"UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN": THE GANGSTER GENRE, SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY, AND TRILOGY

MARK PETER CARPENTER

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Ans

Graduate Programme in Film and Video York University North York, Ontario Bibliothèque nationale du Canada

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by Xark Peter Carpenter

a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requiremen!~for the degree of Haster of Fine Arts

Permission has been granted to the LISRARY OF YORK UNIVERSITY to !end or seIl copies of this thesis. to the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA to microfilm this thesis and to lend or seIl copies of the film, and to UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS to publish an abstract of this thesis. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. Abstract

Robert Warshow's 1948 essay, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," is regarded as one of the seminal texts in film genre theory; it has also been criticized for its impressionism - its sociological ernphasis at the expense of any analysis of film texts. Yet the article's astonishing suggestiveness is still richly apparent sorne fifty years after its writing. Warshow's perception of the rise-fall narrative of the gangster as a challenge to the prevailing culture of optirnism in American movies still reverberates in the Blockbuster Era of today.

Yet the gangster movie as Warshow understood it, while still visible in contemporary cinema, has undergone permutations which Warshow could never have considered. One of the key such transformations of what I have chosen to cal1 the Classical Gangster narrative is the story of rise and fall that stretches across the length and breadth of the Godfather trilogy. In the Godfather films' unofficial adaptation of the Shakespearean plays often cited as their forbears, the Henrv IV plays and Kina Lear, we see an extended tragic narrative that is at once an epic magnification of the Warshow conception and a reconfiguration of it. The films in question, with their outlaw society depicted as an ernbattled monarchy, simultaneously transform and uphold the Warshow schema.

The intent of this thesis is to demonstrate the validity of Warshow's reading of the gangster film through a process of expansion, The first, brief chapter is an exegesis of the Warshow text, with supporthg texts drawn in to underscore (and sometimes challenge) his key points, and with the famous Depression-era v triurnvirate of films comprising Scarface, Little Caesar, and Public Enemy utilized as filmic sources to corroborate his analysis. The next three chapters will deal at length with the Godfather trilogy, and their links to Henrv IV: Parts 1-11 and Kina Lear. The extended cornparison and contrast will take into consideration the thematic- ideological links between the films and the plays, with an eye constantly trained on the trilogy's relationship to the Classical Gangster narrative as defined by Warshow.

The analysis will also touch on areas not approached in the Warshow essay: the question of form will be explored, with a special ernphasis on the sense of tragedy as manifested in the desisn of the three films; what a Godfather aesthetic is, and how the two sequels revise the mode1 established by the first film. The ultimate goal of the thesis is to demonstrate the degree to which the Godfather films transform the Warshow conception while finally demonstrating its endurance over time. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Evan Carneron, for his invaluable assistance and encouragement, and especially for persistently steering me in the direction of my original thesis when the work threatened to balloon out of control. I would like also to thank Derek Cohen, whose book kf Violence played a crucial part in the development of my thinking on the Shakespeare texts, the Henry plays in particular; and Barry Grant, for his advice, and for his words on genre. Thanks and appreciation as well to Doug Davidson and David Leyton-Brown, for serving valiantly on my cornmittee. Finally, the warmest regards to rny parents, who harboured me for many months while I toiled on these words. Table of Contents

TitlePage i ...... Copyright Page ...... ir Certificate Page ...... iii Abstract ...... iv-v Acknowledgernents ...... vi Table of Contents ...... vii

Chapter One

Warshow's Gangster Genre ...... 1

Chapter Two

TheGodfather ...... -...... 19

Chapter Three

The Godfather Part II ...... 82

Chapter Four

The Godfather Part Ill ...... 148

Conclusion ...... 193

Bibliography

Books ...... 197

Articles ...... -...l99 Chapter One

Warshow's Gangster Genre

The following is a discussion of the gangster genre as definad by Robert

Warshow in his 1948 article "The Gangster as Tragic Hero." In my analysis, I hope to fiIl in soma of the blanks in his conception. relating his thesis specifically to the film texts to which he alludes. with special ernphasis upon his perception of the gangster as a tragic figure. From there, I hope to push Warshow's theory simultaneously backwards in tirne (towards Shakespearean tragedy), and forwards to the definitive gangster saga of the contemporary cinema. the Godfather trilogy, the aim being to tease out Warshow's conception in the course of a close textual analysis of the and their Shakespearean forbears. This analysis will therefore hew closely to the emphasis on the genre as "author" that marks most genre film criticism going back to Warshow. The final purpose of this thesis is to establish in detail the links between the Corleone saga and a long tradition of drarnatic discourse going back through the films' gangster precursors to the ambiguous figure of the hero of classical tragedy, specifically as incarnated in the

Shakespeare texts under discussion. What I hope finally to demonstrate is the truth of Warshow's reading of the gangster as a tragic hero for our time - a figure who is, as Warshow puts it, "what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become." (Warshow, p. 131)

Warshow begins by delineating his views on the potential role of tragedy within contemporary mass culture. He starts his essay with the following words:

"America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of 2

Iife." (Warshow, p. 127) He sees mass culture as committed to reinforcing the optimistic status quo. To quote further:

At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot. In terms of attitudes towards Iife, there is very little difference between a 'happy' rnovie like Good News, which ignores death and suffering, and a 'sad' rnovie like A Tree Grows In Brooklvn, which uses death and suffering as incidents in the service of a higher optimism. (Warshow, p. 128)

Pop culture essentially strives, for hirn, to maintain public morale. What he terms a "current of opposition" still exists, however, and tries to release the anxieties this optimisrn attempts to erase or suppress, anxieties he conceptualites as nascent fears of failure in society at large. Warshow finds the primary expression of this current, as it exists within art, in what he regards as "disguised" or

"attenuatedn forms: jazz, the "crazy comedy" nihilism of the Marx Brothers, and "in the continually reasserted strain of hopelessness that often seems to be the real meaning of the soap opera." (Warshow, p. 129)'

Why are these forms modes of disguisel 8ecause, for him, the major means of subversion within modern rnass culture emerges from the sense of tragedy incarnated most clearly and completely in the gangster film. Tragedy, as he sees it, is a luxury peculiar to aristocratic societies in which the value of each and every individual citizen is not given the same measure of importance within the functioning of the body politic. In the aristocratic society, he writes, "the fate of the

1 By the latter he ptesurnably means the radio soap opera, though what he says could just as easily apply to 'melodrarnas' or 'women's pictures" like Stella Dallas. 3 individual is not conceived of as having a direct and legitimate potitical importance, being deterrnined by a fixed and supra-political - that is, non-controversial - moral order or fate." (Warshow, p. 127) On the other hand, the modern state, whether of a democratic or authoritarian bent, exists to ensure the happiness of its citizenry, and, by extension, assure its citizens of their individual value; more than that, its purpose is "to determine the quality and the possibilities of human Iife in general."

(Warshow, p. 38)As such, the production and preservation of hegernony depends upon the perceived good will and satisfaction of the populace to such a degree that the happiness of the citizenry can be insisted upon, often, as Warshow writes, in the form of compelled public displays of happiness, satisfaction, "cheerfulness."

This last bit of writing stems clearly from the era of HUAC, a movement which

Warshow, writing in the late forties, was clearly aware of.'

Against this culture of enforced optimism is the dangerous figure of the gangster. As Warshow writes: "In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself." (Warshow, p. 130) Modern theorists would be reluctant to universalize viewer response to the gangster genre in this way, but fan magazine letters-to-the- editor, quoted by Rosow in his book Born to Lose: the Çanaster Film in

Arnerica, provide ample evidence of widespread public approbation of the gangster figure as a kind of spokesperson, a vesse1 for feelings of frustration and tesentment

Indeed, in a footnote, he comrnents disdsinfully on the case of a 'friendly witness" who con- demned the film None But the tonelv Heart as 'Un-American' on account of its gloominess. at the peak of the Depression. Rosow quotes one F. Clinton Spooner, from

Brooklyn, writing in to the April 1930 issue of Screenland: thanks to the gangster film, "we will be better able to gather Our worries and thrash them soundly; to line up our cares against the wall, shoot them one by one and glory in it just as we saw the hero do." (Rosow, p. 160) Rosow also quotes a ietter from a female fan, - oddly enough named Dorothy Warshow, extolling James Cagney in the pages of the

Depression-era magazine Movie Classic: "'He's the best bet on the screen ...After al1 what we need right now is a well-placed sock from the one and only Cagney to Iift us out of this mental depression and replace the old smile and cheerio on the face of millions." (Rosow, p. 182). Though the audience for gangster films has been predominantly male,= there is no reason to suppose that Warshow's appeal to universal experience is utterly without foundation. Though a small selection of fan letters is hardly conclusive proof of this, I believe that the anxieties expressed in the gangster genre are not necessarily confined to the thrill-seeking males in the audience (or thrill-seekers period). The locus of these anxieties is, obviousl y, . the gangster himself (and sometimes herself), who, as such, has proven to be a remarkably enduring figure. As Rosow writes, from his vantage point in the seventies: "The movie gangster has again grown popular as a rnythological acknowledgement of the deepest doubts and darkest dreams in American culture, a culture beset by a general and overwhelming malaise." (Rosow, p. 327)

John Raeburn quotes a Varietv report asserting that male viewen comprised about 75 percent of Public Enemy's New York audience, a fargreater proportion than average. (Raeburn, p. 521 However, Rosow, I think, overemphasizes the depths of nascent revofutionary feeling tapped by the gangster movie at the cost of occasional bursts of naive reductivism. Writing of the gangster figure's appeal in the Depression era, he SJ~S, "Movie gangsters struck back for those in the audience who were faced with actual adversity or the anxiety of facing economic ruin." (Rosow, p. 167)

Warshow, by contrast, emphasizes the movie gangster's status as a "creature of the imagination." His sense of the gangster as archetype is matched by a sense of the audience reaction to it as an archetypal one, one not so grounded in contemporary economic realities. His may be an early example of genre criticism, but it nevertheless complies with Michael Selig's much later formulation of genre as a distorting mirror heId up to reality, not the simple reflection many genre critics have constructed in their zeal to delineate the sociocultural context of the genres under consideration. (Selig, p. 133) As Selig points out, Warshow grasped what many later theorists have ignored: that any type of genre film will appeal most directly, as Warshow writes, "to previous experience of the type itself: it creates its own field of reference." (Warshow, p. 130)

What, however, is the gangster film as defined by Warshow? What does he see as the "type itself"? As the title of his article suggests, Warshow's analysis of the genre focuses solely upon the gangster protagonist; as such, the Aristotelian basis of his reading of the gangster film is very clear, as the classical conception of tragedy necessarily hingss upon the vicissitudes of the tragic protagonist, and elements such as the tragic recognition, hamartia, and so on. This separates

Warshow's essay from later gangster genre studies that emphasize the pro-filmic 6 elements of the genre (Colin McArthur8sUnderworld USA) and those, Iike Rosow's

Born to Lose, that stress the sociocultural foundation of the gangster rnovie. For

Warshow, it was the "heroicWfigure at the centre of these narratives who was most at issue; the same emphasis is apparent in his 1954 cornpanion essay, "The

Westerner," which defines the eponymous figure as the stony embodiment of the moral clarity and "opennessw of the mythic west of movies.

For Warshow, the gangster is a figure diametrically opposed to the westerner. To quote Warshow directly: "The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club." (Warshow, p.

131) Where the westerner's world is wide open, the horizon seemingly limitless, the gangster's milieu is an enclosed one, one cornposed largely of vertical planes - tenement houses and towering skyscrapers that inevitably dwarf individual endeavour. Where the filmic West mirrors the American frontier mythology of the last century, the urban milieu of the gangster film reflects that modern mythological construct, the Nightmare City, which VVarshow terms, "that dangerous and sad city of the imagination... which is the modern world." (Warshow, p. 131 ) This oppressive asphalt world creates gangsters and, more specifically, the conditions that spawn them. It isn't simply a question of the impact of poverty and urban blight on the youth of the Arnerican city (though you & find traces of such sociologicaI consciousness in Public Enemy (193 1 ) and, especially, the 'Dead End

Kids' cycle exernplified by Anaels with Dirtv Faces (1938)). The Nightmare City, as

Warshow defines it, is an objective corollary of modern society, its human product a being for whorn success is ingrained as an absolute value. As Warshow writes,

"This principle, too, belongs to the city; one must emerge from the crowd or else one is nothing." (Warshow, p. 132)4

It takes a powerful, imposing figure to rise out of that teeming crowd,

Warshow seems to Say; hence the movie gangster, a crude, noisy, vicious but expansive character in stark contrast, as pointed out earlier, to the taciturn hero of westerns. This general description jibes closely with the gangster heroes played by

Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Paul Muni in, respectively, Little Caesar

(19301, Public Enemv, and Scarface (1932) - the famous gangster triumvirate of the early thirties, and clearly the major inspiration for Warshow's writing on the genre.

(Scarface and Caesar are the two films he specifically mentions.) One thinks of

Muni's Tony Camonte, and his gaucheness, his loud clothing, and his famous dictum, "Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing itn;there is also Cagney's famous chin-jabbing gesture in -y, connoting affection to al1 and sundry which also indicates the man capable, in one of the film's most indelible moments, of shoving a grapefruit in his girlfriend's face with seemingly little provocation; and

Robinson's braggadocio in Little Caesar, his comical pride in having his picture in the paper prompting him to buy multiple copies. Of course, Warshow's simple

4 This doesn't apply, of course, to the spate of gangster films made frorn the eerly forties onward in which gangsters took to the open road - the nomadic characters in Hiah Sierra, White Heat, and Baby Face Nelson. What this suggests is a merging of the mythe of the Gangster and the Westerner, with the Gangster aligned increasingly with the heroic paat made tangible in the landscapes of the American West. Where the sense of the Nightrnare City still persists in this group of films is in the tendency to have the gangster hero assailed by the forces of modernity; an exemplar of this is the way in which the psychotic Cody Jarrett is associated with the heroism of the Ancients - his Trojan Horse robbery - while pursued relentlessly by the grey, technocratic forces of the Law. These concerne link a film like this with later "twilight' westerns Iike the Man Who Shot Libertv Valance and The Wild Bunch. 8 paradigm doesn't encompass every variety of movie gangster, something he even acknowledges in the later "The Westerner" when he refers ta the "introspective" gangster as a recent developrnent. (Warshow, p. 454) It is unfortunate that he doesn't provide an example of this new breed of gangster. (One who springs immediately to mind is Humphrey Bogart's wary, taciturn Roy Earle in Hioh Sierra

(1 941 )), hirnself something of a Westerner.) However, it would not be unreasonable to say that the brutish strongarm figure Warshow describes al1 too briefly is a fair precis of the gangster as inscribed in the popular imagination, the figure that provided fodder for countless parodies and nightclub imitations ("You dirty rat ," et al), at least as of the late forties and early fifties.

For al1 his bluster, though, the gangster in these films is still prey to loneliness and melancholy, not out of an existential awareness of tife's vicissitudes, but because, for al1 his power and authority, he is inevitably subject to the violence of rivals and the incessant hounding of the police. The only response he knows both to the brutality of fellow gangsters and the law is more brutality in return. Of course, there are scenes in al1 three films, the classic triumvirate, in which the gangster is shown flaunting the perks of newfound success, with a particular emphasis on clothes: Robinson preening in his tuxedo in Little Caesar, Cagney being fitted in a tailor shop for newer, snappier clothing in Pubiic Enernv, Paul Muni showing off his sharp new clothes to Poppy (Karen Morley) in Scarface. These scenes, though practically a staple of the genre in general, are fairly minimal, as are, in fact, scenes depicting the criminal enterprise by which such success is attained.

Warshow cannily pinpoints the particular shorthand with which the gangster's 9 criminal activity is depicted on screen: to quote him directly," ...we know, perhaps, that the gangster sells liquor or that he operates a numbers racket; often we are not given that much information. Sa his activity becomes a kind of pure crirninality: he hurts people." (Warshow, p. 1311 One could point out that there are prominent scenes in these films in which we dp see the gangsters "plying their traden: there is the Bronze Peacock robbery sequence in Little Caesar, and the scene in Public

Enemv in which Cagney strongarrns a hapless bartender into stocking Paddy's beer.

Yet, both these examples serve to underline the degree to which the gangster's business is reduced in these rnovies to its most violent aspects.

While this could be explained away as indicative of the need to sustain the constant flow of aural-visual excitement deemed crucial to the gangster movie, it can also be argued that this is merely the expression of the gangster's career in its sirnplest terms: the exercise of brutality. However, Warshow stretches this reading further.

...we are always conscious that the whole meaning of this career is a drive for success: the typical gangster film presents a steady upward progress followed by a very precipitate fall. Thus brutality itself becomes at once the means to success and the content of success - a success that is defined in its most general terms, not as accomplishment or specific gain, but simply as the unlimited possibility of aggression. (Warshow, p. 132)

One of the grandly exultant scenss in Scarface - indeed, in the entire history of the genre - is the scene in which Tony Camonte acquires his first submachine gun. The significance of this new toy is richly apparent; it becomes an extension of

Tony's physical self, and, as such, an ernblem of heightened potency and power IO

("Look out, Johnny, I'm gonna spitl" he cries, before ecstatically firing off a round of bullets at some bottles perched on a counter.) This new acquisition is also at once a signifier of success and a means of obtaining still-greater success; it points to his triumph over Gaffney, his overthrow of Johnny Lovo, his eventual ascension to the height of power in the city's undennrorld. As Warshow frames it, the moviegoer, rather than feeling utterly appalled at the gangster's rise, feels rather, through a process with which al1 (or most) of us who go to movies are familiar, a vicarious sense of satisfaction, of release, even as we recoil frorn the brutality.

(That sense of release is richly apparent in the attitude toward the gangster hero visible in the above-quoted fan letters.) This scene is ernblematic of this double perspective (emanating from both the filmmakers and the spectators), but any number of examples of such scenes can be found throughout the history of the genre, ranging frorn Tomrny's murder of the treacherous, hysterical Putty Nose in

Public Enemy, to the bigoted Woltz's horrified discovery of the head of his prize horse in his bed in Thsther (1972).

Of course, those who rise in the world of the gangster film must also fall.

Warshow writes that the basic conception of human endeavour that the audience brings to the gangster film, the assumption that human beings in society are ingrained with the possibility of either success or failure, is finally transformed by moviers end into a certainty of the inevitability of human failure. As Warshow writes: "The final meaning of the city is anonymity and death." (Warshow, p. 132)

This basically applies to the films specifically under discussion here, and to more examples of the genre besides; to quote Colin McArthur: "That the gangster must 11 ultimately lie dead in the Street became perhaps the most rigid convention of the genre, repeated through successive phases of its development ..." (McArthur, pps.

37-38)

I suspect, though, that the decisive basis for Warshow's conception of the gangster falling back into ignominious anonymity is the final scene of Little Caesar, in which Rico emerges from the alcoholic obscurity of his fiophouse hiding-place to do battle with his police officer nemesis, Flaherty. Rico is ruthlessly denied a fighting chance; he is riddled with bullets while hiding behind a billboard advertising the latest dancing extravaganza starring his turncoat friend Joe Massara and Joe's pannerfgirlfriend Olga, the wornan for whom he spurned Rico. The final shot, closely following his famous dying query, "Mother of rnercy, is this the end of

Rico?", is of the billboard itself: "Ti~sv.To~sv, Turvv, a laughing, singing, dancing success." This close juxtaposition of images is a clear ironic statement on the trajectory of Rico's life against the lives of those, like Joe, who follow the straight and narrow (though, in Joe's case, somewhat unconventional) path. Nevertheless, the focus of our interest and sympathy is not the callow Joe but the doomed Rico.

Warshow's conception fits less snugly, 1 think, with the resolutions of the other films in the triumvirate. Tommy's gruesome death at Public Enemv's end is an act of retaliation against a kamikaze attack he had undertaken earlier to avenge the murder of his friend, Matt; the latter scene climaxes with the wounded Cagney stumbling out of his enemies' hideout into the rain, uttering the self-flagellating declaration,"l ain't so tough." Of course, his death-defying act against the killers of 12

his comrade belies that statement: it makes him seem very tough indeed. By the

same token, "Scarface" Carnonte's last stand against the Law strikes a strangely

heroic chord; his cowardly mien, Guarino's self-righteous denunciation of him, and

the ironic emphasis (evocative of little Caesar's finale) on the "The World is Yours"

neon sign under which he dies fail to blight the crazy, suicidai defiance of his final

mad dash into the Street, the escape attempt that brings on the fatal hail of bullets.

