Confession: until I watched it last weekend, the only Marlon Brando movie I’d seen EVER was Superman. I’m dead serious. This is a disgrace for a 32-old, and its something I’m attempting to rectify through my Netflix Adventures that will be chronicled here.
I can’t explain why I had not watched The Godfather prior to college. I can, however, explain why I didn’t see it once I got there, and for many years after.
When I was about 12, a movie starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfus came out called “What About Bob?” My brother and I both thought it was hilarious; our mom didn’t agree. Not for the usual generational gap reasons, either; she worked with a relentlessly needy co-worker whose eerie similarity to “Bob” made the movie unwatchable. Totally understandable, right? That’s how The Godfather became for me in college and for many years afterward.
When I was in college, I knew a guy who liked to pretend he was a Godfather. He was Italian and really, truly believed he was some mutant hybrid of all the Corleone men from the movies. He’d lecture people about respect — not Aretha Franklin respect, but kiss the ring respect — and about never taking a stand against the family. I suppose a bunch of college guys all interested in beer and ladies could loosely be called a family, but whatever. When he shared a house with me and three other guys for two years, it got worse because I was around him all the time. I heard him actually tell people when he was drunk that he was a “Don” and that without him, all of his friends would struggle to get by; they needed his protection and advice. It was pathetic and ridiculous then; its even moreso as I write it now, a decade later.
I had never seen The Godfather or its two sequels, but when I was around him I lied and pretended I had whenever the movie came up, then quickly changed the subject. It wasn’t terribly difficult; so many scenes and storylines are pop culture staples that even people like me, who hadn’t seen the movies, were familiar with them. I knew some dude winds up with a horse’s head in his bed, that Brando talks like he has cotton in his mouth, that one of the sons gets blown away at a toll booth, and that Fredo betrays the family. These are things I think everyone knows, whether they’ve watched the movies or not.
My patience for 3-1/2 hour movies is pretty marginal; even less so when the prospect of someone adding “expert” commentary to it is highly probable, explaining the Sicilian culture and the Catholic symbols, etc. He watched the movies frequently, and I never joined in. After college, when I was glad to lose contact with him, I was in no hurry to watch the movies either.
Last Saturday, I watched The Godfather for the first time start to finish. Its three hours, which is a long time for me to sit still, but its such an engrossing movie that it doesn’t seem nearly that long. Two things immediately struck me.
One, this isn’t anything like the cliche gangster movies that preceded it, even though the Corleone family is in the same line of work as so many of James Cagney’s characters. Those movies tended to show the gangster life as glamorous, flashy, as a 24/7 good time. Oh sure, there was violence, but it was glamorous violence. In The Godfather, all of those cliched things are gone, leaving the story to show us everything else: the vast majority of the movie finds the characters in dark meeting rooms, and every once in a while, enormous violence erupts.
And two, because its told from the inside-out, the audience identifies with the characters, evil as most of them may be. This isn’t James Bond, where the characters seem larger than life. Remember back in middle school, when there were various cliques roaming the halls? Everybody knew everybody else and everybody else’s business. Back then it was gossip about who was dating who, what so-and-so was wearing, and so on. Here its gossip about who’s doing business with who, and where. Back then disputes were settled either with a war of words or by fighting with fists on the corner outside the school. Here disputes are settled by shooting each other.
Nonetheless, the characters are identifiable because the story takes us into their homes, to their dinner tables, to their family wedding, giving them a sense of humanity that most gangster movies don’t offer.
Because I’d never seen the movie, I assumed because of Marlon Brando’s Oscar Award for the role and the way its held in such esteem that he dominated the movie. To my surprise, he has but a few lines early on and is incapacitated by an assassin’s would-be fatal bullet an hour into the flick. The story is really about the transfer of power from the old Don to his sons, with the twist coming when the son who takes over winds up being Michael, the “good” son.
The reason the three hours fly by, though, is the sheer number of unforgettable scenes. There’s all of the aforementioned ones, but also a badass cold-blooded assassination of a cop and a rival in a restaurant, an exploding car killing its occupant, and of course, the baptism massacre. A lesser movie — say, one directed by Michael Bay — would take a situation where the undertaker asks the Don for a favor, is told “someday, and that day may never come, I will ask a favor of you in return…”, and turn it into a chance to make the undertaker kill someone. I assumed that’s what would happen, frankly. Bad moves have conditioned me to think this way. Instead, the Don asks him to clean up Sonny’s maimed corpse so his wife doesn’t have to see him in such a condition.
That sequence says a lot about the nuance and the care with which the story is crafted. This is considered one of the greatest movies of all time for a reason, and that’s a big reason why. Remember how I said I had little patience for 3 hour movies? At the conclusion of this one, I wanted to watch it again. I don’t even do that right away with 90 minute comedies. It does still remind me of the ridiculousness of that guy in college, but now in a funny way: despite his attitude he was no more capable of killing a man who disrepected him than I was capable of speaking fluent Italian to mock him.
By the end of the movie, lots of the characters are dead — actually, pretty much everyone except for Al Pacino’s Michael and Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen. That made me wonder how a second movie could have possibly worked. I’d find out next.
Part II is a disjointed affair, with two parallel storylines: the devolution of Michael into a crime boss lacking in moral character, and the childhood and young life of his father, Vito. Both halves are excellent, but I couldn’t help from thinking I would have enjoyed them more as separate movies — or at least in chronological order. Perhaps the re-edited “Godfather Saga” in which director Francis Ford Coppola did just that should be added to my queue.
Its a remarkable movie, the rare sequel that is the equal of its original so fully that its impossible to have one without the other. But its not better than the original, as many of my friends told me when I advised them of my intent to watch these movies, finally. I’m sorry, in my opinion its not better. Its a sad movie, full of lament for loss — loss of old values, loss of a family patriarch, and for viewers, loss of the happier-by-comparison tone of the first movie. Young Vito was every bit the callous murderer his son Michael becomes, but when we’re introduced to him in the first movie, he’s grown more diplomatic and wise in his age. When he dies, it feels like a loss. There is no such sense at Michael’s decline. Its the biggest difference between the way the two characters are portrayed: Vito is sympathetic, Michael is a villain. We feel for one, we do not for the other.
These are remarkable movies that I’m glad to have finally crossed off the list of classics I’d never watched. I understand, and fully agree with, the sentiment that they’re among the Ten Best movies ever made. I even forgive that college friend for his ridiculous need to pretend to be part of the lifestyle they portray, which prevented me from seeing the movies until now.
You bet.