The Godfather and the Gangster Film

Responding to his fretful, bedridden wife May (Dorothy Tree),
who worries, “When I think of all those awful people you come
in contact with, downright criminals, I get scared,” doubledealing
lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who is about to
be arrested for his part in a high-stakes jewel robbery in The Asphalt
Jungle (1950), blandly reassures her: “Nothing so different about them.
After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.” His remark
neatly encapsulates the defining paradox of the gangster film:
Even though professional criminals who come together for the express
purpose of committing crimes are rough, unscrupulous, and
fearsome, they are at the same time indistinguishable from ordinary
citizens like Emmerich, both because Emmerich is so corrupt that he
might as well be a gangster, and because gangsters cannot help imitating
the society whose norms they set out to violate.
Although it could well be argued that every crime film is a critique
of the society crime disrupts, the gangster film is especially concerned
with the social order its gang mimics or parodies. This concern begins
with the gangster film’s obsession with rules. Some rules are so fundamental
that they are virtually universal in gangster films. The authority
of the leader, if the gang has a leader, is not to be questioned. Junior
gangsters must pay due respect to their elders. Gang members
are forbidden from socializing with the police or competing for each
other’s women. No matter how dishonest they are in their dealings
with the law, gangsters must honor their debts to each other and refrain
from betraying each other whatever the provocation. All disputes
that arise within the gang must be settled within the gang, with-
out appeals to any outside authority. In short, the gang is constituted
as the supreme social authority that demands unquestioning loyalty.
Many gangster films, of course, go much further in tailoring these
general rules to fit their individual gangs. Tony Camonte (Paul Muni),
the self-made entrepreneur of Scarface (1932), lives by a code that reflects
his reluctance to delegate authority: “Do it first, do it yourself,
and keep on doing it.” Sixty years later, Jimmy Conway (Robert De
Niro) approvingly tells an apprentice hoodlum in GoodFellas (1990):
“Keep your mouth shut, and don’t rat on your friends” [Fig. 22]. In
Reservoir Dogs (1992), Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) pleads with his colleagues
to “be professional.” Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) refuses to
take a farmer’s money in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), since he robs only
banks, not the private citizens who use them. Big Jim Colfax (Albert
Dekker), the gangleader in The Killers (1946), takes the lion’s share of
the loot off the top; the gangsters in White Heat (1949) and Bonnie and
Clyde share equally in the proceeds; the technicians who pull off the
jewel heist in The Asphalt Jungle are each paid a flat rate, “like house
painters.”
Setting down these rules does not, of course, prevent them from
being broken, any more than the gangsters’ knowledge of the law
prevents them from committing crimes. Gangsters routinely scheme
against each other, vie for each other’s women, hold out each other’s
money, double-cross and kill each other, and betray each other to the
law. Even when they are determined to follow their own rules, their
debates over the rules can often stretch to ludicrous lengths, as when
Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson),
the two hit men in Pulp Fiction (1994), argue about whether giving
their boss’s wife a foot massage is morally equivalent to “sticking
your tongue in the holiest of holies,” or whether their escape from
an inept drug dealer’s bullets was “a divine miracle” or “a freak occurrence.”
Pulp Fiction’s characters, in fact, constantly illustrate the ways the
gang’s obsession with rules of conduct is echoed by the formula’s own
obsession with broader moral rules. Is there anything lower than a
man who keys another man’s car? How do you react when your boss’s
wife comes on to you while he’s out of town, especially if you’ve already
heard a rumor that the last man the boss caught flirting with
her got tossed out a window? What loyalty do you owe a man you’ve
double-crossed, a man who’s been trying to kill you, if he’s being held
by the homosexual rapists you’ve just escaped? Should a specialist
called in to help you dispose of a dead body have to say “please” when
he tells you what to do? Though it is ironic that films and gangs organized
around breaking the rules should be so preoccupied by the
rules they establish in their place, it is eminently logical for gangsters
to spend their time debating rules of conduct and morality, because
in opting out of the social norms that everyone else takes for granted,
they alone are forthrightly considering the question of what rules
ought to be followed and why.
The gangster film’s fascination with rules begins with the organization
of the gang itself. Lone-wolf criminals like Skip McCoy (Richard
Widmark) in Pickup on South Street (1953) may eventually learn that
they are more social creatures than they knew, but they usually drift
through their films with less interest in or awareness of social and
moral rules because they have fewer commitments to honor. In both
versions of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968/1999), the eponymous gentleman
thief (Steve McQueen/Pierce Brosnan) has no loyalty to the accomplices
he casually assembles and discards; only his romance with
the insurance investigator on his trail (Faye Dunaway /Rene Russo)
threatens to give him away. But gang members are bound from the
22. GoodFellas: “Keep your mouth shut, and don’t rat on your friends.” (Robert
De Niro, Ray Liotta, Paul Sorvino)
beginning by rules dictated by the social structure of their particular
gang. One reason these rules can vary so widely from one gangster
film to the next is the varying basis of different gangs’ social organization.