I would say that Warshow faits to sufficiently account for the heroic dimension of

the gangster figure, the quality of laraeness that is the other side of the classical

conception of the tragic hero. Even Rico's final confrontation with Flaherty contains

the seeds of such heroism in its very tragic futility.

It is the spiritual and physical destruction of the gangster hero that Warshow

emphasizes, however, and it is this that constitutes the resolution of the "classical

gangster film," as Warshow defines it. It is not enough for the gangster hero to die,

not even to die violently, as that is part and parcel of the life of the urban warrior

anyway; what is crucial is that gangsters and al1 they represent be renounced, that their viciousness be met with greater viciousness in return. Thus, we have Rico's

pitiful death, and, in mrface, Tony witnessing the death of his beloved sister right

before his own massacre. Perhaps rnost terrible of al1 is the killing of Tornmy in

Public Enemv. Seen wrapped in bandages in the hospital, after his confrontation with Matt's killers, he expresses penitence for his crimes and especially for causing his family such grief. This implied redemption is scotched, however, when, before his recovery, his family is informed of his capture by the Burns gang. His kidnappers agree to return him to his mother's home; the family await his arrival. However, in a 13 chilling coup-de-grace, he is deposited at his mother's doorstep, a murnmified corpse. Tomrny's ghastly final appearance is scored to the strains of the Song "I'm

Forever Blowing Bubbles," emanating from a phonograph as Tommy's body falls to the floor; his brother Mike walks away, grief-stricken. The song plays on through the final fadeout.

These endings have in common a tendency towards the subversion of the gangster hero; al1 undermine the prospective grandeur of the gangster's violent death through the ironic juxtaposition of signs (literally in Scarface and Little Caesar) connoting material success, power, and, in Public Enemv's closing diegetic music, sheer giddy happiness, with the mortifying, grotesque spectacle of the gangster's demise. Ako, the dying gangster in each of these films is encrusted with the physical signs of monstrosity; as writes: "Robinson, Cagney, Muni each die like monsters: Robinson like a writhing reptile, Cagney like a falling mummy, Muni like a contorted creation of mad science." (Sarris, p. 9) This isn't as frivolous a point as it may appear to be. The early thirties were also (as Sarris helpfully points out) the era of the classic movie monster: the Frankenstein monster,

Dracula, and the Mummy himself. You might say that the Repressed was returning with a in those early Depression years.

In any event, in both genres, the monster had to be vanquished, Warshow asserts that the excessive punishment and renunciation of movie gangsters is not due to their crimes, but is rather the end result of whatever success they obtain.

Edward Mitchell, writing of this paradox at the heart of the gangster tragedy, points out how the rise and ignorninious descent of the gangster links with the rags-to- 14 riches pattern of the Horatio Alger narrative, and how it inverts it. At first it may seem that gangsters, like the heroes of the Alger stories, are part of the heroic elect, predestined to rise, but their fall places them within a different, darker tradition, that of the tragic hero. To quote directly from Mitchell: "What the Horatio

Alger myth chiefly affirms is precisely what the American gangster film denies. The gangster & disinherited - permanently. Socially and financially he is a usurper. While the gangster may feel that he is restoring to himself some rightful position, status, or power, the films repeatedly reveal that nothing could be farther from the truth."

(Mitchell, pps. 208-209)5 We live vicariously through the gangster's acquisition of wealth and power, but in the gangster film, to be wealthy and powerful is ultimately to be hated. The brutal, aggressive forms success takes in these films serve to caricature success; the horrible, painful death of the gangster is a denial of the value of success, showing it to be dangerous. The gangster becomes the scapegoat, the sacrificial victim of the anxieties attendant upon the American

Mitchell writes of the Horatio Alger myth as relieving the anxieties brewed by the contradictions of, on the one hand, the puritanical belief in material success and well-being as an outward sign of one's 'election', and, on the other, the 19th-century seculer transformation of this ideal into the social doctrine of 'survival of the fittest' which. by replacing omnipotent God with an inviolable Nature. rendered material success, evsn or especially at the expense of others, an absolute value. As Mitchell writes: 'Thus in practice Social Darwinisrn served as a rationalization for econornic and geographic rapaciousness while numbing moral judgement with the comforting assurance of a slow but ineviteble progress up the evolutionary Iadder.' (Mitchell p.204) What the Alger stories offered as salve agsinst the tensions implicit in these contradictory beliefs wes a mythology of disinheritance and restoration which invsriably depicted a yoting hero deprived of his rightful inharitance and thereby forced to make his way in the world throuqh fortitude, resourcefulnese, and sheer 'pluck' until, through a steady, picaresque stream of events, circumstances work irievitsbly in hie favour to allow him ta either regain the right to the fernily homestead or secure some eolid, steady job; in either case, what is rightfully his reverts to him in the end. It is the inevitebility of the happy ending that exposes the basic ideological contradiction of the stories even as it appears to resolve it. To quote Mitchell directly: While paying hornage to adaptive 'pIucka, Alger ensures that the plot will turn on a stroke of 'luck' for which the hero is prepared but not responsible.' (Mitchell p.206) What this fact underlines is the degree to which the success of the Alger hero is due to his preordained stetus as one of the 'elect' or 'fittest', not to his own heroic quatities. success dilemma. As Warshow writes: "The effect of the gangster film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is bis death, not ours. We are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail." (Warshow, p. 133)

It is important to note, of course, that Warshow is not dealing with gangster movie narratives in their specificity, but rather with a gangster meta-narrative, if you will, one he constructs via recourse to the seminal gangster films of the early thirties. If one looks at the famous triumvirat0 of films individually, one sees the degree to which they depart from that rneta-narrative. In Little Caesar and Scarface, for example, it is not the drive for success and the hubris implicit in that drive that lead specifically to the gangsters' downfall, but rather the excessive love of another: in the former, it is Rico's attachment to the hapless Joe Massara, and his resultant attempt to force Joe's involvement in the gang by threatening Olga; in the latter, the decisive blow against Camonte is his incestuous love for his sister, and his consequent homicidal rage at his sidekick Guido upon discovery of their coupling. In Public Enemv, Tommy is doomed not by obsessive love, but by the revenge impulse that prompts his near-suicida1 confrontation with the Burns gang.

This leads to another objection to the Warshow paradigm, one implied by Stephen

Karpf when he points out that Cagney's character does not suffer from ambition but is rather "content to be a rank-and-file gangster." What distinguishes Tommy from the gangster heroes of the other films is his position vis-a-vis his fellow denizens of the underworld. The success drive in his case is displaced into a need to belong not satiated by his own family; Paddy Ryan's gang is depicted as a benign patriarchal institution in contrast, as Jack Shadoian points out in his book Dreams and Dead

Ends, to the grasping, the jockeying for position that marks power relations in the respective mobs in the other two films in the triumvirate. An illustration of this is

Ryan's apparently sincere offer to give up his territory in exchange for Tommy's safe return. In this way. the film anticipates the vision of organized crime proffered in The Godfather, the mob as nurturing family unit, and one seemingly at odds with

Warshow's conception of gangsters as isolated figures, pitted against both society

(what Mark M. Hennelly Jr. terms the "Upperworldn (Hennelly, p. 243) and their own comrades in the Underworld.

To judge Warshow's essay fairly, though, one rnust assess the credibility of his rneta-narrative - whether his conception of the gangster as tragic hero rernains apt, and applicable to audience experience of the gangster film, not whether it can be applied as an exact template for al1 the gangster films ever made. Indeed.

Andrew Sarris writes that the genre Warshow had in mind, that we might term the

"classic" or "classical" gangster film, existed in fact only from the years 1927-1 932 and consisted of less than a dozen titIes: the Little Caesar/Public EnernWScarface axis, plus lesser-known films like Quick Millions (1931) and prominent films that fit inexactly with Warshow's conception like Underworlé (1927). To quote directly:

The gangster as a type survives long after hé disappears as a tragic figure. But he merely lurks in the background of urban life. In the murder mystery, for example, he is often a suspect, but no more so than the butler in the manor-house type murder mystery. More often, he represents a lower order of being in contradistinction to the morally marginal hero who teeters between good and evil as he strives for rnoney, sex, and power. (Sarris, p. 6) 17

I would argue, actually, that "the gangster as tragic hero" narrative has persisted to the present day. One can reel off examples, from the sad tale of Roy

Earle in the elegiac Hiah Sierra, through the maniacal Cody Jarrett in the fiery apotheosis of White Heat (1 949); from the gangster biographies of the fifties (Babv

Face Nelson,(1957) Al Ca~one)(1959)),to, of course, the Godfathers: from the

1983 remake of Scarface right up to the twin gangster films of Martin Scorsese:

Good Fellas (1990) and Casino (1995). White many of these films depart considerably from the Warshow model, they demonstrate nevertheless the model's endurance.

Where Sarris is correct, though, is in his assessment of the relative frequency of the paradigrn's appearances on the film scene. Eugene Rosow's list of gangster-film synopses is helpful in this regard; in fact, fewer than 25 of the 83 films listed chart primarily the rise of an individual gangster to prominence in a world of organized crime, his flaunting of his success, the intrigues and doublecrosses he involves himself in, and the turning of his fortunes culminating in his death and defeat. It should be pointed out, of course, that the gangster genre is, in fact, multiple genres. Any taxonomy of the gangster subgenres would have to include the Outlaw Couple film (exemplified by Bonnie and Clvde (1967)) and the

Heist Film, typified by The Killinq (1956). 1 believe one could also make a case for the variety of gangster film in which the gangster figure is rendered heroic, a defender of pro-social values, as a subgenre unto itself: the Redeemed Gangster film, if you will. The Iist of films within this class of gangster movie would include the James Cagney starring vehicles Anaels with Dirtv Faces, and The Roarinq 18

Twenties (t 939), and the more recent films Thinas to Do in Denver When You'r~

Dead (1 995) and nv(1993). Warshow himself speaks disdainfully of this ongoing tendency to "reform" the gangster when, in a footnote, he writes: "Efforts have been made from time to time to bring the gangster film into line with the prevailing optimism and social constructiveness of our culture.. ." (Warshow, p.

129) Kiss of Death (1947)is the example he gives of such a film; though he says that this modification of the gangster to suit the higher purpose of affirmation is usually unsuccessful, he doesn't say why, citing lac& of space. One may infer easily enough that he means that the sense of tragedy is blunted when the gangster is made, whether explicitly or implicitly, an arbiter of moral order; a less prescriptive reading would say that the particular sense of tragedy he discerns in the gangster film is simply modified in these films, just as it is in the Outlaw Couple or Heist film, or in some of the later Classical Gangster films I've mentioned.

The Godfather trilogy alters the Warshow gangster paradigm considerably, as we will see. However, the final emphasis will be upon the degree to which the

Corleone saga moves, over the course of the three films, in the direction of the

Classical Gangster film as defined in Warshow's seminal essay. The context for this analysis will be a close examination of the films in question, with special emphasis upon their links to the Shakespearean texts often cited as their forbears, the Henry

-IV plays and Kina Lear. The ways in which they adapt these works is crucial to their transformation of the sense of tragedy Warshow found in the gangster film, as further anal ysis will show. Chapter Two

The Godfather

As much as they diverge from Warshow's model of the gangster genre, the

Godfathers are nevertheless a useful testing-ground for Warshow's conception of the gangster as a conternporary equivalent of the heroes of tragedy, for few gangster films adhere so much to the models of classical drarna. Peter Cowie quotes Francis Coppola as saying that in the course of the preparation for the screenplay for Part III he read Titus,Romeo and Juliet, and, of course,

Kim Lear, the decisive influence on the film's structure, themes, and tragic effect.(Cowie pps.230-231) Though no such conscious borrowing from

Shakespeare has been made known of in Mario Puzo's conception of the original novel, or in the creation of the first two films, more than one writer (specifically

Gerald Peary, in a survey of the genre in American Film, and Jack Shadoian in

Dreams and Dead Ends) has cited Henrv IV Parts 1-11 in discussion of the two films.

There is prior precedent for the adaptation of Shakespearean sources to gangster milieux: the mid-fifties saw a Me-seen modern-day gangster retelling of

Macbeth called, with little enough subtlety, Joe Macbeth (1955). Also, knowledge of the classical antecedents of the gangster film is long-held, preceding even the

Warshow "gangster as tragic haro" conception; Andrew Sarris writes of John

Barrymore's recitation of the "Now is the winter of my discontent" soliloquy in the

1929 Warner Brothers revue Show of Shows, which Barrymore prefaced with, to quote directly, "the remark that Richard had been a more murderous creature than 20

Al Capone." (Sarris p.6) Of course, venerable historic precedent has played an ongoing role in the creation of movie gangsters as well; much in Scarface was consciously derived by screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Howard Hawks from the vicissitudes of the Borgias as well as from the contemporary exploits of Al

Capone. (Mast p.83) In the Godfathers' roman a clef use of real people and events - from the crooner Johnny Fontaine in Part 1, loosely inspired by Frank Sinatra, to the free use of the Vatican banking scanda1 of the late seventies in Part III - as well as their persistent historical consciousness, their awareness of their place within history both conternporary (the evocation of the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald in the

Hyman Roth murder sequence in Part Two) and ancient (the urged suicide, according to Roman custom, of Frankie Pentangeli in the sarne installment), the

Godfathers are clearly not departing greatly from the tenets of the genre.

However, if we look at the specific sources adapted (in the free sense of

"borrowing," to use Dudley Andrew's term (Andrew p.422)). there are key differences between the classical originals cited above and the works the

Godfathers can be said to draw from. The earlier films can be generally likened to

Northrop Frye's "tragedies of order," with the gangster occupying the position of usurper - as in Macbeth and Richard Ill. The contested space of the earlier Classical

Gangster films is the Upperworld, society, threatened by the movement to a position of power in the Underworld of a rebel-figure, whether he literally overthrows an order-figure (a boss) or is only a usurper in Edward Mitchell's sense of the term: an anti-Horatio Alger hero, a figure who daims a position as one of the

Elect, but is actually one of the Damned. In either case, the heroic energy he 21 embodies exists to be snuffed out; the gangster hero dies so that order may be restored. Yet, his passing is portrayed with sorne ambivalence; Camonte, BandelIo, and Powers may leave us with compiexly rnixed feelings of pity and terror akin to those felt at the passing of Richard III or Macbeth.

However, with the Henry IV histories and Kina Lear as its basis, the

Godfather triiogy generates a quite different set of feelings. More than that, the films posit a universe markedly different from those depicted in the earlier gangster films, though one anticipated by the visions of the underworld in two unheralded precursors to the Godfathers: The St. Valentine's Dav Massacre (1967) and The

Brotherhood (1969). The former film depicts an enclosed world, a space contested by ruling factions with little or no acknowledgement of any upperworld apaR from the occasional hapless barkeep, truck driver, or copy-crazy journalist; the latter presents a similarly-closed world with an added ernphasis on the omnipresence of the codes and rituals of the secret society of the Mafia, and a concurrent sense of that world's impending obsolescence, complete with a tragic hero (Kirk Douglas) sacrificed on the altar of changing mores.

The Godfathers add to the equation a new vision of the Underworld as a rigidly-structured aristocratie world, a Great Chain of Being operating within the supposedly egalitarian framework of our society, with the Don seated at the head.

This society still functions as a distorting mirror of our world, but it aiso stands as a revenant of the Old World operating within the New. As such, it is an ideal universe within which to situate the Shakespearean narratives borrowed for the occasion: possibly unconsciously in the creation of the first two films; clearly deliberately in 22 the development of Part III. Of course, the intention here is not to "prove" the link

between the plays and the films, but rather to demonstrate the nature of the films' transformation of their classical sources, and thereby, the nature of the films' transformation of the classical gangster archetype as originally postulated by

Warshow and as elaborated upon in these pages. The analysis of the films that follows will be informed by recourse to the three Shakespeare plays, with an eye toward their effect on the ambiguous figure of the gangster, as embodied in the

"family" members who populate the Godfathers - in particular, the tragic hero of the series, . Of course, a targer question needs to be dealt with as well: how does the films' revision of the Classical Gangster emerge out of its historic context, both the circumscribed world of Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, and contemporary American society at large? To put the question succinctly, what tensions does Michael Corleone specifically embody, versus the embodirnents visible in earlier and later manifestations of the gangster genre, and what does his sacrifice rnean to us?

The first Godfather is canonized in two related, somewhat contradictory ways (depending on who is doing the talking). On the one hand, it is one of the major achievements of the so-called Movie Brats, the breed of filmmakers who emerged as the first generation of Hollywood directors to go through film school, and who flourished as the result of the confluence of several different trends and lines of influence: the breakup of the old studio system after long-pending antitrust suits, resulting in the various studios' loss of the rigid control they had once wielded; the end of the Hays Office in 1967, and hence, the end of the rigid 23 censorship governing the production of all films in HoHywood; the film culture of the sixties, which contributed to the rampant movie consciousness of the New Breed on several fronts, with the New Documentary rnovements, the New European

Cinema (exemplified by Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut), as well as Hollywood's classical genre cinema being foremost amang the sources of influence; in the realm of theory, the lionkation of the director as the primary driving force behind the previously poorly-considered genre rnoviemaking in Hollywood, emanating first from the Çahiers Du Cinema auteurists in France (consisting of Godard, Truffaut et al), then spreading to their equivalents in England and America; and the leftist counterculture of sixties America, with its tangled, sometimes contradictory veins of righteous idealism and prof ound , despairing pessimism, its assertion of quintessentially American libertarian values, and its borderline-paranoid mistrust of the U.S. government, big business, and the military, with Vietnam being, obviously, a flashpoint for particularly harsh criticism.

This capsulized, evidently oversimplified description of some of the influences that shaped the speaks as much to the received perception of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the group of directors once called the Movie Brats (with Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Paul Schrader, and, of course,

Francis Coppola being foremost among theml as it does to the multiplicity of reasons why this distinct group of filrnmakers emerged when they did. In any case, the vaunted iconoclasm of the period has been well-documented by rnany, and well- theorised, with the Godfather films being deemed central to the New Hollywood phenomenon, and hence lionized by a variety of different writers as radical 24 statements. Part Two has received the bulk of this kind of praise, owing to its audacious structure, its problernatizing of the taken-for-granted process of viewer identification, and its daring dedramatization of events, with John Hess farnously deeming it "closer to a Marxist analysis of our society than any other Hollywood film I know of." (Hess, p. 90)

Godfather, however, is also deemed important for ushering in the

Blockbuster Age, and for that some feel that the film has a lot to answer for. The growing insecurity of the Hollywood studios after the divestiture of their extensive exhibition holdings, not to mention the onset of television, inspired a mounting series of desperate maneuvers to reclaim the viewing audience, some concomitant with the expansion of cinema's technological means (wide-screen, advances in colour cinematography) and some ludicrous dead ends (3D being the most famous such gimmick). Gradually, as the rate of films produced declined, and capital outlays grew, a new attitude grew up towards filmmaking. 1O quote Robert Kolker, writing in the late seventies:

As production fell off throughout the sixties and into the seventies, more and more stock was placed in a given film. When it was discovered, especially with Godfather 1, that one film could rnake an enormous amount of money for everyone concerned, there arose in the minds of producer, distributor, agent, star, screenwriter, and director the fantasy of the blockbuster, the greatest rnoney-maker of al1 the. The result is that many filmmakers are now under extraordinary pressure to create a single work that will gain such profit as to make the successes of the past pale in cornparison. (Kolker, p. 140)

As such, even as The Godfather exernplified the new exploratory spirit of

Hollywood filmmaking in the early seventies, with its enormous success, and the 25 rush to sequelization that the making of Part Two spawned it also ushered in the era that would spell an end to the period of independence that some have called

Hollywood's last Golden Age. The Godfather is one of the Highest-Grossing Films in

Movie History, and its impact at the time as such was the source of the filmmaking climat8 that still holds sway in Hollywood, which many feel has mitigated against creativity, artistic ambition, and the desire on the part of filmmakers there to challenge their audiences.

