![]() ![]() The tension is in the meetings in the underworld darkness one gets the sense that this secret life has its own poetry of fear, more real to the men (and perhaps to the excluded women also) than the sunlight world outside. The visual scheme is based on the most obvious life-and-death contrasts the men meet and conduct their business in deep-toned, shuttered rooms, lighted by lamps even in the daytime, and the story moves back and forth between this hidden, nocturnal world and the sunshine that they share with the women and children. The thirties films indicated some of this, but “The Godfather” gets into it at the primary level, the willingness to be basic and the attempt to understand the basic, to look at it without the usual preconceptions, are what give this picture its epic strength. We see the ethnic subculture, based on a split between the men’s conception of their responsibilities-all that they keep dark-and the sunny false Eden in which they try to shelter the women and children. We see how the racketeering tribes encroach on each other and why this form of illegal business inevitably erupts in violence. The plot is still about rival gangs murdering each other, but now we see the system of patronage and terror, in which killing is a way of dealing with the competition. The beginning is set late in the summer of 1945 the film’s roots, however, are in the gangster films of the early thirties. The abundance is from the book the quality of feeling is Coppola’s. The movie is on the heroic scale of earlier pictures on broad themes, such as “On the Waterfront,” “From Here to Eternity,” and “The Nun’s Story.” It offers a wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty. Given the circumstances and the rush to complete the film and bring it to market, Coppola has not only done his best but pushed himself farther than he may realize. He has salvaged Puzo’s energy and lent the narrative dignity. Coppola, a young director who has never had a big hit, may have done the movie for money, as he claims-in order to make the pictures he really wants to make, he says-but this picture was made at peak capacity. Coppola uses his gifts to reverse the process-to give the public the best a moviemaker can do with this very raw material. Puzo, who admits he was out to make money, wrote “below my gifts,” as he puts it, and one must agree. And Puzo’s shameless turn-on probably left Coppola looser than if he had been dealing with a better book he could not have been cramped by worries about how best to convey its style. ![]() ![]() With the slop and sex reduced and the whoremongering guess-who material minimized (“Nino,” who sings with a highball in his hand, has been weeded out), the movie bears little relationship to other adaptations of books of this kind, such as “The Carpetbaggers” and “The Adventurers.” Puzo provided what Coppola needed: a storyteller’s outpouring of incidents and details to choose from, the folklore behind the headlines, heat and immediacy, the richly familiar. Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the film, and wrote the script with Puzo, has stayed very close to the book’s greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’ used to have. It’s gripping, maybe, in the same sense that Spiro Agnew’s speeches were a few years back. What would this school of fiction do without Porfirio Rubirosa, Judy Garland, James Aubrey, Howard Hughes, and Frank Sinatra? The novel “The Godfather,” financed by Paramount during its writing, features a Sinatra stereotype, and sex and slaughter, and little gobbets of trouble and heartbreak. Mario Puzo has a reputation as a good writer, so his potboiler was treated as if it were special, and not in the Irving Wallace-Harold Robbins class, to which, by its itch and hype and juicy roman-à-clef treatment, it plainly belongs. You’re briefed on their backgrounds and sex lives in a flashy anecdote or two, and the author moves on, from nugget to nugget. You’re told who and what the characters are in a few pungent, punchy sentences, and that’s all they are. The movie starts from a trash novel that is generally considered gripping and compulsively readable, though (maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash) I found it unreadable. If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, “The Godfather” is it.
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