Sometimes a gang, like the brood of Kate “Ma” Barker (Shelley
Winters) in Bloody Mama (1970), is essentially a family. Sometimes, as
in the ethnic white gangs of The Public Enemy (1931) and Once Upon
a Time in America (1984) or the inner-city black gangs of Boyz N the
Hood (1991) and Menace II Society (1993), ties among gang members
are based on childhood friendships [Fig. 23]. Some gangs form around
lovers like Bonnie and Clyde, or the paroled convict Carter “Doc” Mc-
Coy (Steve McQueen/Alec Baldwin) and his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw/
Kim Basinger) in both versions of The Getaway (1972/1994); many, indeed,
are restricted to attractive young couples on the lam, from Eddie
(Henry Fonda) and Joan Taylor (Sylvia Sidney) in You Only Live
Once (1937), to Bart Tare and Annie Laurie Starr (John Dall and Peggy
Cummins) in Gun Crazy (1949), to Arthur “Bowie” and Catherine “Keechie”
Bowers, the newlywed bank robber and his bride (Farley Granger
and Cathy O’Donnell) in They Live by Night (1949) and its weddingless
remake, Thieves Like Us (1974), to the sociopathic teen heroes
of Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994).
More organized gangs take the form of teams whose members all
have a voice in their operation. Gangs like those in The Public Enemy
and Set It Off (1996) can function like labor unions, forming a protective
shield around members who would be more vulnerable to social
pressures if they remained on their own, and giving them the power
to stand up for themselves. When Big Jim Colfax convenes a meeting
in The Killers to discuss the robbery of the Prentiss Hat Factory, every
man present is given a chance to accept or reject the terms he proposes,
and when a small-time thief named Charleston (Vince Barnett)
announces that the job is too risky for him, he is allowed to leave with
no hard feelings. In Bonnie and Clyde, gang members openly argue
over who is to be counted as a member and how the take is to be split,
sometimes overcoming the objections of both Bonnie and Clyde. Finally,
Syndicate films from The Big Combo (1955) to Point Blank (1967) to
Casino (1995) present organized crime organized in the most rigidly
hierarchical and alienating way of all: as a business. The historical evocations
of real-life gangsters in The Cotton Club (1984), Billy Bathgate
(1991), and Bugsy (1991) all present them as aspiring businessmen,
but the tendency is equally pronounced in many purely fictional treatments.
In The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing (1956), gang members are
recruited specifically for the skills they bring to a proposed heist. Both
Howard Hawks’s Scarface and Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake emphasize
the gradual withdrawal of the gangleader from the day-to-day operations
of the gang. By the time of New Jack City (1991), kingpin Wesley
Snipes’s involvement in his thriving cocaine empire seems to be
limited entirely to executing traitors and consuming his own product.
No social model a gang adopts, however, will protect it from the
moral imperative of Hollywood gangster films: Crime does not pay.
This rule, with its corollary axiom that intelligent, morally responsible
citizens never break the law, is responsible for gangster films’ frequent
emphasis on the question of why people turn to crime. Gangster films
of the 1930s – as if to guard against the heretical suggestion that the
inequities of the Depression could make a law-abiding citizen lose faith
in the economic system – generated a heavily overdetermined series
of explanations for crime, ranging from moral deviance (Tony Camonte
and Marielito Tony Montana both willingly embrace the life of
crime that makes them known as Scarface) to developmental deprivation
(the bad kids of The Public Enemy grow up to be bad adults, and
the Dead End Kids are at a similar risk in Dead End [1937] and Angels
23. Boyz N the Hood: Gang loyalties based on childhood friendships. (Cuba
Gooding Jr., Larry Fishburne, Ice Cube)
with Dirty Faces [1938]) to sociological determinism (The Public Enemy’s
gangsters are stereotypically Irish, the gangsters in Scarface and
Little Caesar [1930] Italian)1 to circumstantial accident, as in They
Made Me a Criminal (1939), in which the persecution of prizefighter
Johnnie Bradfield (John Garfield) produces a story that could more
accurately have been titled They Made Me Act Like a Criminal. It was
left to later generations to explore psychopathological explanations
for crime in Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Natural Born
Killers. What is most remarkable throughout all these explanations is
their unvarying insistence on the gangster’s social deviance. Hollywood
never feels the need to explain why people become law-abiding
citizens, only why they do not [Fig. 24].
Whenever a gangster’s behavior is rationalized by explanations that
assume criminals deviate from some social norm, Hollywood is affirming
the social order its audience accepts by reminding them that infractions
against that order are stigmatized. When the criminal is a
member of a gang that is utterly destroyed, however, the film’s subtext
becomes more complicated, since the destruction of any social unit,
even a gang of criminals, that mirrors the larger society amounts to a
critique of friendship, love, family ties, business ethics, or the social
order as a whole. The movies’ attitudes toward their “left-handed” societies
are still further complicated by the fact that gangsters have
been presented throughout Hollywood history as heroic in their defiance
of the law the movies are at such pains to affirm.
Hollywood’s attitude toward gangsters was not always so morally
complex – in The Great Train Robbery (1903), the criminals who carry
out the robbery emerge no more clearly as individuals than their victims
among the trainmen or the passengers – but the steady movement
of the American population from rural areas to big, strange cities
increasingly populated by European immigrants soon caused the urban
gangster film to break away from the western. In the prairie settlements
of the western, life may have been hard, but everyone knew
who or what the enemies were: Indians, rustlers, natural disasters untempered
by the amenities of civilization. In the new cities dramatized
by the gangster film, by contrast, heroes and heroines isolated from
their birth families and the communities in which they had grown up
scrutinized every new arrival in the next apartment as a stranger and
a possible threat. Such distance from one’s closest neighbors, at once
diminishing their humanity and magnifying their potential menace,
tends to make them less empathetic. By the time of D. W. Griffith’s The
Transformation of Mike (1912) and The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912),
the criminal heroes are already the most magnetic characters in their
worlds, and it is not surprising to see them either ripe for conversion
or at least capable of secretive good deeds. Later features like Underworld
(1927) and Thunderbolt (1929) were frank celebrations of the
gangster as tragic hero, proudly dignified by the stoic courage with
which he meets his fate.