Mirroring The Godfattier's rather arnbiguous place in the history of

Hollywood is the film's evidently ambiguous feelings toward its subjects, an ambiguity that is clearly different from the ambivalence of the previous Classical

Gangster films toward Iheir characters. The film's double perspective on the

Corleones quite possibly accounts for the film's enormous popularity with audiences of seemingly al1 intellectual and poiitical persuasions, yet is also the source of what its detractors regard as its perniciousness. Yet the precise nature of the film's ambivalence toward what it shows us can, I think, be illuminated by cornparison to its classical source, 1 Henrv IV, as can the particular nature of the film's sense of tragedy, hidden and implicit as it is.

The orthodox E.M.W. Tillyard view of Shakespeare, as expounded in his famous book Shakes~eare'sHistorv Plava, presents a view of the playwright as simply a proponent of the orthodox Elizabethan world view, with two central theses: first is Shakespeare's cornplete and utter adherence to the notion of the divine right of kings, with a consequent dernonization of discernible in his work; and second is the notion that the English history plays present a providential 26 schema of betrayal and regicide followed by a cycle of divine retribution culminating in the redemption of the throne and England - the Tudor myth. According to this schema, the cycle begins in Richard II with Bolingbroke's deposition and murder of the eponymous king, and proceeds through the Henrv IV plays, with Henry beset by rebellion on the one hand and his own guilt on the other. The triumphs of Henrv V are scotched by his sudden death and the return of rebellion in the earlier Henrv VI plays, and onward through the redemptive overthrow of Richard III. In these plays, according to Tillyard, Shakespeare "expressed successfully," as he puts it, "a universally held and still comprehensible scheme of history: a scheme fundamentally religiaus, by which events evolve under a law of justice and under the ruling of

God's Providence, and of which Elizabeth's England was the acknowledged outcome." (Tillyard, pps. 320-321)

Though the Tudor myth has lost its authority over analyses of the English histories, as has Tillyard's sense of the plays' unswerving belief in unswerving obedience to the throne, one would clearly still be justifed in locating such orthodox beliefs as possibilitie~in the texts; it is the glorifying aspects of the plays that modern academics and theorists must wrestle with. To quote Blair Worden, from his article, "Shakespeare and Politicsn: "Nothing in late Renaissance politics is harder for us to enter - though the theme is widespread in the literature of the period and is the starting-point of the masque - than the idealization of kingship and the longing for a monarch to be a fairy-tale prince." (Worden, p. 6)

What is remarkable about The Godfather is the degree to which it preserves not only that idea of kingship but also the form of kingship within a twentieth- 27 centuty Mafia context. This brings to mind Stephen Greenblatt's discussion of the need for a "poetics of Elizabethan power" inseparable from a poetics of Elizabethan theatre, a poetics inextricably bound, as he writes, "with the figure of Queen

Elizabeth, a ruler without a standing army, without a highly developed bureaucracy, without an extensive police force, a ruler whose power is constituted in theatrical celebrations of royal glory and theatrical violence visited upon the enemies of that glory." (Greenblatt, p. 44) The above-listed signifiers of power that Elizabeth lacked belong to the modern state, as Greenblatt points out - the signs of an invisible, omnipresent authority. Elizabethan power, on the other hand, is dependent on its privileged visibility. To quote further, "As in a theatre, the audience must be powerfully engaged by this visible presence while at the same time held at a certain respectful distance from it." (Greenblatt, p. 44) The sense of the violent manifestations of royal power as theatrical ritual is remarkably apparent in the

Godfather films, and attains particular force in the first part of the trilogy. Peter

Cowie talks about "the impression of relentless physical power" that sustains each act of violence in The Godfather. I would add to that observation the film's clearly- wrought distinction between the utilization of such physical force by the Corleone family and the murders committed by their enemies: the vicious surprise attacks perpetrated by the Five Families versus the carefully, deliberately-9lanned rituals of execution enacted by the Corleones and their soldiers. This distinction is felt throughout the film at every level; the film's visual field, and its narrative structuration, are directed toward a magisterial kind of legitimation of the Corleones and their crirninal activities, apparent not only against the dastardly incursions of their enemies, but also against the screen gangsters of years past. Only the depictions of Roy Earle and perhaps Kirk Douglas' man of tradition in The

Brotherhood corne remotely near the mystique of , the film's designated king. To quote Robert Kolker: "By creating Don Corleone as a good father and husband who mysteriously, surely, and unquestioningly exercises unlimited power, whose will is carried out swiftly and with a vengeance, Coppola gives hirn a mythic dimension that far outstrips the Ricos, Camontes, and Tommy

Powerses of the conventional gangster film." (Kolker, p. 167) Where the invocations of the aristocracy of the past in the earlier gangster films were heavily ironized, the very title of Little Caesar, for instance, in The Godfather, the royal analog y seems on1y fitting.

Robert B. Ray writes of The Godfather as a film "baianced idealty between reassuring conventionality and disquieting revisionism." (Ray, p. 328) His central example of this format balance in action is the restaurant murder sequence, in which

Michael "makes his bones," through the killings of Solloto and McLuskey. Ray writes of the scene's alternation of point-of-view shots of iliusionistic subjectivity, which he regards as encouraging our identification with Michael, and objective long- shots, distancing us from the violent events. Shots 1-7, depicting Michael and his targets, are met by the objective "master shot," imposing a sudden sense of distance from the action. To quote Ray again: "Shots 1-7 had unrnistakeably suggested, "This is what it feels like ta commit a murder" (exciting); Shot 8 replied,

"This is what a murder iooks like from a bystander's position" (appalling)." (Ray, p.

339) Ray's critical acuity here is questionable, as will be made clearer when we 29 come to this pivotal scene. Suffice it to Say that Ray g correct when he points to the film's balance of classical and modernist elements; where he oversimplifies is where he draws the dividing Iine. The truth is that the film's classicism is indivisible from its modernism; to put it another way, though the film adheres closely to classical Hollywood illusionism (shotlreverse shot patterns, linearity, cause-and- effect narrative), its classicism is not precisely that of old Hollywood fiimmaking.

The film's impetus is towards an awed observation of the forms and rituals that constitute the Corleone family; in that sense, it fits rernarkably with the ceremonial function of Shakespearean drama, the way the plays create a space to be honoured, not quite entered, where the viewing subjects are, as Greenblatt writes, "at once a bsorbed by the instructive, delightf uf, or terrible spectacles, and forbidden intervention or deep intimacy." (Greenblatt, p. 44) Where the film's balance is deceptive lies in the degree to which its aesthetic is somehow invisible, functional, and simultaneousl y boldly apparent.

This divided approach to style çan actually be likened tu the aesthetics of the earlier classical gangster films, wherein classical style was countered by a sense of impenetrability at the film's core, the way the films tended to subtly elide the identification rnechanisrns of classical cinema by largely eschewing many of the classical gambits in favour of distanced, theatrical mise-en-scene - two-shots instead of closeups, objective views of onscreen action as opposed to subjective, point-of-view reaction shots. The classical gangster films' senses of space and distance mirrored their ambivalence toward their hero. Of course, it's difficult to generalize about style when discussing a genre with a sixty-year long history, an 30 ongoing problem with film genre studies. Much of the above applies specifically to the gangster films of the early period. a much more "stagy" period of moviemaking;

yet, it is possible to discern a kind of distanciation in the Classical Gangster film's aesthetics ranging across several periods (less true in a film like Hiah Sierra, which enlists our sympathies with its hero to a greater degree than the other films do).

Suffice it to Say that The Godfather adopts a style akin to the earlier Classical

Gangster films, an aesthetic of seductive brutality that is both repellent and attractive.' However, the film's unique, grand sense of pageantry, unlike anything seen previously in the gangster genre, announces itself at the very outset.

A mournful trumpet issues forth the Godfather Waltz over the film's logo, with the Puppet strings over the word "fathern a tellingly ambiguous image. The music stops; the following words are spoken over the black screen, in an aura1 coup-de-grace reminiscent of Welles: "1 believe in America." These words, spoken in heavily-accented English, are obviously freighted with meaning. Next, a courtly, mustachioed face emerges out of the darkness, continuing his appeal: "Arnerica has made my fortune."' He continues with a recounting of the travails of his farnily, the hideous, disfiguring attack on his beautiful daughter, and the sharneful release on suspended sentences of the two young WASPs responsible. All the while, the camera pulls back in a slow, deliberate dolly. Gradually, we see the back of the head of the man's listener, a man seated behind a big desk. The courtly man finally

The degree to which the Godfatheie, Iike other gangster films, depart from "normal," functional Hollywood moviemaking while still eeeming to stey within its boundaries is indicative of the degree to which classical, conventional filmmaking is an elusive qusntity in any period. ' The speaker's narne, fittingly enough, is Amerigo Banasara. 31 announces that the courts having failed him, drastic action must be taken: "...for justice, we must go to Don Corleone."

Robert Kolker pinpoints the startling effect of this first shot when, in his book Cinerna of Loneliness, he Iikens this opening to those of 0thAmerican films of the seventies fike A Clockwork Oranae (197 1) and Taxi Driver (1976) which similariy proceed from a starting image of a face or part of a face in closeup, contrary to the "establishing shot" convention of classical cinema, whereby a film or a change of location within a film is established by a wide or long shot taking the lay of the land (to use an example from the genre under consideration, the exterior shot of the prison from which Roy Earle is released at the beginning of Hiat-i Sierra).

However, The Godfather's is not an aesthetic of fragmentation or dislocation; this first shot can be said to act in part as a metonymy for the film as a whole, pulling us toward an enigmatic center of power in al1 its plenitude, but never quite letting us "identify" with it.

The next shot, our first view of the Don himself, is crucial to our reading of the film's opening: its effect on us and the way that effect is achieved. Bonasera gets out of his chair when asked what he requires of the Don; he moves behind the desk and whispers his request in Don Corleone's ear. It is then that we are moved to the next shot; we se8 the impassive face of the Don, responding to what is asked of him: murder, as it turns out. What is striking is the expression on the

Don's face, closed, cornposed, unreadable. Coupled with his response, "That I cannot don, it establishes immediately his contrast to the gangsters of the earlier eras of the genre. Where the earlier gangsters, ranging from the guarded, weary 32

Roy Earle to the callous, manic Cody Jarrett, were, without exception, quickly established as outlaws, men on the make, Corleone is a dispenser of justice, a keeper of the peace. Where the earlier gangsters' capacity for aggression was always made immediately apparent (even in the wary Earle), the Don is willing and able to parcel out violence with the utmost care though in this case with the proviso that, had the man earlier sought friendship with him, had he called him Godfather, then, as he puts it to him, "this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day." It would be impossible, though, to imagine Vito Corleone ruining himself through recklessness, getting carried away, like the gangsters of the

Depression, or even Kirk Douglas in The Brotherhood, even based on what we see of him in this opening scene. And of course, as we will discover, a huge apparatus exists to follow his orders; like a monarch, others kill and die at his behest.

Underscoring the ineffable regal quality fie projects is the very inscrutability of his mien, especially in our first view of him, as we are just forming a picture of the dark source of power before us. Testifying to the enigma Vito Corleone represents are the different misinterpretations of the first shots in the film in, respectively, Robert Ray and Robert Kolker's analyses of it. The former says that the film plants us in Corleone's shoes in that initial backward dolly, encouraging our identification with him through shared point-of view; the latter argues that the unsettling quality of the opening shot is cancelled by the reassuring first shot of the

Don. To quote Kolker directly: "The reverse shot closes the space, shows us the face of the man whose back we have just seen, and shows it as being old and rather kindly." (Kolker, p. 162) Just as it seems to me a highiy questionable assertion that we "identify" with the Don, I would also argue against the idea that

our initial unease is necessarily erased by our first sight of that face, if only because

"kindly" is surely not one of the words that corne to mind when regarding him.

Though the Don's kindliness does become apparent as the scene proceeds, the

Don's bearing is such that we honour his presence (or are made to honour his

presence), but we realize, even from our first look at him, that this is no affable old gent. Vito Corleone cuts a grand monarchical figure in this opening sequence, indeed, more so than the eponymous king in 1 Henrv IV, as we will see upon further cornparison of The Godfather and its Shakespearean source.

The film proceeds onward to establish the scene; the initial transaction is being played out, it transpires, during the wedding of the Don's daughter. The extended wedding sequence that follows famously establishes the world of the film: the communal, public outside world juxtaposed through cross-cutting with the criminal business conducted in the dark inner sanctum indoors. Robert Kolker acutely pinpoints the nature of the film's vision of the Corleone family, its creation of three 'families' related in outwardly expanding circles. To quote directty his defineation of the families:

...the outer family of wives and children, weddings and rneals, romances and marital disputes; the inner family, made up of men only, who run the 'bus-i-ness', kill and get kiiled; and the mvth of the family, an overriding concept held by the Corleones of an integrated, self-perpetuating, self-controlling force, ptotective of its members, secretive in its operations, and exercising, above everything else, power." (Kolker, pps. 162-1 63) 34

One could also argue that the myth of the family at once binds the inner and outer families together, and is also the sum total of the public and private families. each legitimizing the other to create the larger, encircling mythology of the

Corleones. For that reason, the ltalian families of the Godfather films are constituted differently than the various ethnic families in the early gangster movies, exemplifiad by the weeping ltalian marna of Scarface (a stereotype reproduced with remarkable faithfulness in the Cuban matriarch who disapproves of her gangster son in the 1983 Scarface). Here gangsterism is intimately associated with the Italian community, whereas the earlier films went to great pains to present their gangster heroes as divorced from society, as part of an Underworld utterly separate from the community from which they spring, to the undying shame of its representatives (the

Irish cop in Public Enemv, the community leader who calls Carnonte's mob "A disgrace to my peoplen in the original Scarface.) One could, however, go further: the Corleones and the assembled Five Families are not only part of the community, or even simply benign overlords of the community. In The Godfather, for al1 intents and purposes, they the ltalian comrnunity of New York, with Vito the good king and protectar of its denizens in need, like Enzo the baker, and the courtly Bonasera.

Given this, it is little wonder that the Italian-American League objected strenuously to the film during its making, as Peter Cowie reports. (Cowie, p. 64)

Yet, the grandeur of the conception of the Corleones tends to mitigate against the potentially bigoted implications of this portrayal. In the rigidly patriarchal, aristocratic world of the film, the Don's status as a husband and father is largely important insofar as it underscores his status as benevolent patriarch: as he tells 35

Johnny Fontaine, "a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man." The sense of overwhelming. magisterial power conveyed in this opening sequence is only underscored by the warmth of the extended farnily celebration we see. Shot and staged in a style resembling a confluence of Renoir and cinema verite, the vividness of detail - Marna Corleone singing "Luna Mezz'o Maren with a surprisingly energetic old-timer, brother Fredo's charmingly inebriated introduction to Kay - appeals to a shared longing for the security offered by the big, loving family. A surprising comic-pastoral mood is established; when it is threatened from without by FBI men, monitoring the occasion, Sonny's belligerent reaction seems only fair and proper. The sense of the Corleone family as a benign kingdom is underlined by the sunny outdoor setting on the Long Island family compound, far from the teeming dark city of the Depression-era gangster films, or even the diffuse urban spaces of The Brotherhood, and with a sense of rootednes~obviously unavailable to the nomadic gangsters of the forties and fifties, traversing America's lonely, snaky highways. Yet it is still a kinadorn, protected by high walls, and by men with guns.

It is also a kingdorn very much dominated by the film's eponymous character, to the exclusion of the Corleones' wife-mother figure. Interestingly , given the centrality of the mother figure in a number of earlier gangster films - whether the embodirnents of family values of Scarfac~or The Public Enemy, or the tough-as- nails matriarch guiding her son's criminal career, in White Heat ("Top of the world, ma.") - Marna Corleone is notable by her absence, even compared to her counterpart in Mario Puzo's source novel, who goes to church every day to pray for her husband's . This is cornmensurate with the position of the wife-mother in

the royal families in the Godfather films' Shakespearean sources, where their

absence is taken much further, of course - the wives of Henry IV and Lear both

dead, and both going largely unmentioned. Coppelia Kahn historicizes this absence.

pointing ta evidence amassed of the more-than-usual dominance of the father in

families in Shakespeare's day, with the consequent subordination of the mother.

Writing of the overweening paternalism of the time. she points out the convergence

of the roles of the father and the king in official ideology.

As the Tudor-Stuart state consolidated. it tried to undercut ancient baronial loyalty to the family line in order to replace it with loyalty to the crown. As part of the same campaign, the state also encouraged obedience to the paterfamilias in the home, accotding to the traditional analogy between state and family. king and father. James I stated, 'Kings are compared to fathers in families: for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people.' The state thus had a direct interest in reinforcing patriarchy in the home. (Kahn, p. 38)

If the father is a king in his household, so too is the king the father of his subjects. This reinforcing analogy strengthens both patriarchal positions, and is clearly operative in the figure of Vito Corleone. in the brilliantly well-chosen nom-de-

plume that serves as the series' title (for which Puzo must be given full credit). As literal and figurative Godfather, the Don is not only a surrogate father, but God's surrogate. A scene in the book, shot for the film but not used. illustrates the awesome power he holds for his subjects. In the scene, the Godfather visits his dying former consigliere, Genco Abbandando, who. in desperate, cancer-ridden delirium, begs him to use his powers to Save hm: "'Godfather, Godfather,' he cailed out blindly, 'save me from death, I beg of you. My flesh is burning off rny bones 37 and 1 can feel the Worms eating away my brain. Godfather, cure me, you have the

power, dry the tears of my poor wife.'" (Puzo, pps. 46-47) Of course, the Don has to acknowledge the blasphemy of this request, but the film tends to grant hirn seerlike powers, the ability to see enemies coming based upon seemingly little or no evidence; his prediction of how Banini will betray Michael is proven exactly right.

As the family's living figurehead, he cornes to seem the embodiment of the farnily's awesorne power, which early on is established as near-supernatural.

Observe the famous scene in which the vile, bigoted studio head Jack Woltz, the man denying Johnny Fontaine the movie part that will Save his career, awakens to find his champion horse's head in his bed, and himself covered in its blood. The ghastly discovery is magnified by its very gradualness. The camera slowiy tracks in on the sleeping Woltz. He wakes up; the camera pans to the feft while Woltz rolls his sheets back, as the film's title waltz plays on the in an orninous, discordant arrangement. The music speeds up as the sheets are rolled further and fuither back, until the horrifying discovery of the equine head. Woltz screams and screams, as we are pushed away from the scene through successive cuts, until we are left with an exterior view of Woltz's palatial mansion, and Woltz's screarns reverberating in the distance. From this image we are shifted via a slow, deliberate dissolve to the tranquil face of the Don, an image that lingers for a long time before he actually speaks. Jeffrey Chown proffers the view that this transition, this juxtaposition of images, reminds us, as he writes, "that beneath the surface of this affable man is a conscience capable of ordering gruesome deeds, a concept the charismatic presence of Brando al1 too often undermines." (Chown, p. 74) True 38 enough, except the overdetermined linkage of images tends to rnystify the Don, and, by extension, the family itself; as per his offscreen orders, his minions have magicked the horse's head into Woltz's bed without disturbing him. The miraculousness of this feat tends to establish him as a kind of demonic Prospero.

However, coming as it does after the warrnth of the wedding sequence, and more to the point. after Woltz has been established as thoroughly distasteful, ranting about "dago wop greaseball goombahsn (and addressing the reticent Tom Hagen as

"my kraut-mick friand" after Hagen helpfully points out that he is German-Irish), the film tends to encourage approval of this gruesorne act. To quote Robert Kolker:

The camera tracking in on Woltz is the first major cameta movement in the film since the opening shot. There the movernent drew us into the mysterious heart of the family; here it is leading us, as it were, from that heart, the core of power, to its manifestation. The result, for us, is the innocent pleasure of seeing an unpleasant man get his corneuppance and the not-so-innocent pleasure of enjoying the individuals who are responsible for it. (Kolker, p. 165)

The Corleone family impresses us, then. as a noble institution - at least at this juncture. As we will see, our response to the Family and its endeavours is continually modulated throughout the course of the film. Our attention must now turn, however, to the film's classical antecedent.

