Reel To Real

I just read The Godfather Effect by Tom Santopietrio.  The author uses the Coppola films as a jumping off point to discuss many related issues, but the stuff that sticks closest to the movies is the best. (Keep your family close but the films closer.)

The story behind The Godfather has been told before, but it's still a good one.  Mario Puzo was a talented but failed novelist determined to write a bestseller, so he came out with a book in 1969 full of sex and violence and mostly invented stories about the mob which many took to be based on reality.  Paramount Pictures, in big financial trouble, bought the project, even though mafia pictures seemed guaranteed to fail.  They gave it to Francis Ford Coppola, a director who hadn't made a hit and who was constantly in danger of being fired. He insisted Marlon Brando should play the title role even though the man hadn't been in a hit since the 50s and the head of Paramount refused to even consider him.  He also hired a bunch of unknowns for the other lead roles.  And what came out was an all-time classic that was also a financial blockbuster.

The film, of course, has cast a large shadow, which is Santopietro's subject.  He talks about how Italians were portrayed on screen before and after, how his personal family history related to it, how the film reflected Italian life as well as how American works, how the sequel was an artistic challenge that almost topped the original and so on.  He even has some nice things to say about Godfather III.  I still think making that film was a mistake, but maybe I'll give it another shot.

While some of the stuff on Italian life wasn't bad, I could have done with a lot less family history.  And then there's the idea about how The Godfather is a reflection on capitalism.  This is the kind of dopey concept that can be helpful in giving a film a spine if the director or writer thinks about it but doesn't make it too explicit, but writing at length on it is just tiresome.

Still, The Godfather films are a landmark that changed cinema and even changed real life.  As movies, the first two are firmly ensconced on top ten lists and it's almost impossible to make a gangster film without reacting to them in one way or another.  But in real life, it's got people believing they've seen a glimpse of organized crime in action, and also convinced many people of what started as a racist concept over a century ago when WASPs looked at these new, swarthy immigrants--that Italians have a propensity toward crime.  Not that all Italians mind--many love this view where they're the power behind the scenes. For that matter, real life mobsters (and characters on The Sopranos) have taken their cues from the movie for the past two generations, just as gangsters in the 30s watched Jimmy Cagney and George Raft to learn how to talk and dress (though for hip-hop gangstas the film to watch is Scarface). What started as an invented world from Puzo, then Coppola, has become the world we all live in.