The gangster film enjoyed a remarkable flowering in the 1930s for
three reasons. First was the premium that synchronized sound put on
the genre’s expressive sound effects: fast cars, threatening police sirens,
the incessant chatter of guns that provide the auditory continu-
The Godfather and the Gangster Film 109
24. Natural Born Killers: The enduring need to explain why people become
criminals. (Juliette Lewis, Woody Harrelson)
ity substituting for music for most of the running time of the 1932 Scarface.
Second was the opportunity sync sound offered gangster heroes
to define themselves through pungent epigrams, from the sneering
put-down of a rival gangster by Cesare “Rico” Bandello (Edward G.
Robinson) in Mervyn Le Roy’s Little Caesar – “He can dish it out, but
he’s got so he can’t take it any more” – to Tom Powers’s epitaph on
himself in The Public Enemy: “I ain’t so tough.” Because of its demand
for greater realism in dialogue, sync sound also unmasked the inarticulateness
and the ethnic or immigrant inflections of gangster heroes
like Tom Powers and Tony Camonte, making them seem even more
alienated and vulnerable than their predecessors. Third and most important,
however, was a development that had nothing to do with the
rise of sync sound: the background of Prohibition and the Depression.
The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution – the Volstead Act,
which took effect in 1920 – prohibited the sale or transportation of
alcoholic beverages. By making every liquor purchase a criminal act,
the Volstead Act transformed the American public’s view of criminal
culture. Instead of marginalizing criminals as lost souls on the other
side of the tracks, Americans who wanted a drink were obliged to
think of them as their suppliers, their associates, perhaps even their
friends, without necessarily giving up their old opinion. Criminals
were still Them, but they were increasingly Us as well; and a society
that could not officially acknowledge its own dependence on smugglers
and bootleggers prepared the way for an even more complex
attitude toward criminals in its popular entertainment.
It was not until the onset of the Depression in 1929, however, when
Prohibition was in its last years, that the availability of synchronized
sound and the noncriminal audience’s increased intimacy with criminal
culture were sparked by the Depression’s rapid polarizing of economic
classes into the haves and the have-nots (basically, the employed
and the unemployed) to produce gangster classics like The
Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface. The heroes of these films may
have been ruthless and even despicable, but they were living out the
audience’s dreams of economic power and revenge on the system. At
first glance it might be hard to understand the appeal of Scarface’s
Tony Camonte. Tony’s dim, boorish, ugly, disloyal side is painfully obvious
in his pursuit of Poppy (Karen Morley), his boss’s girlfriend, who
shows up his lack of polish when, for instance, he unwittingly approves
her description of his apartment as “gaudy” and his passion
for jewelry as “effeminate.” Yet Tony is as irresistible to the audience
as he is to Poppy. His brutishness can be excused as childlike immaturity
he may grow out of; his delight in violence, unforgettably displayed
when he picks up his first machine gun and excitedly sprays
the room with gunfire, is equally childlike; and his courage and rude
wit place him above both his sniveling boss Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins)
and Lt. Ben Guarino (C. Henry Gordon), the earnest, vengeful flatfoot
determined to nail him. Even more important, Tony is acting as a
Depression-era Horatio Alger, a self-made success in direct sales, one
of the few avenues to wealth open to ordinary citizens in the thirties.
Though the product Tony is selling is illegal, many members of his
original audience would have sampled it regularly anyway, and their
indulgence of Tony is compounded by his success in flouting both the
law of the land and Johnny’s cautious rule of staying away from the
rival North Side mob. Tony is not only acting out the Depression audience’s
economic dreams of rising above the limitations of the authoritarian
system represented in Hollywood films by centralized business,
banks, courts, and police officers; he is also acting out viewers’
far more equivocal desire to avenge themselves on the system that
has kept them down.
Tony’s status as an anticapitalist who ends up as the ultimate capitalist
is rich material for a critique of capitalism as an economic system
that cannot distinguish successful businessmen from career criminals.
Not surprisingly, however, the public outcry against gangster
films that led to the tighter enforcement of the 1930 Production Code
beginning in 1934 focused on the seductive ways they glamorized the
criminal hero’s most sociopathic tendencies toward violence. The
enduring appeal of the gangster’s sociopathic behavior is made even
more striking by the disinclination of most movie gangsters to offer
any moral justification for their lawbreaking. Set It Off, one of the few
gangster films to make a serious case for its protagonists’ behavior,
shows by implication why so few other films do so. Like other selfjustifying
gangsters, the four heroines of Set It Off do not think of themselves
as gangsters; they are simply four friends struggling to make
a living in Los Angeles as office cleaners. Fired from her job as a bank
teller after her failure to trigger the silent alarm during a bank robbery
has led to several deaths, Frankie Sutton (Vivica A. Fox) urges her
friends, “We just takin’ away from the system that’s fuckin’ us anyway.”
It is a system, as the film makes clear, that includes not only the Man
– the police officers who mistakenly kill the kid brother of Frankie’s
friend Stony Newsome (Jada Pinkett Smith) – but men in general, from
The Godfather and the Gangster Film 111
the car dealer who beds Stony in return for an advance in salary he
promises her to the owner of the cleaning agency, who steals the take
from the friends’ second (and, as they had originally planned, final)
bank job, forcing them to a third robbery with tragic consequences.