Unlike The Godfather, the first Henrv IV play starts with the governing kingdorn in a state of some disarray. The play's opening lines. spoken by the king himself, set the tone: "So shaken as we are, so wan with carelfind we a time for frighted peace to pant/and breathe short-winded accents of new broilsrro be comrnenced in stronds afar remote." (Act 1, Scene 1, Lns.1-4) The king's opening rumination has an a priori subtext; his kingship rests on decidedly shaky foundations, given that he is a usurper - "that ingrate and cankered Bolingbroke." as

Hotspur angrily refers to him. His rise to king was achieved through the murder of

Richard II, as depicted in the play that bears the dead king's name. Whatever the justifications for this act, the sense of Henry's as a tainted kingdom is here established from the outset; his authority is there to be questioned. This opening speech is redolent of plaintive yesrnings for peace, and for new redemptive battles to be fought against "these pagans in these holy fields" - for a new Crusades to unite an England hopelessly rent asundet. Things from here can seemingly only get worse; the valiant Hotspur whom he praises so grandly in this first scene will take arms against him, alongside his father Northumberland, who had earlier backed the deposition of King Richard; this turn of events is anticipated in this first scene, when it is established that Hotspur has denied the king al1 but one of the hostages taken in the recent battle with the forces of Glendower. Coupled with this swiftly- etched portrait of a kingdom in turmoil is the picture transmitted of Henry himself.

In contrast to the towering figure of Don Corleone, the king is a melancholy character; as the plays progress, his guilt cornes increasingly to the fore. One would be tempted to Say that his dream of the Crusades is as much a dream of personal atonement as it is a quest for English unity. as if the two desites were not in fact indivisible. Yet at the same time, it is made apparent that Henry is severely lacking as a king: the high-handed way he denies the heretofora loyal Hotspur his share of the royal hostages. The initial depictions of the respective kingdoms and monarchs in the play and film could not seem more different - at least initially. 40

Yet, the eponymous characters of 1 Henrv IV and the first Godfather are not

in fact the protagonists; their sons are: Prince Hal and Michael Corleone. The works'

shared central concern is the birth of a nascent king, the rightful successor to the

throne; in each case, the rightful successor is a concealed hero, in some way

outside the central sphere of power. Frorn this standpoint, it would be easy to see

The Godfather as a mirror-image reversal of 1 Henrv IV. Where Prince Hal is

associated with the drunken denizens of Eastcheap (most crucially, the jolly,

debauched Falstaff) Michaef is, like his namesake in The Public Enernv, the

"respectablen sonibrother making his way in the Upperworld. His appearance with

his WASP fiancee Kay Adams at the wêdding at film's opening mirrors Hal's initial

appearance with Falstaff in Scene 2. Michael provides the one note of discord at

the celebration; he tells Kay of how his father helped Johnny Fontaine in the past,

through the threat of violence, and concludes by saying, "That's my family, Kay,

it's not me." Hal appears with Falstaff, seconding Falstaff's drunken insistence that

he will as king have no grace, "not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg

and butter." (Act 1, Scene II, Lns. 18-1 9) The prince refers to himself and his

companions as "the moon's men," consciously echoing Falstaff's grand words, "Let

us be Diana's foresters,/gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon. .." (Act 1,

Scene II, Lns.23-24) Yet Shakespeare soon lets us know in no uncertain terrns that

Hal is simply concealing his "true" nature, in the famous "1 know you allwspeech that concludes the scene. He says he will "imitate the sun" that allows "the base contagious cloudsKo smother up his beauty from the world ..." (Act 1, Scene II,

Lns. 186-187) Simply put, his reformation will impress to the degree to which his 41

"baseness" is believed to be his true rneasure. His strength lies in his concealment of his kingly gualities: "1'11 so offend to rnake offense a skill,/Redeeming time when men least think I will." (Act 1, Scene II, Lns.204-2051 The whole play's trajectory is anticipated in this speech, culminating, as it does, in the battle at Shrewsbury, with the king's forces defeating the rebels, the victory epitomized in Hal's personal victory over Hotspur in sword-to-sword combat.

Likewise, the action of The Godfather is a rising ttajectory, building inexorably toward violence against the Corleone family. Sollozo is the intrusive element in this sphere, bringing the Don an offer of a piece of the cut in the narcotics trade he plans to establish in New York. True to ouf sense of Vito as a moral authority, he turns down Sollozo's offer, mainly because it might affect his standing with the politicians he owns, but his refusal is apt to linger in the viewer's mind as a moral position. This is especially true given the betrayal that occurs. With breathtaking rapidity, the family's stability is threatened by a pair of attacks; It is worth noting that these attacks, coming from the Tattaglia and Barzini families, who back Sollozo, tend to register as rebellion, given that the Don is ingrained in our minds as ruling monarch of this kingdom. Underscoring this is the oily Solloto's nickname, "the Turk," with its overtones of "heathenism" left over from European history. (In the book, Vito even refers to Sollozo as 'the infidel'.) Also, the attacks on the buffoonish giant Luca Brasi, and the Don himself are both sneak attacks, performed with no provocation, and with terrific emphasis on the vulnerability of the victirn: Brasi is brutally garrotted and the Don is ambushed whih buying fruit at an outdoor market stall. The latter attack is staged with a powerful sense of the Don's 42

isolation, with its climactic Hitchcockian overhead shot of Vito sprawling over a car,

riddled with bullet~.~It is rernarkable, as Robert Kolker points out, how rapidly the security of the Corleone family is threatened, once so rnuch time has been spent establishing their power. The nadir of their fortunes cornes when Tom Hagen is

briefly abducted, and held in an abandoned warehouse. The chiaroscuro lighting in this sequence, as Koiker writes, suggests film noir, an aesthetic "of reduced

individuality, lost power, and vulnerability ..." (Kolker, p. 1 70) It is a visual sense appropriate to the aftermath of the shooting of the Don; the state of siege in which

Sollozo pressures Tom into making a deal with him, believing (falsely, it turns out) that the Don has been killed. Inside the warehouse, Soilozo's men warm their hands by a fire; this image serves as an index of their liminal status, versus the warm, stable, righteous kingdom of the Corieones. As we absorb this image, as Jeffery

Chown writes, "We want the home protected from the wolves." (Chown, p. 77)

It is here, significantly, that Michael's ascent begins. We first see him after the Don's shooting leaving a showing of the sentimental Leo McCarey comedy The

Bells of St. Marv8s,( 1945) accornpanied by Ka y. Their conversation is arnusingl y vapid; Christmas snow falling around them, Kay asks Michaei, "Would you like me better if I were lngrid Bergman?", the film's costar. In response, Michael feigns uncertainty before reassuring her that no, he would like her better if she were lngrid Bergman. It is then that the two pass the newspaper kiosk with the headline

' The cernera placement and staging of this scene are very like the treaûnent of the ansck on Rico after he passes by a newsstand in Little Caesar, though the warrn feelings we ere encoureged to have for Vito - with the sad spectacle of the hapless Fredo crying over his fallen father - are absent frorn the eerlier film. 43

displayed announcing the attack on the Don. Michael then leaves Kay to return to

his family; the only other time we see them together outside the environs of the

family is in her impersonal hotel roorn. eating, as Kolker writes. "a properly-set,

WASP dinner, in perfect contrast to the rough-and-tumble meals of the Corleone

farnily and the larger family that constitutes their mob." (Kolker, p. 173) Michael's

destiny, his role in the family history is soon made very clear - and Kay is clearly not

to play a major part, except. as it turns out, as mother to his children. As in Quick

Millions, the moneyed WASP woman is important as a signifier of the growth in

power and prestige of the gangster hero - as, in essence, a trophy wife - even if, in

Kay's case. she doesn't start off that way. As in that film, a certain pallidness

settles on the depiction of the woman. a lack of vitality which is. in fact, typical of

the depiction of the representatives of the Uppeworld in gangster films throughout

the genre's history. What is remarkable about The Godfather is the degree to which

the Uppeworid is eliminated from view in this film; even that standard authority

figure. the cop, is embodied only in the belligarent figure of McLuskey, who acts as

Solloto's bodyguard. Him aside, only the vile Wola. some " pain-in-the-ass innocent

bystandersn (to use Clemenza's memorable phrase) and Kay herself appear as rnembers of the world outside the feuding kingdoms of the Underworld. Of these,

Kay is the closest equivalent to Falstaff, the figure Michael must reject to facilitate

his rise to power.

Yet, complicating this assessrnent of Kay (offered rather tentatively in Gerald

Peary's brief cornparison of the first two films to the Shakespearean sources (Peary, p. 68))is the fact of her distance from the center of the film's action, compared to 44

Falstaff's dominance of 1 Henry IV. Of course, the action of the play tends toward

a melding, at least on the surface, of the worlds of the court and the tavern in the

face of the rebel incursions; Falstaff is prominent on the battlefield at Shrewsbury, his irrsverence a constant parodic/comic reproach to the heroic narrative unfolding

in front of him. Though The Godfather's end sees Michael and Kay married with children, suggesting some form of rapproachment between the worlds they represent, in fact it would be an enormous stretch ?O say that Kay occupies a position comparable to Falstaff's. She doesn't connect with the audience as the portly knight does, nor can she be (at least not in this part of the trilogy) the ironic salve against the culture of heroism and battlefield honour that Falstaff is.

Interestingly, a scene in the novel that was shot but not used until the creation for television of the Godfather saga might have shifted the baiance slightly in her favour. It is a sequence that would have preceded the attack on Luca Brasi, in which Michael and Kay are shown in bed in the downtown hotel room. It shows

Michael calling the family, and insisting that Kay pose as a long-distance operator on the line. This scene would have illustrated Michael and Kay's otherwise absent sexual relationship, and stands as at least a miniature equivalent of the Gad's Hill episode in 1 Henry IV. As it stands, Michael's expression of doubt as to whether lngrid Bergman wouldn't be an acceptable substitute for Kay seems to contain more than a grain of truth for him.

However, it would obviously be a mistake to suggest that Falstaff represents a significant "alternativen for Prince Hal; he rnay seem to us an oppositional figure, especially in his famous speech about honour - "What is honor? A word. What is 45 that word honor? Air - a trim reckoning!" (Act V, Scene II, Lns. 133-1 34)' Yet, there is always a fair distance between Hal and his Eastcheap cronies - his "1 know you all" speech proves that, coming as it does in his very first scene. Hal's first appearance forecasts his rise, even to audiences unaware of the historic trajectory of the real Prince: it is very clear that Hal isn't going to spend the rest of his life in the tavern. Even Hal and Poins8arrned theft of the proceeds of a robbery enacted by Falstaff and his "merry menn, the Gad's Hill scene, is framed as a mere practical joke; Hal is made, besides, to announce his intention to repay the money to those from whom it has been stolen - with interest. Hal, with his noblesse oblige, is kept carefully separate from his tavern friends, which gives his jibes, his jokes at

Falstaff's expense a rather unsettiingly callous overtone; when Falstaff, in the aftermath of the Gad's Hill episode, boasts ludicrously about the hordes he fought off in the attack on his loot, Hal responds with a Stream of invective: "These lies are like their father that begets them - gross as a mountain, open, palpable. Why, thou claybrained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene greasy tallow- catch..." (Act II, Scene IV, Lns.214-217) Though this is clearly jesting, the pervasive sense that Hal and Falstaff are on unequal footing sours the cornedy of these lines somewhat; of course, in official surroundings, the prince doesn't hesitate to rein in the portly knight's witticisms: "Peace, chewet, peace!" Hal cries when

Falstaff dares to interrupt the exchange between the king and Worcester just prior to the battle at Shrewsbury. As Derek Cohen writes in his book Shakes~eare's

Interestingly, Robert Warshow in 'The Westerner" cites Falstaff's thoughts on honour es exern- plifying our contemporery Qiberal) attitude toward the concept. (Wsrshow, p. 457) 46

Culture of Violence: "Hal's reaction, embarrassed or angry, is designed to put an end to the disruption, to enable monarchy and support established authority. And, of course, it succeeds. Falstaff doesn't open his mouth again until the king and

Worcester are gone." (Cohen, pps. 48-49)

Hal's 'support of established authority' is mirrored, of course, in Michael's obeisance to the authority his father represents. Michael, like Hal, isn't tom between two worlds, despite initial surface appearances, as closer analysis will indicate. Michael, in his first appearance at the wedding, is seen clad in his soldier's uniform; it is later made known to us that he, like the upstanding Michael Powers in

Public Enemv, is a much-decorated hero - in his case, of the Second World War.

This automatically associates him with the endeavours of the world outside the enclosed space of the Corleone kingdom, the Upperworld. As far as Michael is concerned, The Godfather's particular modification of the classic rise-fall narrative is as close to a straight reading of the Horatio Alger story as the genre has ever gone, with its central character - its Prince Hal - clearly conceived as a part of the heroic elect, a born ruler. His soldier's uniform serves to mark him at his entrance as a warrior figure. Whatever negative connotations this could conceivably have may be mitigated somewhat by the fact that the conflict in which he has served is obviously regarded as a "good war." Thus, Michael's heroism, or at least his heroic potential is established frorn the start, if only subliminally. Once Michael gets embroiled in the defense of the farnily, the legitimizing word "war" is bandied about freely. The analogy between violent geopolitical movements and the battles of the rival families is made most explicitly in the scene in which Clemenza trains Michael 47

in the use of the pistol he needs to kill McLuskey and Sollozo; in the course of the

training, he tells Michael that Hitler should have been stopped at Munich: "They

should've never let him get away with that. They were just asking for big trouble."

Clemenza follows up this observation with these words, "You know, Mike, we was

al1 proud of you - being a hero and ail. Your father too." Any sense of family

disapproval of Michael's enlistrnent in the Arnerican war effort - fighting on behalf

of "strangers" - is suppressed, at least in this installment of the series. (The Puzo

novel explores this issue more thoroughly .)

What cornes through is a sense of the equivalency of "legitimate" warring

and the warring of the Underworld, without significant irony attached. The film is

anticipated in this by The St. Valentine's Dav Massacre, with its battling clans, and

the cornmensurate emphasis upon strategies of warfare. The major difference in

approach lies in Massacre's population of grotesque comic caricatures, particularly

Jason Robards' simianlike Al Capone. The consequent ironic-parodic distance is

clearly miles removed from The Godfather's depiction of its central characters' noble resolve, but both films corne close in their emphasis to Blair Worden's characterization of Shakespeare's history plays as essentially "war plays." (Worden, p. 7) lt is in the crucible of intra-familial combat that Michael is tested and found deserving of the right to succeed his father as Don, but that sense of the validity of his daim to the "throne" is planted, 1 believe, from the time of his entrance, as is surely the case with Prince Hal. Like Hal, as well, his triurnph is Iargely unambiguous; where in Massacre, Capone's defeat of Bugs Moran is undercut by the closing narration over a shot of his tombstone informing us that he died of what 48 used ta be called a 'social disease'. Michael is spared the ignominious tumble from

grace that characterizes most gangster sagas. Of course, Michael's tragic

comeuppance is only deferred beyond the bounds of the first Godfather. Hindsight

may taint the success of Michael's endeavours somewhat for those coming to Part

One with a priori knowledge of the two sequels. just as knowledge of the future

Henry V's early death and the loss of his gains may sour his achievments as

depicted in the Henrv IV plays and Henrv V itself. One may even argue the

existence of a tragic substructure in The Godfather, akin to that found by soma commentators in 1 Henrv IV. The evident ambivalence of the first Godfather toward

what it shows us may be accounted for in the traces of the tragic vision of the

Classical Gangster that it contains, which complicate the heroic narrative of a noble

kingdom violated and subsequently preserved that it seerns to present on the surface.

However. The Godfather is plainly not a tragedy; one would alrnost be justified in calling it a Redeemed Gangster film akin to Anaels With Dinv Faces, with its gangsters functioning in defense of Family. Yet, something of that aforernentioned tragic vision is apparent in the crucial scenes detailing his initiation by fire into the family's inner sanctum. lnitially shut out, as he is, from the family's self-defensive measures in the wake of the shooting of the Don (Clemenza even labelling him a 'civilian') a clear change hes taken place. As Robert Kolker writes:

"Michael consciously withdraws himself from Kay; his voice is beginning to harden; he is putting hirnself through his own rite of passage, out of the exterior bourgeois world and into the mysterious depths of the family ..." (Kolker, p. 173) Michael is 49

noticeably distant towards Kay when they talk on the phone; their next scene

together is the aforementioned one in which they eat a pensive, quiet dinner in her

hotel suite, after which they are to be separated for several years. The next scene

shows Michael arriving alone at the hospital to find it deserted, his father

abandoned. It is here that Michael takes charge. The key moments in this sequence

are firstly, the one in which Michael and the Don exchange looks, and by

implication, power positions; the second is the brief point-of-view shot from

Michael's perspective when he takes notice of his cairn, steady hands, as he lights the trembling Enzo's cigarette. The former is clearly a moment loaded with import: the Don in his bed, bathed in a regal golden light. comforted by his son, a father symbolically reunited with his Prodigal child. The latter, taken directly from the

book, is one of the film's comparatively rare evocations of the subjectivity of any of its characters; this is a particularly privileged moment for us, as Michael is soon to be surrounded by a cone of enigma equivalent to his father's, his face a mask of inscrutability. This sense of an isolating shield around Michael's person, preventing us from getting close to Michael's thoughts and feelings, finds its objective correlative in the shadows in which Michael is immersed as the series progresses: the half-lit world of Part Two represents its impenetrable peak, while Part Three depicts the agonizing breach of that shield in the course of Michael's search for redemption - his Passion.

Such a breach is far in the distance, however: the mantle of power must first be slipped on. The turning-point in Michael's transformation is the scene in which he details his daring plan, seemingly conceived on the spur of the moment, to 50 murder Sollozo and, despite the longheld taboo against killing police officers, his cop protector McLuskey. The staging in this scene typifies the particular kind of theatricality of the Eodfather films - the ernphasis on dialogue, the Bazinian sense of space that places gesture and behaviour within the larger framework of family, setting, environment; the Godfather~clearly utilize meeche~to a degree remarkable in Hollywood movies, particularly in the action-oriented gangster genre. Yet the dreaded curse of "talkinessn is sidestepped hem, as elsewhere, by an intense, probing focus on the actors, whether manifested in montage or camera movement, that acts to underline and rnagnify the import of the words spoken. In this case, a forward dolly shot is used, tracking in from a medium-long shot to a medium shot of

Michael as he speaks. The previous such movement in the film is the dolly in on the sleeping Woltz: the first manifestation, as Robert Kolker pointed out, of the power of the Corleone farnily. Here, it is Michael's growing personal power that is spotlighted; as he speaks, he sits in his father's chair, in the cross-legged position, half-relaxed, half-regally arrogant, that will become increasingly familiar through the next part of the trilogy. His cheeks are swollen, and his speech impeded by the impact of McLuskey8s punch, causing him to resemble Vito. He speaks: "They wanna have a meeting with me, right? It will be me, McLuskey, and Sollozo. Let's set the meeting. Get our informers to find out where it's gonna be held." On that last line, the camera starts to dolly in: the mention of informers is the first sign of

Michael's embrace of the family business. He speaks furthet, mapping out his plan to meet the pair in a public place where he can feel safe, where Clemenza can plant 51 a weapon. The camera cornes to a stop, isolating him in the frame just before his

Iast crucial words: "...then l'II kill 'em both."

Of course, this statement of purpose is met with peals of laughter; we see

Clemenza, Tessio, then Sonny chortling in successive medium shots. Yet this short speech fias the effect of rnobillizing and focusing the family's line of defense; it maps out the necessary transfer of power, from the hotheaded Sonny to the Don's true successor Michael. It also further legitimizes the violence the Corleone family directs against its enemies.

