“In 1972, The Godfather was a real surprise not only at the American box office, but also at the global box office. Of course, Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name was a bestseller, but it was the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic blockbuster that helped to increase attention to the book. However, the story of the film’s creation has long since become a legend, and it is possible to make a separate movie about it, and not just one. The film itself has become one of the key works of the New Hollywood, without which it is impossible to imagine the landscape of American cinema.
In one of his many interviews, Francis Ford Coppola told how he worked with the actors involved in his famous crime epic The Godfather: “Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, John Cazale-all admired Marlon Brando. He was a real godfather. I decided to use that. As Napoleon said, use whatever is at hand. This is what a director does every day. So at our first meeting, I did an improvisation. I said: “I want you to come to the meeting hungry.” We gathered at a table in a restaurant, and it was a homely atmosphere. I put Brando at the head of the table, Pacino to his right, and Kaan to his left. The rest of us sat down as we could. My sister Talia played Connie and served the food. Everyone at the table was improvising, but still looking at Brando as a father figure. James Caan was trying to impress him with jokes, Al Pacino was quiet and reserved, and my sister was generally intimidated. That’s how the characters emerged over dinner.”
“The Godfather is one of those films that almost everyone has seen. Depending on the circumstances of the viewing, one or another optic of the viewer’s perception of the film was adjusted. For some, it still remains a refined gangster epic and one of the key role models of the Pepsi Generation in the post-Soviet space. For others, it is a powerful family saga where everyday life and crime are closely linked to American history.
Of course, each of these points of view has the right to exist, and The Godfather should not be simplified by adjusting the film to the modern revisionist realities after #MeToo. Of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s opus magnum will not pass this cultural and political revision. But will the importance of this outstanding film work, which has become a benchmark for the whole genre and is de facto one of the textbooks on the cinematic language, diminish for the history of cinema?
Often, such an ideological revision (already successfully used in the United States for The Birth of a Nation by David Work Griffith) implies a totalitarian right to cancel culture, which leads to a cultural dead end. Deny it and offer it! There is nothing in the history of American cinema that is equivalent in terms of the power of expression on the topic of the mafia, its functioning, and its fusion with the body of the historical process, and it is unlikely to be.
After all, even though the mafia is immortal, it is no longer possible to write or film about it honestly and without embellishment. Steve McQueen’s Widows or Andrea Berloff’s Crime Queens, which are failures in every sense, cannot be considered such an alternative. They are rather primitively parasitic on the legacy of The Godfather, although they seem satisfactory as a feminist outburst, but not more, unfortunately.
For all its clear ties to New Hollywood, The Godfather may be archaic for those who see it as a celebration of destructive masculinity rather than a demonstration of individual experience of the impossibility of overcoming family ties. At first, Michael Corleone seems to be perhaps the most aloof and bored of all the guests at the wedding. He himself has defiantly brushed aside his family’s affairs, and even against the backdrop of Fredo, the outspoken slob, Michael looks no less weak. But the heavier the clouds over the Corleone family, the more Michael realizes his responsibility, and he must turn from an observer into an attacker, and above all, a defender of his family, himself, and his business. And Michael cannot simply go into the shadows, give up and spit on everything, because it is not even an abstract part of the family that is at stake, but its survival.
From the femoptics point of view, The Godfather is, of course, not even a hymn, but a poem to that notoriously toxic masculinity with all its derivatives. The film does not pass the Beckdel test, the Ellen Willis test, or any other gender-based tests for all the deadly sins of patriarchy, which are multiplied many times over in The Godfather. Finally, the role of women in the all-male world of The Godfather is reduced to such a degree of decorativeness that removing Diane Keaton’s character from the film would not cause any significant damage to the completeness of the artistic expression.
Only in the third part of the saga will women begin to play on equal terms with men, and even finally take their due. But the first The Godfather, like Mario Puzo’s bestseller of the same name, did not try to serve anyone’s ideological interests. Especially if we remember both the difficult history of the film’s filming and the unconditional autobiographical context that Coppola put into the work on the film.
“The Godfather is not devoid of critical reflection on capitalist discourse, equating business with violence, with business offers that cannot be refused. But it is also impossible to make a choice that is so right that it does not smack of nihilism, or at least moral relativism. The choice is not between “male and female,” but “business and human.” Business does not tolerate weakness; a family will not forgive betrayal.