Like You Only Live Once, They Made Me a Criminal, Carlito’s Way
(1993), and A Perfect World (1993), Set It Off takes such pains to whitewash
its criminal heroes as innocents whose actions are forced on
them by an alienating society that it is hard to see them as criminals
at all. From time to time, however, the film’s assumption that its heroines
and its audience have access to an intuitively correct code of justice
that the system has betrayed is complicated, for example, by its
more nuanced attitude toward the justice system represented by a
kind but intransigent Child Protection caseworker and a cop – prejudiced
against Frankie but remorseful about the death of Stony’s brother
– who is determined to keep the four suspects from getting killed.
Even more telling are the differences the film develops among the four
friends. Gentle Tisean Williams (Kimberly Elise) cannot even bring
herself to participate in the first robbery; practical Frankie argues
against targeting a well-protected downtown branch where the risks
will be as big as the payoff; Stony is torn between her loyalty to her
friends and the prospects of romance with a junior bank executive
who works at the designated branch; hotheaded Cleo Simms (Queen
Latifah) gets so deeply into the role of the gun-toting bank robber that
she becomes a danger to all the others. Despite the different attitudes
toward the law and lawbreakers the film explores, however, it ends
by reaffirming the power of friendship among the four heroines, who
would die rather than let each other down. Maintaining the friendships
that have been formed under the gun, and under the heel of oppression,
becomes the moral imperative Set It Off offers in place of
following the rules of an unjust society.
Most gangsters, incapable of such unshakable loyalty to their
friends, can offer no such sweeping justification for breaking the law.
Bonnie and Clyde, which seems at first to offer its lovers as equally
innocent, soon reveals them as shockingly damaged. Clyde Barrow
(Warren Beatty) is a slick, insensitive, fast-talking salesman with no
sense of moral responsibility and a harrowingly comical inability to
see around the next curve. He is genuinely puzzled when a grocer he
is robbing attacks him just for trying to get something to eat, and he
thinks that by robbing banks instead of private citizens he can avoid
hurting anybody. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), by contrast, is a sen-
112 Crime Films
sitive, melancholic narcissist, a sociopath obsessed with thoughts of
her impending death but indifferent to the death of the bank officer
Clyde kills during a botched robbery. Yet for all their faults the couple
remain, like Tony Camonte, the most appealing characters in their
world. Even more than Tony’s, their faults are those of youth, and their
sterile West Texas landscape, which offers them nothing but a choice
between dead-end rules and a hell-raising spree sure to bring the
wrath of the authorities down on them, is so clearly a Depression-era
refraction of the Vietnam-era draft that college audiences were ready
to sentimentalize the lovers even more completely by adopting the
1930s fashions Theadora Van Runkle had designed for them.
Still other criminals justify their lawbreaking through their rejection
not of the law as such but of particular laws proscribing particular
crimes. Although practically all movie gangsters end up killing someone
in order to raise the stakes of their lawbreaking, brand themselves
as irredeemable, and create spectacular death scenes, these killings
are incidental to the laws they set out to break. Bonnie and Clyde, like
the heroines of Set It Off, are bank robbers; Tony Camonte is a bootlegger;
Joe Morse (John Garfield), in Force of Evil (1948), is involved
with the numbers racket; Harry Fabian, in Night and the City (1950/
1992), is a small-time promoter. Except for the thrill-killers of Badlands
and Natural Born Killers, few movie criminals use murder as a mode
of social protest; murder (or the unintended deaths in Force of Evil and
the 1950 Night and the City) simply represents the natural tendency of
criminal plots to spiral out of control and the formula’s imperative
to inflate criminal infractions and their punishment to heroic status.
Depression-era bootlegging films are especially likely to sympathize
with their gangsters’ original plots but not in the killings that are their
inevitable results. These films reveal the ambivalence at the heart of
the formula’s attitude toward the law, and in particular toward the
proposition that crime does not pay. Gangster films insist on this proposition,
not because it is universally self-evident, but because it is constantly
under suspicion by audiences eager to see their antiestablishment
dreams of power and wealth acted out onscreen.
This ambivalence toward society’s laws is dramatized even more
directly by the primary conflicts in gangster films. Except for the flurry
of antigangster films like “G” Men (1935) and the Crime Does Not
Pay series (1935–47) shepherded through the Hays Office in the later
1930s, officers of the law are surprisingly marginal figures in most
gangster films. The real threat to the gangs of The Public Enemy and
The Godfather and the Gangster Film 113
Scarface is not the impotent police force but rival gangsters; once
Tony Camonte has wiped out the North Side gang, he is made vulnerable
only by his grief at having killed his sidekick Guino Rinaldo
(George Raft), who had secretly married Tony’s sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak),
and by Cesca’s own death. Bonnie and Clyde are killed not by an
official police force but by the collusion between a vigilante Texas ranger
they have insulted and a gang member’s father as outraged by his
son’s failure to achieve Bonnie and Clyde’s notoriety as by his prominent
tattoo. The gang members in The Asphalt Jungle are killed by each
other, by the accident of bad luck, by their own flawed natures. The
greatest danger to Big Jim Colfax’s gang in The Killers is Big Jim himself,
who eliminates each of them in order to cover up his plot to trick
them out of the take from the Prentiss Hat Factory robbery. In Don
Siegel’s 1964 remake of The Killers, the authorities are even more invisible
when Johnny North (John Cassavettes) is killed by another pair
of hit men dispatched by his old boss, Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan),
and it is the enterprising hit men, not the stalwart insurance investigator,
who spend the film solving the puzzle of why Johnny did
not run from them. Point Blank and The Usual Suspects (1995) show
gangs similarly destroyed by criminal masterminds who clean house
of possible rivals or assemble suicide forces to eliminate dangerous
informants. Mean Streets (1973) marginalizes rival gangs along with the
police, since every threat to Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and Johnny Boy
Cervello (Robert De Niro) comes from within their own gang. Even in
Reservoir Dogs, whose gangsters fret obsessively about the police officer
who has infiltrated their gang, the undercover cop (Tim Roth)
succeeds in killing only one of them; the others end up executing each
other in a bloody, ritualistic finale.