In this it finds its clear parallel in the speech Prince Hal makes in Act III of 1

Henrv IV, his vow of fealty to the throne against the king's harsh words of reproach against his dissolute son; "1 will redeem al1 this on Percy's head,/And in the closing of some glorious day/Be bold to tell you that I am your son,lWhen I will Wear a garment al1 of blood,/And stain rny favours in a bloody mask,Mlhich, wash'd away, shall scour my sharne with it ..." (Act III, Scene II, Lns.132-137) We might say of

Michael's speech what Derek Cohen says of that of the Prince: "Hal's is a promise to commit a deed of 'good' violence, and the elements of ceremony with which he intends to inform the deed only adds to its ritualized nature." (Cohen, p. 36)

Obviously, the images of religious ritual and blood sacrifice that Hal uses in his speech are absent from Michael's, though they inform the collision of imagery in the climactic baptism montage, as we will ses, but the sense of ritual emerges anyway in the sense of preordainment in Michael's words: the precision with which he outlines his plan, and the violent act's adherence to what he has described as his course of action. This works effectively against any sense of the impending killing 52

as a sneak attack comparable to the violent incursions of the Five Families against

the Corleones. This disparity in our responses to the violence of, respectively, the

film's royal family and its rebellious subjects, may be equated with the difference in

the Shakespeare text between royal violence and the savage violence of the Welsh

enemy, as described by Westmoreland in 1 Henrv IV's first scene: "...the noble

Mortimer ...Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,/A thousand of his

people butchered;Npon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,/Such beastly

shameless transformationJBy those Welshwomen done as may not beNithout

much shame retold or spoken of." (Act i, Scene 1, Lns.38-461

Of course, the difference lies in the degree to which the rebel figures, as Ied

by Hotspur, are strongly characterized and their cause given some credibility, where

in The Godfather the Five Families, in tandem with Solfozo, are seen from a

considerable distance, their planning against the Corleones kept offscreen. Hence, the violence they commit is seen purely as a violation of the norm, where the violence of the Corleones is rendered righteous, retribution for the wrongs of their enemies: even the repulsive horse's head sequence is accorded this kind of validation, given the reasonableness of Tom Hagen against the irrational recalcitrance of Woltz. Thus, the ceremonial quality of Michael's pronouncement, underscored by the theatricality of the staging, funher valourizes the family' endeavours.

However, there are developed simultaneously the seeds of the tragic vision that would mach full bloorn in the film's two sequels. While the horse's head sequence may leave some of us with mixed feelings about the Corleones, the most 53 easily available interpretation is that the studio head got what was coming to him.

More difficult to read positively is the killing of Paulie Gatto. Unlike the book, where

it is clearly established that the soldier had betrayed the Don, deliberately failing to

turn up on the day of the assassination attempt, the film leaves the issue

ambiguous. The melancholy. offscreen murder of Paulie, with the Statue of Liberty

visible in the background, looks quietly ahead to the murder of Fredo in Pan II. Yet,

it is in the transformation of Michael that the film's sense of ambivalence takes on

potentially tragic proportions. In Part III, Michael explains his killing of Sollozo and

McLuskey as having been entirely for the good of the family, his princely duty:

"What could I do?" he asks Kay. One might be compelled to cal1 this evasion of

responsibility, but it contains a certain truth; so too does the argument that

Michael's decision betrays a cerîain cold opportunism: that he, like Prince Hal, has

waited for the right time to don the mask of authority. One might invoke Norman

Council's reading of Hal in Horatio Algerish terms. as a pragmatist intent on scaling the ladder of success. To quote him directly. in reference to the "1 know you all"

soliloquy: "Instead of considering honor an ideal to which life itself must be sacrificed, Hal sees an honorable reputation as a useful political commodity. and he intends to exploit appearances to increase his grip on that commodity." (Council, p.

138) The truth is that Michael's motives in this film are somewhat mysterious, but

based on what we see (barring. for the time being, what we learn in the two sequels - especially Part III), we may infer soma combination of opportunism and a feeling of duty to his family. the latter not mitigating the strange remoteness he periodically displays, notably in the scene in which Clemenza trains hirn for his first 54 hit. (When Clemenza asks him what he's supposed to do after he shoots the two men, he unnervingly responds "Sit down. Finish my dinner.") Yet another, perhaps more cornpelling reason for his actions suggests itself. The way he suddenly transforms himself into the very image of his father, the way he rolls off the plan to hit McLuskey and Sollozo, suggests that he is acting out his destiny, the irnposed legacy of his birthright.

Though the sense of Michael as prisoner of his destiny is largely deferred, at least as a major theme, until the two sequels (Part III in particular), there are certainly strong hints of such a perspective present: hints which, in retiospect, anticipate the direction of his career as Don in Part II. That aside, there is a strong sense of what Northrop Frye in Anatomv of Criticism terms the Augenblick in the moment of truth in which Michael hesitates before killing Sollozo and McLuskev.

The camera tracks slowly in on his grey face in familiar fashion, as Solloto's words are drowned out by the screech of a passing subway car. I believe we reach here, in Northrop Frye's words, the "crucial moment frorn which point the road to what might have been and the road to what will be can be simultaneously seen." (Frye, p. 21 3)Though Frye's addendum must be acknowledged as well, that the two roads are seen by and not by the hero in question, who is too consumed by hubris to see clearly, it seems arguable that Michael's moment of hesitation is a moment of profound knowledge; the enormity of his impending action overwhelms him.

He finally carries it out, of course. The juxtaposition of shots representing

Michael's subjectivity and shots with a "presentational" purpose, from an objective 55

perspective, mirror the simultaneous sense of horror and ceremony that the scene

displays. The shots of Michael firing and his targets being struck in brutal closeup

interspersed with the long shots of the whole bloody scene visualize with precision

the film's ambivalence toward the event: the former convey the awesome terror of

the situation, as felt by Michael; while the latter freeze the event as ritual, and

therefore as 'honourable' violence. The aestheticization of the event even imparts

the killings with an odd, terrifying beauty, with the dreamlike suspension of the

long-shot image of McLuskeyfs lifeless body pitching forward and upending the

table and its contents standing out as particularly memorable. The sequence cornes

to a close with Michael calmly departing the scene, dropping the gun to the floor as

dictated by Clemenza. At the precise moment he does that, a burst of horns

appears as fanfare on the soundtrack, half-celebratory, half-mournful. With this

evocation of the trumpet flourishes of Renaissance drama, we move to a doser

view of the scene as Michael has left it. The bodies of Sollozo and McLuskey Iinger

in theatrical tableau, in typical Godfather fashion. Posed as they are, in a manner

suggesting the lurid newspaper photos of the victims of real-life underworld

battles,a connection cemented in the period photographs used in the succeeding

montage illustrating the war between the Corleones and the Five Families, there is a

strong sense of elegy attached to the somber image that renders it more than

merely lurid. It conveys the magnitude of this event in Michael's life, and ensures that we realize that his Iife is changed irrevocably.

The film's structure, like that of 1 Henrv IV, moves inexorably toward victory, the triumph of the kingdom. However, where the play starts with the 56 kingdom seemingly on the brink of ruin, its ruler "wan with caren, the film begins

with a gangster kingdom at the peak of graceful stability. Where the play

progresses through a deiineation of the respective worlds of the court, the rebel

stronghold, and the tavern, the film concentrates upon the embattled seat of power,

and its defensive rneasures. As such, the nobility of the gangster heroes seerns, on

the surface, to go unquestioned. Hence David Thomson's judgernent in his article,

"The Oiscreet Charrn of The Godfather," that the public views the film "in a spirit of

wanting to belong to this family, wanting to share its heroic purpose and its

embattled unity." (Thomson, p. 79) Yet to judge the film as morally invidious, as

Thomson and others have done, is to miss the rich vein of ambivalence, particularly

with regard to Michael, that courses through it. Where 1 Henrv IV builds a heroic

narrative out of the ashes of the tragedy of the deposition of Richard II, its hero

eclipsing the melancholy, incipiently tragic figure that is its eponymous character,

Godfather i finds in the anointed successor to the throne a melancholy, incipiently tragic figure who is doomed to be overshadowed by his saintly precursor - the true

Godfather. I believe one can locate a basis for this judgement within the text of Part

1 without recourse to its two sequels, as I have already suggested, yet the film's

particular, half-buried tragic vision is considerably clearer when placed against the tragic vision of the classical gangster subgenre as a whole. Even as the film points to the historic and dramatic antecedents of the gangster film, it also creates in

Michael a new breed of gangster, one "fitter" to survive than the gangsters of earlier eras - one whose own obsolescence lies far in the future, but one whose 57

success cornes with an enornous cost for the way of life his ascension seemingly

preserves.

Central to the film's sense of tragedy is its treatment of the Underworld-

Upperworld antinomy. We have already discussed the film's treatment of the

Corleones as a benign kingdom with the competing families as rebels, with its

cornmensurate denial of the outside world of "respectable" citizenry. Yet, the

degree to which Michael ernbodies the Upperworld that exists just beyond the reach

of the old-style gangsters, his father included, is the degree to which the old

antinomy reasserts itself in subtle ways. Robert Ray rightly characterizes the words

of Vito in his final scene with Michael as expressive of Horatio Alger aspirations

toward power and success - with respectability. The old man talks of his lifelong

desire to assert power, to not dance "on the string held by al1 those bigshots" - to

be a puppetmaster hirnself. He tells Michaei that he never anticipated that he, of al1

his sons, would be the one to follow in his footsteps - that he thought that Michael

would be the one to "hold the strings," that he would be "Senator Corleone,

Governor Corleone, or something." Michael responds reassuringly, " We'll get there,

Pop, we'll get there." This is one of the warmest scenes in the film; Robert Ray and

others rightly point to the Andy Hardy overtones, the affecting evocation of father- son togetherness. Of course, the scene takes on additional poignancy in the light of the sequence that follows: the old Don's death scene. This is much the antithesis of the violent deaths meted out to the gangsters of previous eras: he passes on in a sun-dappled tomato garden, in the midst of play with his grandson. A stray, gently ironic hint of ambivalence toward the man emerges out of his feigned-monster act 58

with the little boy, in which he stuffs an orange peel in his mouth and growls Iike

Frankenstein's creation, but his actual death is depicted with a stanling reverence:

after his collapse from a heart attack, he is seen prone in medium long-shot,

beneath a billowing sheet of muslin which hangs over his body Iike a shroud. In the

next scene, during the Don's funeral, the transfet of power is sealed by Michael's

cagey acceptance of Banini's instructions for a meeting, as relayed by Tessio. AS

par his father's prediction, the new Don has discerned who the traitor is, Tessio,

and has deterrnined how to strike back.

The sense of continuity from Vito to Michael is tainted, however, by the

manner in which he asserts his rule. Throughout, we have seen hints of Michael's spiritual barrenness against the benevolence of his father. The scene in which

Michael announces his plan to do away with McLuskey and Sollozo provides the first substantial sign of this: the coldness of his planning, the way he assures Sonny that his desire to kill the two is "not personal" but "strictly business", his words echoing those earlier spoken by Sollozo himself. Yet a more subtle sign of the difference between the prince and the ailing monarch is the way in which he defends his decision to kill a police officer by referring to him as a "dishonest cop.

..who got mixed up in the rackets and got what was coming to him," a cop who would not be missed. Most crucial here is ~ichael'sprecise wording, 'a cop who got mixed up in the rackets'. These contemptuous words seem to emanate from a respectable bourgeois outraged by police corruption. (While Michael's words are frarned as the "spin" reporters on the Corleone payroll will be required to put on their coverage of the killing, his delivery bespeaks an Ivy League contempt of the 59

corrupt CO^ that g08S beyond mere strategic thinking.) This aligned with the ~CY

mien he adopts gives added weight to the "not personal... strictly business" line that

becornes the film's central mantra.

What starts to emerge here is a vision of the gangster as cool corporate

raider, one not unprecedanted (a near precursor being Kirk Douglas' technocrat

brother in The Brotherhood) but with an added tragic impetus. As I have tried to

suggest, a good part of The Godfather's crucial status in the history of the gangster

genre arises out of its conspicuous blurring of the rnetaphoricai Iine that separates the Underworld and the Upperworld in the traditional gangster film. The

ruthlessness of the gangster hero continues in this film to mirror the ruthlessness endemic in the success drive in the Warshovian gangster film ; the heroism of the gangster hero is still inflected with a sense of tragedy, though somewhat concealed.

But what separates Michael from his gangster precursors is that the particular nightmare vision of the drive to power which he enacts is excised of many of the factors that traditionally separated the movie gangster from the "real" business world. Like the gangsters of The St. Valentine's Dav Massacre, he is shown negotiating over turf, over the organization's holdings, with far more detail than the makers of the older gangster films ever saw fit to show. Unlike Capone, Moran, and so on, however, he is a determined family man, with his WASP girlfriend becoming his wife, and therefore the badge of respectability that Bugs Raymond in Quick

Millions, with his infatuation with his uppercrust business partner's sister, wanted but could never possess. Unlike the older gangsters, Michael's anger, aggression, rage are subsumed into a coldbloodedness that seems almost pathological. Like his 60 father. he has his violence carried out by others once he ascends to the throne, but in his case, the delegation of brutality seems almost a form of displacement (note the scene in which Michael looks on while the hapless Carlo is garrotted after having confessed and seemingly received "absolution" for his part in the murder of

Sonny). His impulses toward violent vengeance are no less real or potent than those of his father, or those of Tornmy Powers, Cody Jarrett, Rico BandelIo, and so on; yet the difference lies in the lack of passion with which he exerts his terrible will - it really is al1 "just business."

As a vision of triurnphant upward mobility, he cornes closer than any other gangster hero, as I have said. to the Horatio Alger archetype; within the world of power and privilege into which he is born he is nevertheless, like Prince Hal, an unrecognized "hero" whose innate qualities wait for the right circumstances to emerge so he can take his place amongst the Elect. Of course, unlike the older gangsters, he survives and prospers: like Hal, he saves the family and himself from the incursions of their enemies. Moreover, after the first cop-killing that establishes hirn as one to be reckoned with, the family presumably resurnes the political ties threatened by his daring act, and they maintain those ties once Michael takes over.

The distance between the Corleones and those "contacts" is subtly asserted during the wedding sequence at film's beginning when Tom informs the Don that one

Senator Cauly has apologized for not coming to the festivities, but has sent gifts, as have "some of the judges." The film's progression suggests a movernent toward the kind of respectability that ensures that the family will no longer lack for guests from high places. as the communion festivities at the star? of Godfather II confirm. The 61 sequel aside. everything the film presents near its conclusion dernonstrates the considerable divide between the styles of leadership of the old Don and his young,

Americanized successor, and, by extension, the vast distance between Michael and the graceful world his father led. Michael's curtness when telling Tom he is to move to Las Vegas to handle the family's operations there ("You're out, Tom.") speaks volumes about the different persona1 styles of the courtly old Don and his hard- nosed son.

Tessio's betrayal of Michael - the man being one of Vito's foremost old allies, a Northumberland to his Bolingbroke - is further indicative of the sea-change after Vito's death. (Just as he is being taken for his final 'ride', he asks Tom to be sure to tell Michael that his traitorous act was "only business.") In bridging the gap between the peaceful, stable Underworld of his father and the cold, pragrnatic

Upperworld, Michael has lost his ties to the sunny, pastoral kingdom seen at film's opening, which, as we have seen. were quite tenuous to begin with. When he tells

Kay, in their reunion scene, that his father's way of doing business is finished, the statement registers retrospectively, in light of Michael's actions for the remainder of the film, as a grim joke: Vito's ways seem exalted compared to those of his

Americanized son, with his veneer of businesslike pragrnatism. The world of legitimacy is not the decent, sanctified place that Kay and Vito naively assume it to be. Senators and presidents have people killed, as Michael himself implies.

Yet, as many have pointed out, it would be equally easy to read the film as a heroic narrative, as 1 Henrv IV is often thought to be. To do so, as I have tried to demonstrate, would be to ignore the unsettling ambivalences in the text, which are equivalent, in part, to the tragic substructure some have located in the

Shakespearean source. In this latter reading, Hotspur is regarded as the play's incipient tragic figure and his death a sacrificial one, allowing the kingdom to survive and its true heir to find his rightful place. While The Godfather has only a rather tentative Falstaff in Kay, it has a clear Hotspur figure in the jovial, quick- tempered Sonny. Of course, Sonny is a Corleone, and therefore afigned with the kingdom under siege, unlike his Shakespearean counterpart: a fact indicative of the comparative haziness of the Corleones' antagonists and their cause versus the strongly-etched rebels in the play. Nevertheless, play and film share alike a structure that contrasts the heroism of its two warrior figures, and demonstrates why the brash, choleric, fiercely loyal fighter must die to pave way for the coldly pragmatic, authentic heir to the throne.

Hotspur and Sonny share a vaingloriousness, and an infinite capacity for talking out of turn. Two scenes that stand out as roughly parallel in film and play are the scenes delineating, respectively, the initial meeting of Don Corleone and

Soilozo and Act III, Scene I of 1 Henrv IV, in which Hotspur, Worcester, Mortimer, and Glendower meet to divide up the kingdom. In the latter scene, Hotspur cannot restrain his impulse to chide his senior Glendower, with his pompous belief in his mastery of the supernatural, his ability to "call spirits from the vasty deep"; of this,

Hotspur says, exasperated: "Why, so can 1, or so can any man;/But will they come when you do cal1 for them?" (Act III, Scene 1, Lns. 54-55) Worcester duly warns

Hotspur of the potential for enormous harm in his impolitic nature: "...oftentirnes it doth present harsh rage,/Defect of manners, want of government,lPride, 63 haughtiness, opinion, and disdain;Khe least of which haunting a noblemanlLoseth men's hearts, and leaves behind a stainlupon the beauty of al1 parts besides,

Beguiling them of cornmendation." (Act III, Scene 1, Lns. 18 1-1 87) The parallel scene in The Godfather depicts Sollozo making his initial offer ta the wise old Don, and being rejected on the grounds that narcotics are a "dangerous business." Sonny interrupts to confirm Sollozo's guarantee of the family's investment. Vito interrupts his son in turn, signalling to us that this is a breach of family protocol, a feeling confirmed by the quick cuts to reaction shots of Tom, Clemenza, and Sollozo, registering Sonny's error of judgement. Aher Sollozo's departure, the Don chastises his errant son with words strikingly similar to those used towards film's end by

Michael against the dissembling Fredo: Vito to Sonny, "Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking again."; Michael to Fredo, "Fredo, you8re my older brother and I love you. But don? ever take sides with anyone against the family again." This parallel confirms at once Michael's status as a born successor to his father and the unsuitability of his two brothers for the rde of leader, the judgement being particularly damning for Sonny, the ostensible replacement Don. It is worth mentioning, as well, that his interruption plays a major role in Sollozo's decision to attack the Don, giving hirn cause to believe that it is a sign of dissension in the ranks. Another nail in Sonny's coffin, so to speak, is the quarrelling over strategy that marks his relationship with Tom. On the one hand, Sonny, like his

Shakespearean counterpart, is always ready for a fight, while Tom keeps wisely counselling caution, a case in point being Sonny's idea that Michael shoot

McLuskey and Sollozo in the car, prompting Tom's angry but logical response that Sollozo may not be in the car (this suggestion of Sonny's being, besides, a circumvention of Michael's ritual glory). On the other hand, however, Sonny's inability to cornrnand Tom's obeisance the way Vito (and eventually Michael) can is a significant sign of Sonny's inadequacy.

It is significant, also, that one of the only acts of violence ordered by Sonny during his time as Don is the killing of Bruno Tattaglia; unlike the other hits ordered in the film, whether the righteous executions of the Corleones or the treacherous attacks of the Five Families, this murder occurs offscreen, neither vilified as an atrocity nor glorified as an assertion of the will of the reigning monarch, or presented with both attitudes closely combined, as in Michael's killing of McLuskey and Soll~zo.'~The downplaying of Sonny's efforts on behalf of the farnily tends to underscore the judgement of Vito himself, when he says that Sonny was a bad

Don; the acts of criminal aggression for which ha is responsible are kept outside the circle of theatrical violence in which the violent acts ordered by Vito and Michael are played out. The conspicuous absence of Sonny's official deeds from the visual record creates an impression of weightlessness and ineffectuality that, in retrospect. seem to reinforce the idea that he is doomed to failure.

