll down is—if you’ve seen the movie, that is—to have a stab at answering this question: how many deaths are represented in this film? (I use the term advisedly, since some of them are implied, and of some of them, one sees only the results.) I said to myself there were around 50. So what do you think: more than 50, or fewer than 50?
There are in fact 19 deaths represented in the film The Godfather. Here they are:
Number 8 is not a murder, it’s a natural death. Number 1 is an animal, the film producer’s horse, whose head is found in his bed. Quite how that would have been achieved whilst the man was sleeping is beyond me. Numbers 6 and 14 were the only women, and number 18 was implied, but we don’t see the act of murder itself, whereas for numbers 9 and 10 we see the shooters but not the victims (I assume the lift boy escaped unscathed).
Two were strangulations (or garrottings: numbers 2 and 19), one was a heart attack (number 8), one a car bomb (number 6), one an unknown cause of death (number 18), one a decapitation (number 1), and thirteen were shootings (numbers 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17).
With that, you may think that the analysis of all these deaths is thereby done. But there is one more statistic that is of some interest, and that is how the deaths affected you.
In the film Rambo, Stallone plays the eponymous role of the commando hero and therefore represents the one and only good guy. Everyone else in that movie is the bad guy. One good guy and 359 bad guys.
So, here is the next question for you: in The Godfather, of those who died, who were the good guys and who were the bad guys? If we, for a second, equate the poor equine creature whose head was removed from his body with the character that was his film studio-owner owner, then is it even possible to say that there were any good guys in the whole movie? Let me rephrase the question, and that is where the right-hand columns come in on the table up above: Whose deaths left you feeling good? And whose deaths left you feeling bad? Or rephrase it yet another way: Which killer were you hoping would succeed? And which killer were you hoping would fail? And which didn’t you much care about whether they succeeded or failed?
Here’s my own breakdown:
I knew it was a prosthesis, not a real horse [wrong, in fact: it was a real horse’s head, just not that of the horse we’d seen in the previous scene], but the first time you see it, it is pretty gruesome. That said, I didn’t feel bad for the horse. Because the horse’s owner was a bad guy. He was a bad guy because he would not do what the other bad guy wanted him to do (employ the singer in a movie): GOOD.
Luca was played by an actor (Lenny Montana) who was an ex-wrestler who, in real life, had done exactly the job he portrayed on the screen. Hm. But he was our, the audience’s, bad guy, so he wasn’t as bad as the bad guys who stabbed him in the hand and garrotted him: BAD.
What did Paulie (Johnny Martino) do wrong? Well, he didn’t pay attention when Corleone (our hero) was buying fruit: GOOD.
The capo in the restaurant? Ugly so-and-so: GOOD.
Dirty copper: GOOD.
Very pretty girl, even if she drove like an Italian: BAD.
If I’d have been the toll-booth clerk, I wouldn’t have crouched down, I’d have legged it. But James Caan was our guy: BAD.
Bad, because the little boy was there, playing with his grandpa. But, what if Corleone had been shot in the hospital? BAD.
to 17. GOOD. Even as Michael lies his ways through his oaths to God, there is an overwhelming sense of Gotcha!
Feel sorry for a traitor? GOOD.
The way he beat up that wife of his, no one feels sorry for Carlo (Gianni Russo): GOOD.
So, how many of these deaths did I feel bad about? Four. And how many good? Fifteen. And you? If by any chance you came to the conclusion that all 19 were bad, why were you even watching the movie? If all 19 were good, have you no compassion?
How did I come to my result? Did I analyse the film in terms of the degree of turpitude represented by each character in the story? Did I measure the innocence of the horse, and of Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli)? Apollonia was the daughter of a Sicilian innkeeper: do you think she was entirely innocent? I guess so, from how the marriage night was depicted. But what about the woman (who isn’t named) in bed with Philip Tattaglia (Victor Rendina)? Maybe we don’t feel quite so good about her, even if we don’t like Tattaglia? She’s actually a hard call, between feeling good and feeling bad about her. What, you mean to say you don’t care?
No, I didn’t analyse the characters in terms of their back stories or their supposed actual criminal records. Perhaps I should have placed their fates in counterpoint with my own moral code, which would have been to say that nobody deserves to die, ever. And yet, I was enticed into this fictional story and persuaded by the novelist (Mario Puzo) and the director (Francis Ford Coppola) to take sides in what is essentially a feud among criminals inter se. Khartoum and Apollonia are entirely innocent bystanders, but the killing spree during the baptism sequence does have that satisfaction of vengeance, and it leaves me enjoying the film; but not enjoying myself.
That’s how easy it is to take sides on a killing field, and the guns are not even pointed at you. Yet, we still take sides. We still root for some of the killers, and hope others of them get it between the eyes. We still want one of them to get a bullet in the brains and the other guy to get off scot free.
And we think we know why. Why we root for one and not for the other. It’s all a question of what frame of mind the novelist has put us in. How the director has slanted our favours. How we measure bad up against worse, and think we’ve found good.
That’s how malleable we are.
Two hours into this two-and-three-quarter-hour film we have the following dialogue between Kay and Michael:
You’re not like him, Michael. I thought you weren’t going to become a man like your father. That’s what you told me.
- My father’s no different than any other powerful man, any man who’s responsible for other people. Like a senator or a president.
You know how naive you sound?
- Why?
Senators and presidents don’t have men killed.
- Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?
So, two last questions:
Does that exchange have you nodding in agreement with Kay? Or with Michael?
And, whichever you agree with, does your answer leave you feeling that senators and presidents are just as bad as mafia godfathers? Or that mafia godfathers are no worse than senators and presidents?
But it’s true, isn’t it? It’s only criminals who have people killed.
The only thing I liked about the film The Godfather was the theme music. Although I read the book and have seen a very few other gangster movies, I have never understood my fellow Americans fascination - nor the British, for that matter [I was a Canadian for the first 25 years of my life] with violence for the sake of violence or "admiration" for gangsters in general. I suppose among the few things I admire about Canada - other than her scenic beauty - was the lack of a gun culture growing up. Wars are bad enough, but the shooting people for fun or profit, is beyond my ability to admire.