The Grifters (1990) offers the bleakest view of criminal society of all.
Although con man Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is seriously injured by a
bartender he is trying to swindle out of ten dollars and Roy’s mother
Lilly (Anjelica Huston) is beaten and terrified by the bookmaker from
whom she has been stealing, the real threat to Roy, Lilly, and Roy’s
lover Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) is each other. Throughout the
film, the three grifters take turns trying to escape, betray, or kill each
other; but only Roy realizes that since the essence of confidence
schemes is “to take another pro – your partner, who’s watching you”
– his life of crime has poisoned every possible human relationship.
The law is not Roy’s enemy; if his every social relation is founded on
a trust it is his vocation to betray, then everyone who tries to get close
to him, from his lover to his mother, is the enemy.
The Grifters’s unflinchingly bleak view of social relations is merely
the logical extension of the gangster formula’s treatment of society.
Since gangsters who form outlaw societies in order to break the rules
cannot help at the same time replicating the rules within their own
countersocieties, what they take to be their primary conflict with the
law will inevitably by mirrored and magnified as conflict within the
gang. Gangster films resolve the resulting contradictions in one of
three ways. The most conventionally reassuring films show the gangsters
vanquished by the superior force or intelligence of the police;
more challenging studies of career criminals explore their heroes’
paradoxical combination of power and vulnerability by emphasizing
their destruction at the hands of competing criminals to whom their
life-style has made them vulnerable; and the films that use gang culture
most directly as a means of analyzing the consensual culture of
law-abiding citizens show gangsters destroyed by the contradictions
among the different social roles they have been obliged to assume
within their gangs.

The fatal effects of conflict among gangsters’ different social roles
are foreshadowed as early as Scarface, in which Tony Camonte’s selfappointed
role as his sister Cesca’s protective guardian will end with
his killing first her bridegroom Guino, his right-hand man in the gang,
and later accidentally killing Cesca herself. The Killers, Force of Evil,
They Live by Night, Mean Streets, Once Upon a Time in America, New
Jack City, and Casino are all studies of the divided loyalties to which
gangsters necessarily have committed themselves as gangsters. The
fact-based GoodFellas is a particularly corrosive critique of the longstanding
friendships that do not prevent gangsters from breaking their
promises to each other or ratting each other out. But the most ambitious
of all such studies, and the greatest of all American crime films,
is the movie whose myth of honor among thieves GoodFellas seeks
to correct: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).
The story of The Godfather begins with the success of Mario Puzo’s
bestselling 1969 novel. Paramount, which had acquired the rights to
the novel before publication, found itself with an unexpected opportunity
to revitalize the gangster film. First envisioning a quick, lowbudget
transcription, the studio hired screenwriter-director Francis
Ford Coppola. Though he had shared a screenwriting Oscar for Patton
in 1970, Coppola’s credentials for the project were sketchy. While still
a film student, he had begun a long apprenticeship with Roger Corman,
the dean of low-budget independent producers. Coppola’s first
directorial credit was for Corman’s horror film Dementia 13 (1963); his
second, the coming-of-age story You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), was submitted
as his M.F.A. thesis at UCLA. In between, he had collaborated
on the screenplays of the Tennessee Williams sexual odyssey This
Property Is Condemned and the World War II epic Is Paris Burning?
(both 1966). Until he directed The Godfather, Coppola had been consistently
more successful as a screenwriter than as a director; neither
of the only two major studio releases Coppola had directed, the leprechaun
musical Finian’s Rainbow (1968) and the drama The Rain People
(1969), had been successful at the box office.
Once he was brought aboard, however, Coppola moved quickly to
take control of The Godfather. He fought for a budget big enough to
finance location shooting for a key sequence in Sicily. He interested
Marlon Brando, the preeminent screen actor of his generation, in the
role of the aging Don Vito Corleone. He brought two cast members of
The Rain People into the film: James Caan as the Don’s oldest son,
Santino “Sonny” Corleone, and Robert Duvall as his adopted son and
consigliere, Tom Hagen. He asked that his younger sister, Talia Shire,
be given the part of Connie Corleone, the Don’s daughter. And he insisted,
on the strength of an intense performance as a drug addict in
The Panic in Needle Park (1971), on casting stage actor Al Pacino, virtually
unknown in Hollywood despite his Obie and Tony awards for
The Indian Wants the Bronx (1968) and Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?
(1969), in the pivotal role of Michael Corleone, the Don’s youngest son.