The emphasis veers, instead, toward Sonny's personal capacity for violence, his volatility, which the film nnders rather comic. Like Hotspur, Sonny is conceived as something of a figure of fun, though he is far from humourless himself. A pivotal example of the play's mockery of the other Prince Harry, coming from the mouth of

'O lt is worth noting, as well, that the slaying of Peulie, depicted in euch a sad, muted fashion, is also an act ordered by Sonny. 65

Hal himself: "1 am not yet of Percy's rnind, the Hotspur of the North; he that kills

me some six or seven doten of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to

his wife, 'Fie upon this quiet IifeI I want work.'" (Act II, Scene IV, Lns.97-100)

There is an equivalent sense of mockery in the film's treatment of Sonny's two

main violent explosions against the photographers at the wedding and at Carlo.

80th sequences are shot largely in farcicai long-shot, with the assauft on Carlo seen

in particularly slapstick fashion, given Sonny's titanic, outsize exertions against his

passive, helpless brother-in-law, and the mock-violent detailing of the scene (hitting

Carlo with a garbage can, biting his hand loose from a railing he clasps for support).

Of course, we may be further inclined to laugh at Carlo's pummelling, given the

reason for it (his violent abuse of Sonny's sister Connie). In any event, where Sonny

is concerned, the film's literal sense of distance - the violence of the Corleones

being constantly framed in long-shot, as theatrical tableau - becomes comic, infused

with irony.

Yet, mitigating this sense of comedy is the eut - when Sonny stops just

before administering one final kick - to a medium shot of him looking down at Carlo;

between clenched teeth, he says, "If you touch my sister again, IfIl kill you." This

emphatic cut makes the moment register in retrospect as ominous portent: it is

Sonny's attack on Carlo that prompts his betrayal, being the culmination of a narrative strand, developed over two preceding sequences, delineating Carlo's alienation from the family's inner circte, particularly and most violently from the belligerent Sonny, who chastises him at the dinner table for telling Connie to shut up. Though Carlo's calcufations are kept offscreen (and in fact are not revealed 66

until Michael extracts his confession near film's end), it seerns fair to Say from the vantage point of hindsight that Sonny's death threat is the deciding factor in Carlo's decision to turn turncoat, and this use of montage indicates the moment's fatal importance.

Sonny is of course a figure closer to the classic gangster archetype epitomized by James Cagney than either his father or brother Michael, the Warshow

paradigm of the agressive, volatile, somewhat crude racketeer, albeit in Sonny's case ensconced within the rigid, hierarchical structure presided over by the Don.

Even his death recalls the deaths of the classic gangsters. Driving frantically to the aid of the pregnant Connie, who has once again been beaten by Carlo, Sonny is ambushed at a tollbooth by seeming hordes of "button men." This sequence. while exemplifying the violence of the New Hollywood, nevertheless stands as one of the scenes in the film that best recaptures the look and sound of the classic early- thirties triumvirate of gangster films (though the tirne period here is some fifteen years after the heyday of Scarface Cam~nte).~'We see Sonny riddled with bullets fired from vintage-looking tornmy guns. In a final, insulting blow, a killer, in period formal attire (grey suit, black gloves, and a snap-brim fedora) walks up to the dying

Sonny as he falls from his sleek black Cadillac, fires a final round of bullets into him, and kicks him in the face. Like the earliest movie gangsters, Sonny has been undone by his passions - in this case, his overweening family ioyalty, a loyalty that blinds

11 Another is the montage illustrating the murderous effects of the intra-familial war, though this is accorded a layer of elegy, through its rnelanchaly dissolves and the gentle, lulling piano music to which it is scored, that is consistent with the film's sense of pastness. his judgament and allows him to be entrapped. His failure suggests the obsolescence of the species of gangsterdom he represents in the face of, on the one hand, the gangster who rules by the traditional divine right, and who exercises the preternatural judgement of those who are part of this elect; and on the other, the late-twentieth century Gangster as Corporate Raider. It is the former kind who stands ernbodied by Sonny's father, and the latter kind who defeats him, the dour, pragrnatic Banini, who is revealed to be the mastermind behind the attacks against the family: it is surely no accident that the role of Banini is essayed by Richard

Conte, who was closely identified with the grey Mr. Big gangsters of the syndicate films of the fihies - it was he who played "Mr. Brownn in The Bia Combp (1 9541.''

In this sense, Michael can be read as the rnedian between the extremes represented by Sonny and Barzini; as the anointed saviour of the family, he nevertheless exhibits the cool businesslike ruthlessness the family needs to survive into the next half- century: his loyalty to his farnily doesn't push him into carelessness. It doesn't make him vulnerable.

Of course, we may be more than inclined to look favourably upon Sonny's large-scale volatility against the cold machinations of his brother; Michael's grasp of the correct rneans to power, like Hal's, must not necessarily be confused with virtue. Just as the justice apparent in Hotspur's leadership of the rebellion against the crown accounts a good deal for the sense of tragedy attached to the futility of

l2The syndicate films of the fifties can be loosely defined as the wave of police filrnslRedeemed Gangster films pitting a lone, crusading hero (whether a maverick gangster or a vigilante cop) against a large, arnorphous criminal ayndicate tun elortg corporate lines. Aparî from The Bia Combo, exarnples include The Phenix City Storv, The Bia Heat, and Undeworld USA. 68 his efforts, one could similarly point out that the reason Sonny impresses us as a partly tragic rather than merely comic figure is the sense that attends his passing of a way of life easing out of existence (just as his death seems to signal the passing of the Classical Gangster.) This sense emerges primarily through implication, from the juxtaposition of the scenes leading up to and including Sonny's death with the scenes delineating Michael's exile in Sicily and his meeting with, courtship of, and marriage to Apollonia, culminating, of course, in her violent death. Associative montage, another central Godfather trope, is here used more expansively than in the rapid intercutting of the climactic baptism sequence. This section of the film is introduced with a striking oneiric transition. Michael's journey to Sicily (to Corleone, the family's ancestral home) has a ritualistic function, as Robert Kolker points out: it signifies Michael's immersion in the past, in the family's histoty and its legacy of violence. This laver of meaning is underscored by the initial image and its link to the shot that immediately precedes it. To quote Kolker directly, frorn his discussion of the sequence: "It is presented almost as a dream of the Don's, introduced as a dissolve from the face of the bedridden Don Corleone to a pastoral scene of meadows and sheep. .." (Kolker, p. 174) Michael is here reliving the collective memory of the home country that binds the family and sustains their endeavours in the New World. The dream of the Old World is inevitably riven by violence, of course, the proverbial snake in the proverbial Eden. It is the brutal learning process

Michael thereby undeigoes that prepares him for the next stage, the assumption of the throne. It is fitting, then, that his experiences in exile are crosscut with the 69

events leading up to the death of his brother - the event that leaves the way clear

for Michaef's ascension.

Michael's awe-stricken first meeting with Apollonia is followed by a chance

meeting with her irate father, over whom Michael asserts his newfound power. A

chaste courtship commences, capped by the memorable image of the lovestruck

pair followed, in a single, stationary long take, by a group of old, cloaked

chaperones, followed in turn by Michael's Sicilian bodyguards, Fabrizio and CaIo.

This shot dissolves to three besuited bodyguards in long-shot, pitching pennies in

front of Lucy Mancini's apaRment building - Lucy having been seen previously in a

surreptitious assignation with Sonny during the opening wedding sequence. This transition could be seen at one level as a shift from innocence to experience. from

the idyllic Old World, with its traditional rituals governing the rnating process, to the

Dark City, with its covert affairs. Complicating this conservative reading, of course,

is the presence of bodyguards in both scenes: in Sicily, lending their presence to

remind us that Michael is no ordinary young lover; in New York, seen engaged in a

child's game in the midst of great bloodshed, the ongoing war between the

Corleones and the Five Families necessitating their presence.

The next scenes delineate Sonny's departure from Lucy's to pick up his sister, his discovery of the wounds inflicted on her by Carlo, and his brutal beating of the offending husband. The latter scene concludes via direct cut to Michael and

Apollonia kneeling as part of their wedding ceremony. Seen in terms of the sequence of events, one rnay read this as an extended, reactionary form of collision montage. the gap between the decayed New World of marital discord and domestic 70 violence and the loving, pious Old World. The juxtaposition can be seen more complexly, though (and, of course, with the benefit of hindsight) as Iinking two images of characters at the crucial points where their respective fates are decided -

Sonny's death threat against Carlo, Apollonia's marriage to Michael. Sonny and

Apollonia are linked in other ways as well: both are conceived as overdetermined gender types, Sonny in his aggressive, priapic masculinity, Apollonia in her soft, pliant, somewhat vacant femininity. Apollonia is inextricably associated with the idealized dream of Sicily; the lush music that ushers in Michael's exile is called

"Apollonia's Theme," and accompanies al1 returns to Sicily in the succeeding

Godfather films. That Sonny's fate is linked with hers underscores his status as a figure of the gangster movie past. As figures associated with dreams of the past, the cold world that emerges in the film's latter section obviously has no place for them.

The cold world soon asserts itself in most brutal fashion, shattering the erotic idyll of Michael and Apollonia's honeymoon: the sensuous unveiling of

Apollonia's bare breasts is followed by Kay's arriva1 at the Corleone compound inquiring of Michael's whereabouts. This is followed in turn by a fierce screaming row between Carlo and the conspicuously pregnant Connie, culminating in him attacking her with a belt. It is this violation that prompts Sonny's sudden. angry departure from the cornpound to settle accounts, and therefore ena bles the am bush that ends his life. In typical Çodfather fashion, the body of Sonny is lingered on - a memento mori tableau. Yet Sonny's death reverberates more than those of Barzini,

Solloto, and so on. Not only does the camera hold on Sonny's corpse, not only 71 does it become subject to contemptuous desecration by one of the hostile 'soldiers', but it becomes, in a brilliant exemplar of the film's narrative symmetry, the repayment of the debt owed the Don by Bonasera, for he is asked to prepare the grotesquely-punctured body of the fallen son for burial. There is a moment of suspension when the camera lingers on the Don's grief-stricken face, surrounded by darkness. "Look how they massacred my boy" are his sorrowful words.

Derek Cohen, speaking of the climax of 1 Henrv IV (Hotspur's defeat, his dying soliloquy, and Hal's impassioned requiem for his fallen opponentl says the following: "It is the concentration of the audience's, the reader's, the prince's passive energy upon the spectacle of the dying soldier that emphasizes his role as the sacrificial victim of his and our world ..." (Cohen, p. 34) The ironic effect of

Hotspur's final speech, being simultaneously, as Cohen points out, Hal's triumph and Hotspur's tragic apotheosis is missing in The Godfather, of course. Sonny's death is unquestionably an atrocity; though the horrific comedy of the revived

Falstaff wounding Hotspur's corpse in the thigh is darkly mirrored here in the

'button manus violation of the prone body, the latter scene conspicuously lacks the sense of comic deflation that attends Falstaff's violation of the ritual of observance carried out by Hal. Yet, even if we are doubly compelled to honour Sonny's slain body, there exists nevertheless a sense of his death as an instrumental one: his killing prompts the Don's return to the fray, his brokering of a deal with the Five

Families, and, of course, it facifitates Michael's rise to the throne. The following 72 words of Derek Cohen apply as much to the loyal Sonny as they do to the rebellious

Hotspur:

And as we look back at the blood imagery related to the Hal/Hotspur conflict, it becornes char that Hotspur's blood has been represented as that of the sacrificial creature whose death will redeem his world, and into whose life and persona are concentrated the rage, anxiety, and fear of a threatened nation. His death, then, sometimes regarded as tragic, is also represented in this monarchical ideology as necessary for the continuation of the nation. (Cohen, pps. 43-44)

There is a key point in Part One after which the mantle of power passes over

Michael like a form of demonic possession. That is the point at which Apollonia is killed by a car bomb rneant for him, the first of several women caught in the crossfire in the Godfather trilogy. The explosion is immediately preceded by a moment of realization when Michael, before embarking on a planned drive with his new wife, intuits what is about to happen. In classic shotlreverse shot fashion, we see Michael looking, with a growing, stunned awareness, at his bodyguard Fabrizio as he dashes away from the scene, then at Apollonia preparing to start the car; he starts to cal1 out to her to stop, but to no avail - the car explodes. We see Michael fall; the sequence fades to black on the image of the smoking car, then fades in again to an upward tilt covering the exterior of the big stone building where the

Families are conducting their summit talks. Michael's reaction to the blast is kept offscreen, as is a scene derived loosely from the book (actually shot but not used until the epic TV broadcast) depicting him, in convalescence, ordering Fabrizio's murder. The next time we see him he is ensconced in his new leadership role. He appears to Kay, clad in a big black coat and hat ensemble that looks oversize, awkward on him. He seems stiff, rigid; as he walks with Kay, the pair are shadowed by a big car: Michael's protection. We may surmise that the combined impact of Apollonia's death and Fabrizio's betrayal has hardened him; that, like Kirk

Douglas in The Brotherhood, he has realized that the old country offers him no refuge - on the contrary. Yet the repercussions on his interior life of these events are kept something of a mystery: it is here that he truly starts to recede into the shadows, to become the monster displayed more fully in Part Two. To quote Robert

Kolker: "It is our first indication of how Michael will turn the warm, unquestioriing, familial closeness of Don Corleone into a rigid and destructive mechanism." (Cohen, p. 175)

The autumnal colours of the scene showing Michael and Kay's reunion indicate the end of the pastoral summer that is Michael's Sicilian sojurn. Taken together, the Sicilian sequences mark a partial reversion to the world depicted so lovingly at film's beginning, with its joyous wedding sequence, its bursts of eroticism. It marks the return to view of Sonny's girlfriend-on-the-sly, and, of course, of the undertaker. The scene in which the grieving Don gazes at his son's body recalls visually Bonasera's initial visit to the Corleone cornpound, with the

Don's face isolated in a field of darkness. The difference between the opening and this section of the film (which commences at riearly its halfway point) is clear.

Where the idealized, sunshine portrait of the exterior farnily helps to legitimize the dark dealings indoors at the start of the film, the gangster business here at film's middle taints the pastoral world, exposes the dream for what it is. 74

The Sicilian scenes also recall an equivalent scene, from approxirnately the midpoint of the Shakespearean source. Act III, Scene I begins with Hotspur's imbroglio with Glendower. but the dressing-down he receives frorn Worcester and

Mortimer is shortly followed by a quiet respite, the soldiers bidding a last goodbye to their wives before the impending carnage at Shrewsbury. Though the interlude's meaning is clear enough, there is an enigmatic reserve of meaning at its core. The

Welsh-speaking Lady Mortimer comes ta ernbody that sense of enigma; much is made of her inability to speak English and of Mortimer's inability to speak her language. Welsh. There are layers of fairy-tale mystification adhering to the conception of the love-struck pair, both mute of voice but eloquent nevertheless: to quote Mortimer's rhapsodic language in this scene: "...thy tongue/Ma kes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned,/Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bow'r,/With ravishing division, to her lute." (Act III, Scene 1. Lns.205-208) Their relationship is very different from the one conceived between Henry and the French princess

Katherine in Henrv V, with its sly, screwball delineation of the courtship of a royal by her nation's conqueror; of course, unlike Katherine as well, the Lady's dialogue is left out of the text, indicated only by the recurring directions, "The Lady speaks in Welsh." She is mystified, in fact, in much the way the mainly-silent Apollonia is: both women are linked with music (Apollonia with her "Theme," Lady Mortimer with the Welsh Song she sings); both women speak a tongue labelled "foreign"; and both women are inextricably associated with a world rendered ephemeral, and therefore lost - Apollonia with Sicily, Lady Mortimer with the rebel alliance her overdetermined "Welshness" seems here to signify. This scene is imrnediately 75

followed by the meeting between the king and his son (meaningfully introduced

here as the Prince of Wales) in which the "madcap" prince promises he "will redeem

ail this on Percy's head." The departures of Lady Mortimer and Apollonia from the

respective narratives mark alike a blast of cold reality - the shattering of a pastoral dream, however tenuously evoked.

The brutal fade to black that marks the end of Michael's exile has in

particuiar an impact equivalent to being shocked awake from a dream. This feeling is borne out by Michael's evident transformation in the unseen interim before his reunion with Kay, his newfound hardness. Ilt is atso crucial, I think, that Apollonia is not mentioned, or even alluded to for the remainder of the film.) Autumn has set in - significantly, the season Northrop frye saw as embodying the tragic vision in his

"Theory of Mythsn in Anatomv of Criticism. The stage is soon to be set, of course, for the ritual killing montage that marks Michael's completion of the process of accession. The baptism of Carlo and Connie's baby becomes, famously, the site of legitimation for Michael's power grab; in the church, he becomes godfather to his sister's child, while, simultaneously, his violent machinations reach fruition outside, in the massacre of the family's enemies in seemingly one fell swoop. Again the family of wives, sisters, and children is sustained by the dirty dealings of the

"family" that is the organization, while granting thatVcriminalfamily a moral authority. The way the sequence is composed one can either read the associations created between the preparations for the massacre, the massacre itself, and the baptismal ceremony as strictly ironic; or as complementary, emphasizing the events' shared liturgical legitimacy; or as both simultaneously. In any event, the juxtapositions, scored to Bach, have a cumulative impact that gives the killings a

solemn force that recalls the language of blood sacrifice Hal invokes in his vow to

vanquish the rebel effort, as ernbodied in Hotspur. In his speech to his father,

quoted previously, Hal promises to stain his favours "in a bloody mask,Mlhich,

wash'd away, shall scour my shame with it..." (Act III, Scene II, Lns.136-137) To

quote Derek Cohen:

The bloody mask is a token or a ritualistic syrnbol of his effort on behalf of established order and will publicly proclaim him as hero and publicly demonstrate that the salvation of the nation has been won through the exercise of sanctioned and needed violence. Thus, not only is Hal to be celebrated as a saviour, but also violence itself is mystified as his almost holy means of salvation. (Cohen, pps. 36-37)

As Cohen points out, the imagery Hal utilizes, while invoking pagan

purification rites, also, in its use of the word 'garment', suggests a donning of

priestly vestments. The malleability of Hal's rhetoric is apparent as well in Hal's taunting in the climactic battle with Hotspur. As Derek Cohen says, Hal's lines about 'stars keeping not their motion in one sphere' and 'England not brooking a

double reign' signify a newfound obeisance to the laws of nature - as constituted, of course, in the monarchist state - while his mockery of Hotspur echoes his opponent's own warrior arrogance, his Tamburlainian self-glorification: "l'II make it greater ere I part from thee/And al1 the budding honors on thy crest/l'll crop to make a garland for rny head." (Act V, Scene IV, Lns.70-72) The rhetorical contradictions apparent in Hal's speech mirror the contradictions that support the state's assertion of power; the preservation of order in that state is dependent upon a mastery of violence, a harnessing of chaos. The baptism sequence that serves as The Godfather's climax is equivalent to the dichotomaus language of the play -

expressive as it is of how authority is maintained in a monarchical society. Here, as

in the Warshow conception of the gangster rnovie, power is an opportunity for

unlimited aggression.

ln the sequence in question. the montage structure first manifests itself in a

traveling closeup of a machine gun being taken from a desktop ta be prepared for

use, the previous shot being the removal of the baby's bonnet for anointing, also in

closeup. The sprinkling of holy water on the infant's lip and chin is similarly

juxtaposed with a soldier's preparations for "battie," this tirne cosmetic in nature,

the lathering of Willie Cicci's face for a shave. A shot of Clemenza slowly climbing

some stairs, while carrying an ominously large package, is immediately followed by

the priest making the sign of the cross over the baby. At this point, the ceremony

focuses on Michael; the priest asks Michael to state his belief successively in God,

Jesus Christ, and the HoIy Ghost, which he does. f his is counterpointed with the

first sightings of Barzini, the Corleones' primary nemesis. We see the players

assembling. the massacre coming closer to fruition. Then, the point of no return: the

priest asks Michael, addressing him. as par the ceremony, by the baby's name,

"Michaet Francis Rizzi", if he renounces Satan. At this point, we see Clemenza,

armed with a huge shotgun, blowing away a pair of gangsters in an elevator (along

with, apparently, an unfortunate elevator operator). We then return to Michaei solemnly swearing, "1 do renounce him." We then see, in succession, Moe Green,

Don Cuneo, Tattaglia (along with a female bedroom companion), and Barzini (along with a bodyguard and a chauffeur) al1 violently dispatched, with the murders al1 78 juxtaposed with Michael, in his nephew's name, swearing his renunciation of

Satan's works and pomps: the shot that acts as the pivot for this sequence - its key image, in fact - is the recurring shot of Michael, his face closed, impassive, half-lit.

