When director Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter-novelist Mario Puzo released The Godfather 50 years ago, the mobster had already been a stock figure in film for half a century. Their genius (and that of the film’s own godfather, producer Robert Evans) was to reinvent these criminals as a dysfunctional dynastic psychodrama.
They took the figure of the ageing don as seriously as Lear, the careworn ruler of a secret American state-within-a-state. Stomach-turning flourishes of violence are juxtaposed with elaborate rituals of familial piety and respect, which generations of real-life criminals in the United States treated as how-to behaviour manuals for decades afterwards. These Italian-American gangsters do not complain about the bigotry heading their way, and are themselves casually racist and antisemitic. Extravagant gestures of romantic adoration and solemn respect for womenfolk are combined with casual sexual abuse; and women have to reconcile themselves to their role: a pretext for revenge. (A tour guide in Sicily once told me that the word “mafia” is taken from the Italian phrase “non toccare ma figlia” – don’t touch my daughter – an explanation I have yet to see confirmed anywhere else.) There is a toxic chill to the film’s opening speech, from a local undertaker piteously demanding the Don take revenge on his behalf against two over-privileged white boys who have raped and disfigured his daughter. Many cannot forgive this film for sentimentalising mob violence with this fantasy rationale.