Coppola kept the story faithful to the vision of Puzo, retained as coscreenwriter
despite his lack of Hollywood experience, who maintained
that The Godfather was essentially a film about a family that
happened to be in crime rather than a crime film whose criminal organization
happened to be that of a family. The film’s anatomy of the conflicting
roles the Corleone family demands its leading members play
begins with its title, the first of a series of euphemisms forced on Paramount
by the insistence of Italian-American lobbies that the film
avoid the ethnically charged terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra in fictionalizing
the five New York crime families whose existence was well known
thanks to repeated journalistic exposés and Hollywood fictionalizations
long before The Godfather ever went before the cameras. The
film’s forced ethnic sensitivity helped transform it into a masterpiece
of innuendo in which innocent or neutral terms take on double meanings
far more sinister than the ethnic slurs they had been pressed into
service to replace.

As Michael, a returning World War II veteran, explains to his girlfriend
Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) during his sister Connie’s wedding
reception, the daringly extended set piece that opens the film, standing
as a child’s godfather is a family relationship, a sacred relationship,
that the Corleones take very seriously. In the Catholic Church, godparents
are asked to take an active role in the religious education of
their godchildren, and to act as the children’s guardians if their parents
die. These duties, however, are ironically remote from Don Vito’s
self-appointed responsibilities to his godson Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino),
a washed-up singer. Vito, who has already released Johnny from
an inconvenient contract to a bandleader by making the bandleader
“an offer he couldn’t refuse” – a choice between a $1,000 check and
the loaded gun at his head – is about to intimidate a Hollywood producer
into giving Johnny a career-reviving role in his new film by a
combination of suave threats and shocking violence.
The contrast between the official and unofficial meanings of the
term godfather – the spiritual advisor and guardian and the violently
protective head of the Corleone interests – is developed visually
throughout this opening sequence by the conflict production designer
Dean Tavoularis and cinematographer Gordon Willis set up between
the brightly lit exteriors, in which joyous wedding guests sing, dance,
drink, and slip the bride and her groom Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo)
envelopes of cash, and the somber, monochrome gold-lit interior of
Vito’s office, where the don sits listening to the petitioners who have
come to ask him the favors Sicilian custom requires him to grant on
his daughter’s wedding day. Throughout this scene – the first of many
contrasts the film sets up between the freedom and joy of exterior
scenes and the entrapment of interiors, or of exteriors blocked and
shot as if they were interiors – Don Vito manages to be at once generous,
judicious, and unapologetically criminal [Fig. 25]. Although the
undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) begs him to kill the boys
who beat his daughter when she refused their sexual advances, Vito
chides him: “You don’t ask with respect.” He agrees to have the boys
beaten only when Bonasera asks him to “be my friend,” calls him
“Godfather,” and kisses his hand. The scene, played in the hushed
tones of a religious ritual, is the first of many parodies of such rituals
that will mark the Corleones’ growing distance from the ideals they
embody.

The film’s title is a pun in another sense as well. The Godfather is a
generational history of the Corleone family that charts the changes in
The Godfather and the Gangster Film 117
the family from the height of Vito’s power to the coming of age of his
three sons. Although Vito is widely identified as the film’s title character,
the title more accurately refers to a title, like that of president or
pope, that migrates from one godfather to the next as Vito is succeeded
by Sonny and finally Michael. Significantly, the Don’s middle son,
the sweetly ineffectual Fredo (John Cazale), who fails to prevent his
father’s near-fatal shooting by the henchmen of Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri),
is never considered to fill the role of Vito’s successor; nor is Sonny,
who is thrust into the position as Vito lies near death in a hospital
room, ever referred to as the godfather. Vito’s true heir is Michael,
the clean-cut war hero who, despite capping the anecdote he tells his
WASP girlfriend in the opening sequence, “That’s my family, Kay.
That’s not me,” ends as a far more ruthless godfather than his father
ever was.

Woven through the film’s saga of the Corleone family’s fortunes from
1945 to 1952, which is driven by Michael’s determination to execute
the man he is certain will otherwise kill his father and his father’s attempt
to protect Michael from reprisals, is the question of what it
means to be a member of a family. The question is first posed in the
opening conversation between Bonasera and Vito and highlighted in
Kay’s question to Michael why Tom Hagen, whom he introduces as
his brother, has a different last name from him. Even after Michael’s
explanation of how Vito adopted Tom, the question lingers: Is Tom a
member of the Corleones? The same question will be asked of Kay,
whom Michael insists, despite her objections and the red dress that
jars with his family’s wedding finery, on posing with them for a formal
photograph at the very end of the wedding sequence. Even after her
wedding to Michael years later, it is clear that Kay is not a Corleone.
Neither is Connie herself, nor her mother, nor the wife Sonny casually
betrays with a bridesmaid as the reception continues outside. The
Corleone family excludes women from full membership; they can
never act as freely or responsibly as the fathers and sons who are the
family’s core.

As Fredo and Carlo show, however, not every son can be a Corleone
either. If family ties are measured by intimacy and responsibility, then
Connie’s husband Carlo, whom Vito tells Tom Hagen should be given
a living but kept out of discussions of the family business, is not a Corleone,
and Tom himself, as he points out to Sonny, is as much Vito’s
son as Sonny ever was. To make up for the attenuated ties to some
disenfranchised members of the immediate family, the Corleones have
family ties to many people to whom they are not related by blood:
Vito’s caporegimi (lieutenants), his old Sicilian friends, Peter Clemenza
(Richard Castellano) and Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda); his dull-witted, fanatically
loyal enforcer, Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana); and, most tellingly,
Emilio Barzini (Richard Conte), Ottilio Cuneo (Rudy Bond), and
the members of the other New York crime families.