With his victims here scarcely individuated (excepting the boorish Moe Green), our focus stays on Michael's transformation with the consolidation of power this daring move represents.

The murders of course, in conjunction with the baptism, register as the sign of Michael's ascension to a divinely-sanctioned position of power; the baptism with holy water of the baby is simultaneously the baptism with blood of the victorious

Godfather who shares the infant's name. The water poured on the baby's head links, in a startling graphic match, with the blood seen dripping, two shots later, on the glass of the revolving door in which the bullet-riddled corpse of Don Cuneo lies.

The ritualized shots of the vanquished corpses of the Corleones' enemies are followed by a slow dolly-in on Michael staring, in tight closeup, at the candle held before him. The Bach organ music played during the killings has an obvious sacramental significance, the murders are thus sanctified. This final shot of the man who ordered the slayings seals his covenant with God; the priest gives his final blessing: "Go in peace and may the Lord be with you. Amen."

Peter Cowie reads this sequence as a delineation of Michael's hypocrisy, given blasphemous dimensions in the crosscutting of the ceremony in al1 its liturgical detail with the massacre that defiles it; "Michael continues to pay lip- service to the traditional ideals while others, like some orninous symphonic bass line, carry out his scheme of vengeance." (Cowie, p. 70) Yet this reading, while 79 cohesive and not inconsistent with what we see on the screen, only accounts for half of the film's divided perspective of the Corleones. Again the killings are granted a theatrical lustre inextricable, as elsewhere in the film, from an aura of legitimacy.

The preparations are witnessed in full; the killings are linked aurally and visually with a ceremony sanctioned as holy. The sense of personal dread evidently experienced by Michael before the killings of McLuskey and Sollozo is here absent.

Though we do see two innocent bystanders killed in the carnage (somewhat contrary to the criticism offered by Robert Ray and others that the Corleones exist in this film in a moral vacuum, where no one innocent gets hurt) the cumulative impact of the sequence tends to negate any horror that might provoke.

The sequence that follows, however, might be said to undermine the sense that the Corleones' murders are divineiy-sanctioned acts of rough justice. Michael acts the role (not for the last time in the Godfather series) of demon father confessor, forcing Carlo to admit his role in the death of Sonny: again, we see

Michael's grim face half in shadow, pressuring Carlo in the quietest rnanner possible to corne clean. That he does, of course, but in exchange he receives not absolution but death. The killing of Carlo, the happy bridegroom of film's beginning, is the culmination of the film's slew of automobile slayings; more than that, its treatment ensures its status as a sign of Michael's (and by extension, the family's) spiritual and moral descent. Carlo's garrotting is seen in a travelling long take, the camera mounted on the hood of the car. Behind the windshield, Carlo struggles; his feet jut forward, shattering the window. Though its flamboyante mirrors that of the earlier hits, it differs from them in two crucial ways. Firstly, it is sprung on us without 80 preparation, and second, it is not presented with the layers of distanciation that mark the treatment of the other Corleone killings. Wou might say that Carlo's feet shatter the frame, our proscenium arch, even as they the windshield.) The murder has more in comrnon, aesthetically, with the slaying of Luca Brasi. fhe film has coma full circle: the moral authority that earlier separated the Corleones from the other families has now been elided.

The film's final scene finds the Corleones on the verge of a move to Lake

Tahoe, away from the old family compound: the old ways are gone. Connie bursts in, screaming that Michael killed her husband; we may reflect that the marriage union so grandly celebrated by the family at film's beginning has been torn asunder, apparently for the good of that family. When Kay asks Michael if Connie is correct, he first explodes, and then, with great ostentation, says that he will tell her about his business "this one time." Looking her right in the face, he lies. Any stray seose of Michael as a heroic figure is here, if not necessarily eliminated, at least severely shaken. Robert Ray points out Michael's violation of the heroic code of truthtelling in this scene, the code that demands that the hero admit to the necessity of violence and of the wielding of violence for the greater good. The shocking reversal of expectation underlines and clinches the new Don's cold pragmatism.

The final images evoke Kay's subjectivity for the first time, as she watches her husband attended by his soldiers; what we see and, more crucially, what we are not allowed to see cements the changeover from the benign, inscrutable Don Vito

Corleone to his cold, ruthless son. The famous final shot/reverse shot pattern shows

Michael's hand being kissed from Kay's point-of-view. As the door is closed on her. 81

cutting her and us off frorn the inner sanctum, we are moved to a shot of the dismayed Kay as the door seals shut. As Robert Kolker points out, we are left here in an oddly ambiguous position, Our perspective at once aligned with that of the

Corleones and divorced from it; "..we are trapped on the inside and in the dark. We get to see no more than Kay does, even though we look from the inside out. Our implication in Michael's world is both suggested and withheld." (Kolker p.178) Like so many Westerns of the same period, The Godfather is concerned with a period of transition, with old values giving way to new ones. Though it shares a sense of elegy with films like The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971 ), unlike them it offers a source of renewal in a young hero capable of presenring the old system, but his heroism is presented, if not ironically, then certainly ambivalently. What sense of tragedy there is is partly substructural, but is alsa apparent in the trajectory from the golden world of the film's beginning to the cold world of the conclusion, which finaliy shuts us out. You might Say, to use Northrop

Frye's archetypal terms, that the film's panicular tragic vision is the tragedy of the

Fall. Chapter Three

The Godfather Part II

As Robert Kolker writes, the reverse angle denied us at the end of Part One is essentially provided at the start of Part Two. We see Michael's blank face in closeup, sunounded by darkness. His hand is kissed; his face has accrued layers of exhaustion: he looks ravaged. The mournful, ominous strains of the "Godfather

Waltzn fiIl the soundtrack. The title appears over a shot of Michael's empty chair, marked, as Kolker points out, by a deep depression. The film about to unreel is in part an exploration of the Godfather ideal as visualized in this shot of the family

"throne." Its unique time scheme (juxtaposing the exploits of the young Vito, making his way in the New World, with those of his son, in the throes of spiritual declinel makes the concept of association montage its guiding structural principle; it uses tehniques of juxîaposition and contrast to demonstrate how that monarchical ideal has aged and been found wanting over the decades. As such, it builds on the broader thematic implications of the previouç installment. What emerges is a rigourously analytic work which, as John Hess points out in his famous Marxist analysis of the film, delineates not only the moral decline of the family and its leader but the degree to which that decline emerges inexorably out of the success of the family's revered founder, the forrn Vito's success takes makes the fall inevitable. To quote Hess quoting Coppola: "1 leave Godfather Pan TWQ,with Michael very possibly the most powerful man in America. But he is a corpse." (Hess, p. 86) 83

Kolker points out that the trajectory suggests that of the traditional gangster film dynastically expanded: the rise of the father ensures the fall of the son. Of course, Michael leaves the film still alive and successful, unlike his gangster-movie precursors. The sense of tragedy that emerges is akin not to the likes of Scarface but rather to the tragic vision Northrop Frye ingeniously locates in Prince Hal's rise in his study of Shakespearean tragedy, Fools of Tirne. To apply Frye's terms to the classical gangster narrative, if films like the Depression-era Çaesar/Enemv/Scarface triumvirate or White Heat can be read as tragedies of order, in which the natural order of things is rocked by a hero whose true status as usurper must be teasserted by film's end, what we see atypically in Godfather Il is a narrative closer to what

Frye calls the tragedy of the sick society. To quote Frye directly: "What is squeezed out of the tragic action is not excessive ambition but excessive vitality, though it is only because of the pewerted social context that it is excessive." (Frye, p. 44) Frye writes that such a narrative is not typical of Shakespeare's work (the nearest example being Romeo and Julieu but that traces of such a tragic approach are apparent in a number of plays which he terms the tragedies of passion. In these plays (the other two being Troilus and Cressida and Antonv and Cleo~atralwe are faced with the spectacle of the Dionysian vitality of the lovers at each play's centre being crushed under the weight of clashing social forces.

Such a schema has an obvious relationship to the Outlaw Couple subgenre of the gangster film, that, not coincidentally, flourished in the late sixties and early seventies, with films like Bonnie and Clvde, Thieves Like Us (19741, and the decidedly less-renowned Dirtv Marv. Crazv Larrv (1974). Relating Godfather II 84

(1974) to the passion-tragedy may seem an unwieldy task, given Michael's clear temperamental similarity to Hal, who has, as Frye puts it, "probably less passion than any other major character in Shakespeare." (Frye p.51) Yet Hal's ascension stands, for Frye, as Shakespeare's clearest example of, to use his words again, "the cyclical movement of the youthful tragic hero." (Frye p.51) Hal moves over the course of the two plays from madcap to triurnphant warrior to magisterial upholder of the Law, from Dionysian reveller to Apollonian ruler (as, of course, he announces he will vety early on in Part One).

Along the way, though, he cruelly jettisons his tutor in debauchery. Even as the play seems to assert the value of Hal's rejection of Falstaff, to affirm its necessity, we are still more than free to regard Hal's actions as troublingly callous; as Frye puts it: "There is a markedly disapproving emphasis on what amounts to the killing of Falstaff." (Frye p.52) He is speaking here specifically of the sequel to 2

Henrv IV, Henrv V, but what he says could apply just as easily to its precursor. The second of the Henrv IV piays is a disillusioned, troubling work, which keeps its ostensible young hero offstage for much of the time, the better to concentrate on the hijinks of Falstaff that this tirne are soured by the increasing violence in the tavern, by the emphasis on aging, illness, and mortality, and by the evident fruitlessness of Falstaff's hopes for glory upon his Hal's ascension to the throne.

The play climaxes, inevitably, with Falstaff's public humiliation - the "1 know thee not, old man" speech. Godfather II is a work in that darkened spirit, but its focus is very much upon its young (though steadily aging) Don, even as he continues to be overshadowed by the legend of his father. If the first Godfather released the darker 85 implications of its Shakespearean equivatent, the tragedy of Dionysian passion and vitality squeezed out of existence that lies implicit in 2 Henry IV,a possibility within the text, becomes the tragic vision of Part Two.

The narrative proper commences in 190 i, in Corleone, Sicily. A funeral procession crosses the parched landscape; titles inforrn us where we are: in the midst of a Mafia reign of violence that has claimed the life of the young Vito

Andolini's father. The mourners soon corne across the body of the boy's brother.

With that, his mother goes to the presiding Don Ciccio to beg for his life. When the

Don, fearing the boy's vengeance, refuses, she holds him at knifepoint, screaming for her young son to escape. What follows is the hideous prima1 scene of the whole

Godfather saga; from Vito's long shot point-of-view, we see the Don's hoods push his mother away frorn their boss, while her gaze stays fixed on her son - and us.

The hoods fire their guns, sending her body flying. What is striking here is the boy's preternatural coolness in the face of this: it forecasts the calcuiating men that Vito and, eventually, his youngest son would become. As such, it underscores the sense that what we are watching here is the making of a myth: Vito is hidden on a donkey while Ciccio, like a Sicilian King Herod, proclaims that the penalty for those harbouring the boy will be a stiff one. The boy escapes to the brave new world of

America; an exultant orchestral score plays over the first ecstatic closeup view of the Statue of Liberty. It is at Ellis Island that the mute Vito is granted the name

"Corleone" by an indifferent customs official, who sees the name on a tag the boy wears. Having been rechristened with the name of his home village, Vito is recast here as an embodiment of the Old World in America, his name an ever-present 86 reminder of where he cornes from.

The segue to the blighted present is effected by a panicularly felicitous transition, from the quarantined Vito bursting forth in angelic Song while gazing at the Statue of Liberty through his barred window, to the communion service of

Michael's son Anthony, with the hymn Vito sings taken up gradually on the soundtrack by the church organ. The time is 1958; the place is Lake Tahoe,

Nevada. Like many cowboy heroes before them (and some gangsters, notably Hiah

Sierra's Roy Earle) the Corleones have sought the opportunities available in the

American West. The New World has seemingly expanded for Vito's farnily; the linkage of the young, imprisoned Vito and his prosperous family may initially appear to assert the success of the Corleones, their achievernent of the Horatio Alger dream from the desolate, poverty-stricken anonymity of its patriarch, upon his arriva1 in America, to the very height of power and prestige enjoyed by the giant extended family he leaves behind. However, the purity of the boy's hymn is countered by the impression of vulgar conspicuous consumption conveyed in the lawn party that follows the communion. There is an arch sense of parody in this extended sequence, starting with the shot of the tangoing dancers on the gazebo, while party guests crowd around. The party seems grossly overscaled compared to its precursor in Part One; it strikes us early on as a gaudy, joyless affair, even tainting in retrospect the ornateness of the church where Anthony receives his blessing. The tone is exacerbated by the first appearances of Connie, Tom, Fredo, and the other characters we remember from Part One in the midst of the festivities.

To quote Diane Jacobs, discussing the film in a survey of Francis Coppola's oeuvre: 87

"...the central 'Farnily' members seem pinched variations of their full-bodied counterparts in the earlier work." (Jacobs p.72) The haunting echoes of Part One that resonate through Part Two serve to rernind us how much has faded away in the eight-year interim that separates the two periods in the life of the farnily, and we register how the people we remember, .and the relationships that bind them, have been eroded. Fredo and Connie are sad, dissolute figures, hopelessly dependent on Michael; both are also involved in couplings with unsavoury WASPs.

Tom is a chastenad hanger-on, pushed increasingly to the sidelines. In a particularly grim moment, the camera lingers on him, in medium long-shot through a glass partition separating him frorn Michael and Johnny Ola, as he forlornly departs the scene while the two men talk business. The robust Marna Corleone of the wedding celebration sequence in Part One, with her boisterous rendition of "Luna Mezz'o

Mare," is here replaced by a scowling matriarch who grumbles over the foibles of her children and their mates. "Times are changing," as Michael, speaking Italian, ruefully tells his mother later on.

Part Two's relation to the previous film is not, of course, simply a question of character development in accordance with the film's delineation of the passing of time since the praceding chapter. The film's contemporary sequences establish a dialectical relationship with their equivalents in Part One: or, perhaps more to the point, with our memories of Part One as they are brought to bear on the darker universe of its sequel. The first such example in the film is, of course, the lawn party sequence, again contrasting the outdoor revels with the dark business indoors. Yet the symbiosis apparent in the first film between the indoor and outdoor 88

'families", each distinct, yet each legitimizing and validating the other, is here noticeably absent. I have already mentioned the stress and strain strongly evident in family relations here, of course; there are other striking contrasts between the party sequences that introduce the family in the two films. The images bespeak an expansion of the family's means, even as the center has started to give way. The horizon is not marked by a big wall, dotted with security people, but rather by waterskiers on the lake. The scale of the party mainly precfudes the intimacy of the cinerna verite aesthetic of the first film's joyous wedding party, with its loving focus on stray moments like Clemenza's bout of dance floor exhaustion: the guests here, apart from the central family members singled out at crucial (and generally unhappy) moments, are a scarcely individuated mass. One intriguing exception to this is the shot of a fancy-dress waiter bringing a tray bearing a champagne cocktail to a sheriff's deputy in the parking-lot: where the law was indignantly chased away in the first film, hem, as Robert Kolker points out, they are embraced with open arrns.

But does the Law embrace back? A tense exchange ensues between Michael and a prominent Lawmaker, the vile Senator Geary. The senator makes clear his intention to "squeeze" Michael, to blackmail him into paying a huge amount for a gaming license - an unfortunate decision, as it turns out. Like the studio head Jack

Woltz in the first film, he directs a torrent of bigotry at the family, but unlike Woltz, he does so within the family's inner sanctum, on a day of celebration. Also, even as his presence indicates how far the family has come (given the judges who politely

"made excuses" for their absence at the wedding party in Part One), his vicious rhetoric, the ugly mirror-image of the speech he had earlier given outside in honour 89 of Michael's philanthropy, illustrates how far the Corleones still have to go. The

senator mocks the Corfeones' "oily haïr," the way they "pose in those silk suits," trying to 'pass themselves off' as "decent Americans." To close this hateful tirade,

he offers the coup-de-grace: "..A despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you

pose yourselves - yourself and your whole fucking family." Michael responds with the revealing statement, "Senator, we're both part of the same hypocrisy, but don't

ever think it applies to my family." This whoie exchange would be inconceivable in the world of the first film. Michael receives nothing like the supplicating respect his father did. (Connie projects some measure of contempt for her ruling brother, when, in response to a toast hoping that the family lives a hundred years, she bursts forth with the pronouncement "It would be true if my father were aliven; Pentangeli

chastises Michael for, uniike his father, putting "a Jew" - Hyman Roth - ahead of

his own blood.) Yet, Geary's blackmail attempt and his insults mark the rnost unsettling attack on the Corleone myth. Michael's response is most revealing: the world-weary self-disgust in "we're both part of the same hypocrisy," followed by the verbal attempt to keep the family sacrosanct together indicate how Michael's acid self-knowledge is baianced by a deep attachment to the familial rnyth. For him, the family is still sacred; these contradictory attitudes will prove insupportable as the film proceeds. As Geary says, playfully aiming a-miniature cannon perched on the desk at the Young Don, "Some of us have to play little games. You play yours."

Clearly, something has to give.

It is worth noting that the scenes in which Michael meets with visitors are constructed quite differently than their equivalents in Part One. Where the earlier scenes were built mainly upon long takes and two-shots delineating Vito's communion with his subjects, the argumentative encounters Michael has with those requesting his favours are largely divided into shotheverse shot patterns - conventional, yes, but the link with the earlier film's utilization of such a conventional, 'classical' form of montage is crucial. Shotfreverse shot in The

Godfather is used to connote important steps in the relationships of the characters depicted, with the level of warmth and intimacy in the images and their linkages determined by whether what we are seeing is the warm bond of family reasserted in the face of crisis (the conversations between Vito and Tom Hagen) or rather, as is more common, the spectacle of people at odds; the latter usage ranges from the strained reunion of Michael and Kay after his return from Sicily to the battle of words between Michael and Moe Green. However, lengthy two-shots tend to be used in scenes in which Vito acts the benign monarch: a good example, apart from the early scenes with Johnny Fontaine and Amerigo Bonasera, is with Michael, where he expounds on his dreams for the family's future. The two- shot in these sequences seems to situate Brando's Don at their still point: he forms their center of gravity. There are no such scenes in Godfather II; Pacino's Don is denied such a distinction. The shotlreverse shot structure is used exclusively here in the presentation of Michael's dealings with people, and these are nearly al1 either vaguely or stridently confrontational. The scenes near film's beginning with Geary,

Connie, and Pentangeli, and later with Fredo, Roth and Kay, subtly indicate the fragmentation at the core of the family, for all the power it has attained. Two exceptions are the warm scenes of brotherly bonding, between Michael and Tom, 91 after the attack on the house, and between Michael and Fredo in Havana, both shot in intimate closeup, the scene with Tom especially mirroring the Consiglieri's talks with Vito. Of course, these relationships soon deteriorate, culrninating in Tom's alienation from Michael, and in fredo's murder on Michael's orders.

The disintegration of the old family is matched by an aesthetics of disintegration relative to the aesthetics of unity and harmony that mark the earlier film's treatment of the family under Vito. Another example from the lawn party sequence of these formal changes is a key transition from the interior world (the world of men and business) to the exterior world of women and children, the

Corleones' public face. We are moved via direct cut from Michael and Tom exchanging a darkly meaningful look after Geary's departure, to the exterior world, where beautiful people miIl in inappropriate evening dress. The cut is jarring: the sunlight is blinding and the rise in volume with the shift outdoors causes the music issuing from the bandstand, heard dimly in the background at the end of the previous scene, to burst forth shrilly. This is in utter contrast to the smoothness of the interior-exterior movements of the wedding party sequence in Fart One, which effectively mirror a world whose constituent parts exist in graceful symbiosis, its public and private halves perfectly harmonious. Here the worlds both overlap (the exterior world is clearly visible through the office windows, where the drawn blinds in Vito's office kept the outside separate, apart) and collide. All is clearly not right in the kingdom, as the machine-gun attack on Michael and his family in the inner sancturn corroborates. 92

The change in the presentation of the Corleones and their endeavours is

nowhere more clear than in the depiction of the violence they direct at their

enemies. A striking early example is the scene in which Senator Geary gets his

comeuppance (is made "an offer he can't refuse."). The sequence very much lacks

the voluptuous horror of its precursor, the horse's head scene, nor does it inspire

the same sense of awe, nor is it meant to, apparently. What we see is Tom arriving

in a Las Vegas brothel to extend the family "generosity" toward Geary, who we see

frantically attending the bloody corpse of a prostitute. By ail appearances, Geary

killed her in a state of frenzied drunkenness: he can't remember how it happened.