The Godfather and the Gangster Film 119
25. The Godfather: A crime boss at once generous, judicious, and unapologetically
criminal. (Marlon Brando)
Although it might seem absurd to take the term “crime families” as
referring to relationships of genuine intimacy, it is an absurdity the
film takes very seriously indeed. Sollozzo’s attempt to kill Vito is based
on his belief that Sonny, who had imprudently added a tactical question
to his father’s refusal of Sollozzo’s offer to collaborate in selling
drugs, will be more receptive to the partnership. What kind of businessman
kills his prospective partner’s much-loved father to cement
their business relationship? The kind who is convinced, as Tom points
out to Sonny, that with Vito seriously wounded, the survival of the
Corleone family depends on their maintaining cordial official relations
with the Five Families, who are likely to enforce a peace that forbids
revenge for Vito’s wounding in order to prevent the outbreak of fullscale
gang warfare. The Corleone family, Sollozzo realizes, is ironically
weakened by the very ties to the other New York families that are supposed
to give it strength, and by the nobility of the Corleones’ wellknown
commitment to any agreements they make with the other families.
Puzo and Coppola’s view of the New York crime families as driven
by an imperative of survival through cooperation makes Vito’s world,
with its handshake deals, its courtly nonaggression pacts, and its
leaders’ smug contrasts of their honorable behavior with the deals of
politicians, remote from the Darwinian gang wars of Scarface and Little
Caesar. Yet it is equally remote from the new world order Michael confirms
in the film’s climactic set piece, the baptism of Connie and Carlo’s
infant son Anthony (Sofia Coppola), when Coppola intercuts the
murders Michael has ordered of the rival family heads with Michael’s
ritual vicarious promise, as his nephew’s godfather, to renounce Satan
and all his works and all his empty promises. The irony of this blasphemous
christening focuses again on the distance between the two
meanings of the word “godfather.” Unlike his father, who is tragically
caught trying to reconcile the two senses of the word by courteously
declining Sollozzo’s offer of a drug partnership because he feels it will
degrade and imperil his family, Michael resolves the dilemma by ignoring
the original force of family ties entirely. In acting to guarantee the
safety of his family, Michael is making a mockery of the values he is
most concerned to defend.

The Godfather tells the story of how Michael was brought to such a
pass, the story of how Vito’s olympian insistence on justice and family
values gives way first to Sonny’s impulsive, unquenchable appetite
for vengeance, then to Michael’s apparently more judicious, but actu-
ally more Machiavellian, handling of the family’s struggles to adapt to
a treacherously changing world. Michael’s fate is shaped by the contradictions
in his status in the family. Although the other families think
him a “civilian” until his unexpected murders of Sollozzo and McCluskey
(Sterling Hayden), the police captain Sollozzo has audaciously
chosen as his bodyguard, Michael’s crucial conversion comes earlier,
in a deceptively quiet scene at his father’s abandoned hospital bed.
Realizing that Sollozzo has pressed police and hospital officials to
eject Vito’s bodyguards from the hospital so that they can finish the
job of killing him, Michael gets a reluctant nurse to help him move
Vito’s bed into an unoccupied room, then tells his comatose father,
“I’m here, Pop. . . . I’m with you now.” All the subsequent corruption
in the Corleone family stems from this moment of filial responsibility.
Despite his success in protecting his father, Michael argues to Sonny
that since Sollozzo can save his own life now only by killing their
father, he will keep trying unless he is stopped. “It’s not personal,”
Michael concludes. “It’s strictly business.” The apparent contrast between
the personal desires that continue to motivate Sonny and the
business considerations that motivate Michael reveals still another
contradiction lurking in the phrase “family business.” The Corleones
are connected to the other New York crime families, and for that matter
to their own caporegimi, not by family ties but by business connections
conducted as if they were family ties. Although the Corleones
think of themselves as a family, they are better described as a familyrun
business, and it is the survival of the business, not the family, that
is of paramount importance. Michael’s “strictly business” rationale –
sadly to be echoed at the film’s ending by Michael’s would-be betrayer
Tessio to the capos who are leading him off to his own execution –
is persuasive to Sonny because Sonny agrees that what’s good for the
Corleone business must be good for the Corleones, who have been
schooled more successfully than any other gangsters in film history
to put their family’s welfare above their own.

Exiled to his family’s idyllic ancestral village in Sicily after his assassination
of Sollozzo and McCluskey, Michael attempts to settle down
in an old-world marriage to Apollonia Vitelli (Simonetta Stefanelli); but
once Apollonia dies in an explosion intended to kill him, everything
Michael does for the rest of the film is calculated to ensure his family’s
safety by consolidating its power and destroying its enemies. Returning
to America under a truce negotiated by his father, who has been
thrown back into heading the family by the execution of Sonny, Mi-
chael abruptly marries Kay – their wedding, unlike his and Apollonia’s,
is never shown – after a single, chillingly dispassionate courtship
scene. If his first marriage was an attempt at personal happiness and
self-fulfillment [Fig. 26], his second is a marriage of convenience, an
assimilationist fantasy evidently designed to bring him a step closer
to his oft-proclaimed dream of making the Corleone family legitimate.
This quintessentially American fantasy of legitimacy through assimilation,
generational survival, and the cultivation of a business dynasty
most insidiously dramatizes Coppola’s widely quoted remark that “the
film always was a loose metaphor: Michael as America.”2 By the end
of the film Michael has confirmed his promise as the heir to his father’s
family business. Armed with the advice Vito gives him just before
his sentimentally peaceful death in his grape arbor, he repels a
26. The Godfather: Michael’s first marriage as an abortive attempt at happiness.
(Al Pacino, Simonetta Stefanelli)
threat against his life. With his father dead, Michael moves swiftly in
ways his father never would have countenanced. Going a step beyond
his preemptive murder of Sollozzo and McCluskey, he orchestrates the
executions of the heads of all the rival families and of Moe Green (Alex
Rocco), the Las Vegas hotelier who refused to sell him the casino he
had sought as the base of operations for the Corleones’ newly legitimate
family business. He also avenges his brother Sonny by arranging
the murder of Sonny’s betrayer, Carlo, and wins the renewed loyalty
of the family members who remain after his purge of the ranks.
At the same time, Michael’s shocking betrayals expose the hollowness
of the Italian-American family values he espouses. Even viewers
who expect gangster heroes to be quick on the trigger are often appalled
by Michael’s explicitly religious blasphemy during the christening
sequence, when he covers his complicity in a gruesome series of
mob killings by promising to reject Satan on behalf of the godson
whose father he will send to his death later that same day [Fig. 27].
The Godfather and the Gangster Film 123
27. The Godfather: Michael rejects Satan on behalf of the godson whose father
he is about to have killed. (Al Pacino, Diane Keaton)
Michael’s brusque denial of Connie’s accusation that he had been
planning to murder Carlo for all the years since Sonny’s death is even
more cold-blooded. Most troubling of all is the film’s closing scene,
in which Michael responds to Kay’s demand that he tell her whether
Connie’s accusation is true first by angrily refusing to answer any
questions about his business, then by assuring Kay that Connie’s story
is not true, moments before Clemenza and another capo enter, call
Michael Don Corleone, kiss his hand, and quietly shut the door in
Kay’s face. Michael has ensured his family’s survival and success, but
only at the price of dishonoring his religious faith, his father’s moral
principles, his sister’s happiness, and his wife’s trust.

In one sense, Michael’s exceptional personal heroism preserves his
family business by destroying his soul. The film sets Vito’s insistence
on honor, respect, courtesy, and justice against Michael’s uncompromising,
deeply corrupted drive to do whatever it takes to ensure his
family’s survival. Vito’s old-world gangster courtliness is set against
his youngest son’s vicious parody of the ritualistic rules of family life.
The final scene between father and son, in which Vito speaks poignantly
of his unfulfilled wishes for Michael as “Governor Corleone, Senator
Corleone,” heightens this contrast and presents Michael’s whole life
in terms of a road not taken, a life he should have led. In another
sense, however, Michael is all too clearly Vito’s legitimate heir, the don
that Vito would have had to become if he wanted to protect his family
from the conflicting loyalties between spiritual and temporal stewardship,
blood relations and the extended family, family and business,
Italian ways and American ways, that he had been cultivating for many
years. As far back as the opening wedding sequence, the smiling presence
of Carlo Rizzi, whose violence against his bride would finally lead
to his murderous betrayal of Sonny, is a sign that the family’s corruption
is present, like the serpent in the garden, from the beginning.

The Godfather achieved extraordinary popular and critical success,
winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay,
and Best Actor (Marlon Brando) and becoming the top-grossing film
in Hollywood history until the days of Steven Spielberg. It launched
Coppola on a meteoric career as the key American director of the
1970s, whose films ranged from the nightmare of surveillance paranoia
The Conversation (1974) to the Vietnam restaging of Conrad’s
1899 “Heart of Darkness,” Apocalypse Now (1979), before the disastrous
failure of his epic Las Vegas romance One from the Heart (1982)
bankrupted his production company, Zoetrope Studios, and sent him
back to the ranks of journeyman directors for such varied projects
as the teen-angst films Rumble Fish and The Outsiders (both 1983), the
historical gangster film The Cotton Club (1984), the time-travel romance
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), the home-front Vietnam War film
Gardens of Stone (1987), the historical anecdote Tucker: The Man and
His Dream (1988), whose tale of an independent carmaker buried by
the establishment was a thinly veiled autobiographical parable, a florid
adapation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), the comic fantasy Jack
(1996), and the legal fairy tale John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997).
Nonetheless, Coppola will undoubtedly be best remembered as the
director and cowriter not only of The Godfather but of its two sequels
(1974, 1990). Although the third film in the series, for all its grand scale
and historical sweep, is memorable mostly as a pastiche of the first
two, from its extended opening sequence at a festive celebration to its
furiously crosscut climactic bloodbath, The Godfather: Part II is far and
away the most successful sequel ever made, a dazzlingly complex reexamination
of the relations between Don Vito (played as a young man
by Robert De Niro, the only actor in screen history to win an Oscar
for playing a role someone else had already been awarded an Oscar
for playing) and his star-crossed son. Crisscrossing between Michael’s
ventures in Las Vegas and Havana just before the Cuban Revolution
of 1958–9 and his father’s rise to power half a century earlier in New
York’s Little Italy, The Godfather: Part II fleshes out the earlier film’s
mythic and psychological account of the Corleones’ corruption with
an incisive sociopolitical analysis of the family’s evolution, even as it
plumbs new depths of family betrayal in the name of family survival.
When the film concludes after a poignant final flashback to Vito’s
birthday party in 1941, Michael, already a monster at the end of the
earlier film, seems even more thoroughly damned by hopelessly entangling
family loyalties his family’s involvement in crime has dramatized
but not created. It is not until the end of The Godfather: Part III
sixteen years later, however, that he is finally permitted to die.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org