As with the horse's head, the body is not immediately shown, but is gradually

revealed to us with a right-to-left pan, in this case, following the Senator, clad only

in a towel, as he moves across the room to untie the dead woman from the

headboard of the bed on which she lies. The scene develops without the scare

music, or the shock cutting of its precursor - without the theatrical flamboyante of

the earlier sequence. Instead, it forces us to stare unblinkingly at the scene, at the

anguished figure of the Senator, pathetically trying to wipe the blood from the body

before dissolving into hysterical tears. The family has him right where it wants him:

of course, it is the family that is responsible for his predicarnent, and for the

woman's death.

The treatment of the scene doesn't allow for the sense of righteous complicity with the Corleones that the horse's head scene did: neither does the

horrific act itself. There is no way we can revel in the triumph over Geary; neither are we astounded by the terrifying miraculousness of the deed. The presence of the 93

Corleone soldier Al Neri on the scene indicates how her death was achieved, as does Tom's shamefaced gesture at him to stay out of sight. A single felicitous cut encapsulates the scene's overall strategy. Tom tells the Senator that he is in good hands with the family, that taking care of this will be a simple matter. "She had no family, nothing. It will be as if she didn't exist." As that last Iine ends, there is a cut, from Tom wiping his hands, to indicate how easy the disposai of this problem will be, to the senator seated at the of the bed, the murdered waman right behind him: she won't be spirited from our attention so easily. This scene functions at every levei as a demystification of the Corleones' power: we see how it functions, and we see the extent of the consequences of its exertion.

This scene exemplifies the film's concerted diminution of the Corleone mythos: where the horse's head scene stood as a message, directed as much toward us as toward Woltz as to the magnitude of the farnily's wrath when crossed

(and to the near-supernatural powers at the Don's command) its equivalent in this film impresses us as a sordid act of blackmail at best, a hideous murder of an innocent at worst, Similady, the film's violence is comparatively sparse; what few violent acts there are in the contemporary passages are either muted, deliberately undramatic (the murders at film's end), or faintly parodic (the garrotting of Johnny

Ola) or anticlimactically botched (the attempts on Roth and Pentangeli), or combinations thereof. The attacks on Pentangeli and on the Corleone compound aside, al1 acts of aggression are the work of the Corleones - at the instigation of

Michael, of course. Yet, by dedramatizing these violent acts through the approaches listed above, the aesthetics of legitimation that marks the Corleones' aggressive 94 endeavours in Part One, ensuring that the depictions of the hits mystify and glorify the farnily even as they terrify us, is transformed into an aesthetics that to a degree demvstifies the Corleones.

Its approach is analogous in that sense to the reworking of the Prince Hal legend in 2 Heniv IV. Though the play is rather unlike Godfather II in its deemphasizing of the character of Hal himself in favour of Falstaff, where the film increasingly posits Michael as the central tragic figure, a cornparison can be drawn insofar as both ptay and film can be deemed mock-heroic. As James Black points out, where 1 Henrv IV had in Hotspur a representative of the warrior ideal, Part Two has in Falstaff and Pistol its reductio ad absurdum. Where the earlier ptay had its

Apollonian scourge of rebellion in Hal, the best Part Two can manage is the

Machiavellian deceitfulness of Prince John. Of course, examination of the battlefield confrontations where the two brothers respectively distinguish themselves serves to underscore theit differences. Where 1 Henrv IV culminates triumphantly at

Shrewsbury, with Hal's victory and Hotspur's apotheosis, its sequel places the meeting of the opposing sides at Gaultree at approximately its midpoint, and ends it ignorniniously, first with Prince John's promise to the archbishop's forces that their grievances wil1 be redressed, and then with his treacherous arrest of the rebels once the deal has been struck and the rebel troops have been discharged. To quote Black directly, when he pronounces John as as much a counterfeit warrior as Falstaff and

Pistol: "When he unctuously prociaims that "God, and not we, hath safely fought today" (Act IV, Scene Il, Ln.1211, the effect is of a formula emptily mouthed, and the emphasis falls heavily on 'safely fought'." (Black, p. 378) 1 Henrv IV also has 95 its parodic elernents, embodied in Falstaff and his false victory over Hotspur, but as

I have already indicated, the parodic and heroic exist here in more-or-less equal measure; in the sequel, the idea of heroism cornes under sardonic scrutiny, allowing a tone of jaundiced parody to prevail.

By the same token, where the first Godfather establishes a new gangster mythology, a vision of the Underworld as a benign kingdom under siege, its sequel challenges that conception through a process of sobering demystification. Yet, 2

Henrv IV, cannily keeps its prince, its exalted heir to the throne, out of harm's way, so to speak. Noticeably absent in the Gaultree scene, he is effectively dissociated from his brother's actions there, so he manages to ernerge from the play untainted by any suggestion of false heroics. In Godfather II, on the other hand, Michael's moral descent is squarely faced, and so the heroism he displays in Part One, however arnbiguously, is here called into severe question. Part One creates in the

Corleones a myth of unsurpassed grandeur, even as it subtly undermines it by charting the first stages of that myth's corruption: Part Two enlarges that myth to accomodate its historical roots, the better to make its corruption its subject,

The first two Çodfathers relate in an interesting way to the John Cawelti conception of the seventies as a period in American cinerna of intense generic modification. Cawelti writes that the era saw in genre cinema a phase of re- examination in which the classic Hollywood genres were held up for inspection and were either mocked, affirmed, or debunked. The tendency in some Hollywood films of the tirne toward demythification is perhaps clearest in some of the westerns he mentions, notably McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Where he tends to stumble is on the subject of the gangster film. The following is his delineation of what he sees as the essential gangster myth:

The underlying myth of the genre affirms the Iimits of individual aggression in a society which tolerates and even encourages a high degree of personal enterprise and violence. The gangster becomes a tragic figure not because he is inherently evil, but because he fails to recognize these limits. The myth assures us that society is not repressive or violent: instead, it shows how criminal violence evokes its own inevitable doom. (Cawelti, p. 508)

Couldn't you Say, though, that the fate of Rico Bandello at the hands of the

Law in Little Caesar at the very least irnplies the violent, repressive potential of society? As a potentially subversive genre to start with, the gangster film is not so easily debunked or reaffirmed. If Cawelti is correct in his reading of the early seventies as a genuinely iconoclastic period in American movies (and I think he is) then part of the proof must lie in the degree to which the gangster film became an object of nostalgia (as in the resurgence of gangster biographies that produced films like Leok~(1975) and The Valachi Paoers (1972) in the wake of The Godfather's success) and the extent to which the gangster hero became for the first time an object of unadulterated affirmation (supremefy so in the depiction of Vito Corleone, as I have tried to show). This latter fact prompted much of the negative criticism that greeted the film, with David Thomson being one of the most articulate detractors. He argues in his book America In the Dark that the film cynically plays ta the moviegoer's longing for peace and stability at the expense of the satirical implications of the material, with its juxtaposition of the exalted institutions of our society (family, the church) with acts of bloodletting - that where it could agitate and confound it chooses the cornfortable respite of melodrama. His criticism also

has sociopolitical dimensions. To quote him at some length:

It is natural that the success of The Godfather launched a sequel; just as inevitably, corporations perpetuate themselves at the heart of America. Those servicemen returning from Vietnam, and those millions of Americans aching for calm, needed a setting fit for heroes, that holds to the dignified life, to family meals, to church services and the near papal benevolence of a healing godfather. The election claims of Richard Nixon were barely distinguishable from the policies of Don Corleone: peace on the streets, the freedorn of businesss to expand and be prosperous, honor in profit and hard work, distaste for narcotics, support of a Christian moral and social ethic, belief in neighborliness, and the schizoid inability to relate wholesome ends and a crook's methods. (Thomson, pps. 189-190)

Though Thomson refers to both of the first two Godfathers, both in the piece quoted here and in the later article (previously-quoted) on the Godfather saga prepared for television, he seems to regard thern as a single entity, which is peculiar as it seems to me impossible that one could corne away from Part Two feeling the sentiments quoted above. (It is perhaps for this reason that he hardly addresses the sequel specifically, concentrating most of his analysis instead upon the events of

Part One.) Part Two is very much a resDonse to its precursor: indeed, this was very much the strategy, at least as far as Francis Coppola was concerned. To quote

Robert Ray, quoting Coppola: "1 felt I was rnaking a harsh statement about the

Mafia and power at the end of G~dfatherOne when Michael murders al1 those people, then lies to his wife and closes the door. And so if the statement I was trying to make was outbalanced by the charismatic aspects of the characters, I felt

Godfather Two was an opportunity to rectify that." (Ray, pps. 386-387)Thus, you could argue that Part Two is a film in the debunking or demythologizing spirit Cawelti sees as the basis of much of the highest artistic accomplishment in

American movies in the first half of the seventies. John Hess goes rnuch further in his approbation of the film, of course. As he writes: "Few films have used such extensive means ($13 miIIion) and created such beautiful images in order to show the corruption and perversion of the system which supplied those rneans." (Hess, p.

85) You might Say, ta counter Thomson's objections, that if we agree that the first

Godfather ironically reinforces the bourgeois-capitalist myth, then Part Two surely subverts it.

The first Godfather is a good deal more complicated than Thomson suggests, though, as I have tried to show. Robert Ray's analysis of the film suggests another way to situate it within its period. Ray offers another taxonomy for American genre movies of the late sixties and the early-to-rnid-seventies, one based more specifically on ideological iines than the one postulated by Cawelti, and one also informed by the intense cultural polarization of the era of Vietnam, Kent State, the assassinations, and Watergate. His categories hinge largely for our purposes upon the given film's attitude towards the forces of authority: the Law. He distinguishes between films that grant figures of authority (whether officially designated as such or rather surrogate upholders of the Law) a license for brutal extremes, and those that make heroes of those on society's margins - outlaws, gangsters, seedy private detectives, and so on. The former group tends to demonize those who subvert social strictures, while the latter renders the Law an oppressive, life-destroying force. The former group he terms the "Right" cycle of films, with representative examples being Dirtv Harrv (197 11, Peath Wish (1974) Walkina Tall (19731, and 99 The French Connection (1971 1. The latter group he calls the "Left" cycle - this category being perhaps more representative of the work of the New Hollywood, with its young filmmakers' connections with the counterculture. Films in this cycle include Bonnie and Clvde, Butch Cass'dvI and the Sundance Kid (19691, Easv Rider

(1969) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

For Ray, the Godfather movies represent the culmination of this second strain, the completion of the cycle. What the Godfathers do is take the concept of the outlaw as a romantic hero to its forseeable lirnit, beyond which the outlaw ceases ta be that, and takes on the trappings of authority. The world in which the outlaw operates is in these films not the Iiminal, tenuous one of the Left cycle, where the frontier exists as a constant, beckoning promise - where escape is held out as at least a possibility.13 In the Godfathers, the frontiers are closed: escape is utterly impossible.

Ray's analysis brings to mind another important distinction between the first two Godfathers with regard to the Left cycle. He writes that The Godfather has in common with the other Left films a tendency to isolate its heroes in, "a moral vacuum in which they can appear as forces of justice." (Ray, p. 331 No innocents are hurt by the heroes' actions in these films, according to Ray. In terms of hard facts, this is not precisely true, as earlier analysis has shown: there are two innocents caught in the crossfire initiated by the Corleones in the baptism montage

l3 A gangster film like Bonnie and Clvde and s western like The Wild Bunch are linked by this therne of escape, in addition to the other obvious cornrnonalities that make them key manifestations of this rornantic Left impulse. 100 in Part One, as indeed there are bystanders wiped out by the goodlbad guys in the opening bank robberylrnassacre in The Wild Bunch. Yet, it is true that there is a conspicuous lack of dramatic weight in the presentation of these events (though one may point out the exceptional instance of the bank teller shot point-blank in the face by Clyde Barrow in another one of the key films of the Left group). The films certainly lean toward a glorification of their outlaw central characters, whatever doubts are planted in the process. Part Two, however, completes the process started by the first film, insofar as the Underworld becomes to a far greater degree a microcosm of the Sick Society against which the Corleones' outlaw precursors in the earlier films in the cycle rebel; again, in this film, innocents are killed by the hero without any sleight-of-hand to redirect aur attention. Godfather II shares the sense of authority as a repressive, finally destructive force that permeates the Left films of the period, a time in American movies which Donald Lyons recently characterized as

"that total war of us against them, not so much apres la guerre as pendant la guerre." (Lyons, p. 48) What separates this film from the others is the fact that its hero. the figure we are meant ta identify with, is the locus of the Sick Society, its crowned ruler.

However, it would be a mistake once more to characterize Part Two of the

Godfather trilogy as a work of demystification along the lines of the 1970 western fantasia Little Bia Man. It is not that any more then 2 Henrv IV is an attack on the monarchy pure and simple. First of all, there is the ravaged glarnour of Michael himself, brilliantly incarnated by . Even as we recognize the depths of his descent, we must still recognize the towering grandeur of the conception. both of 101 him and of his increasingly labyrinthine dealings. In Michael we find an increasingly morose, self-absorbed figure, with a titanic capacity for rage, notably in the shocking moment when, telling Pentangeli of the attack on his home, he shouts the words, "IN MY HOME!!!" as if firing bullets from a gun. The scene testifies to his genius for calculation, for the manipulation of people; genuine as his rage apparently is, its release is still precisely calibrated for maximum effect. His purpose: to root out the identity of the one who ordered the attack on him. Is it Roth or Pentangeli?

The previous scene showed him calmly discussing the situation with Roth in his modest Miami home, a conversation ending with Michael asking permission to kill

Pentangeli. This sequence, however, takes place in the wintry setting of the former

Corleone residence in Long Island, which is now Pentangeli's house. In this tensely ambiguous scene, Michael drifts from musings over his childhood home, to the aforementioned burst of rage, to a cool explanation of his motives for insisting that

Pentangeli make the deal with the Roth-backed Rosato brothers, so that Roth, the true enemy, will think his deal with Michael is still a going concern.

At this point, we may surmise that Michael's meetings with Roth and

Pentangeli are intended to clarify for himself just who has betrayed hirn: Pacino's intent gaze at the two men in the respective scenes would appear to confirm this, though Michael's motivations are kept mysterious. Michael rernains wrapped at this point in an impenetrable cone of enigma that helps to mark him as the true successor to his father: the camera remains in these scenes at a severe remove, capturing hirn exclusively in long-shot.14 It is this sense of rnystery that

undetscores Michael's mystique as it did Vito's, and is central to the power of the

Corleone mythos: it lingers for al1 the ruthlessness he dis play^.'^ There is a lustre in the darkness that surrounds Michael to which the Godfathers' detractors can't fail to object, just as movie gangsters before and since the Corleones have inflamed debate as to whether the genre glorifies aggression and brutality, or appeals to fantasies of power and vengeance. We may recall some of the fan letters of the early thirties, quoted in previous chapters, with their frenzied approbation of the various gangster-movie stars. Bearing this in rnind, one may see the wisdom in

David Thomson's major epigrammatic salvo against the Godfather saga in "The

Discreet Charrn of The Godfather": "It is a movie for those who prefer to /ive in darkness. " (Thomson, p. 80)

Yet, again, the glorification argument does a disservice to the tragic vision of the gangster rnovie. Thomson writes that the Godfathers never mock Michael, or harshly condemn him, but simply show hirn; he then writes, "And whatever such balanced filmmaking shows it implicitly glorifies." (Thomson, p. 79) As I have tried already to demonstrate, it is difficult to see how we can respond to Michael's actions in this film except in a spirit of condemnation. lnsofar as he remains a

l4 MichaeYs outburst in the scene with Pentangeli rnight initially appear to afford us a glirnpse of his embattled 'true self', but both its suddenness and its sir of deliberatenecs give it the overtone of a performance, however genuine Michael's self-righteous anger here may be. In this way, it is strongiy reminiscent of Vito's sudden fury at Johnny Fontaine in Part One, when he slaps him and tells him to act Iike a man. The shared reason for these outbursta: the dramatic display of monarchical power. l5 Even in the rnidst of the dirty daalings in Cuba, we are encouraged to be irnpreased by Michael's ability to outthink hie enemies, when he tells Fredo exactly how Roth means to assassinate hirn. How does he know this? He appeam to have inherited his father's psychic ability. 1 O3

compelling figure who transcends mere villainy, whose brilliant manipulation of

others, the way his yelling brings Pentangeli to attention in the scene described above, impresses us as a kind of heroism - depleted of energy, as it may be in his case - he is a tragic figure. Frye reminds us that the tragic hero is one about whom

we have mixed feelings. (He gives Othello as an example, though Macbeth, Lear, or

many of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists would suffice.) There is always a grandeur in their actions, even their deplorable ones, just as the shadows that envelop Michael increasingiy in Part Two, both literally and figuratively, seem

paradoxicaliy to raise him in stature.

It is the contradictory nature of our response to Michael that makes him an ideal figure, a kin to his gangster-movie precursors, to embod y the contradictions inherent in the mythologies that underlie modern capitalist society. He is very much the Classical Horatio Alger Gangster for a period in American movies informed by a

rebellious, countercultural spirit unlike anything before seen in Hollywood. The early thirties were perhaps comparable, as 1 tried to show in my earlier analysis of the key

gangster movies of the period, but the films of that era tended to shy away from explicitly depicting the corruption of the ideals that underlie modern democratic society. What Warshow discerned as the deeper appeal of the gangster film. its

questioning of the success ethic, is in Godfather expanded into an unprecedented

examination of that ethic and its costs. The film's trajectory, from Vito singing

before the mighty Statue of Liberty to Michael alone on his Lake Tahoe estate,

seems to mirror the mythic passage of Arnerica through the Twentieth Century,

from New World hopefulness to postwar disillusionment. As such, it magnifies the 1 O4 subversive potential of the traditional gangster film. Where Classical Gangster films from Scarface to White Heat depict the success drive as inextricable from individual hubris (the narrative of Hotspur), The Godfather Part II depicts the contradictions implicit in the success drive as antithetical to personal happiness and individual achievement. It is the weight of these ideals as passed down from Michael's sainted father that destroys his spirit even as it causes him to destroy that which those same ideals venerate as sacred, namely his family.

The idealized criminal patriarchy of the first Godfather is something of a corporatized equivalent of the Barrow gang in Bonnie and Clvd~,at once an outlaw bastion against an oppressive Sick Society and a distorted-mirror image of its values. Yet, even as it survives and prevails where the Barrow "familyn are finally slaughtered, the Corleone corporation becomes no longer an ideal kingdom but simply a reflection of the larger society. In that way, the Michael Corleone of Part

Two is something like the Robber Baron inverse of Clyde Barrow's Robin Hood.

However, that antinomy is also present within Godfather II in the film's juxtaposition of Michael and the Robin Hood figure embodied by the Young Vito

Corleone. The "contemporary" scenes bespeak a longing for the dead patriarch, most directly expressed in the constant references to him in the dialogue; that longing is given an enormous, ghostly poignancy by 's graceful incarnation of the paterfamilias, his scenes rendering the old Don Corleone visible to us, but not quite within our reach.

The idealized portrait of him raises the question of the filmmakers' intentions.

One could argue that the ambivalence of the earlier film is here replaced by an attitude that sanctifies Vito at the expense of Michael, that imagines in the founder of the Corleone "family" a srnall entrepreneur and a decent man who loves his family, whose corporate raider son betrays everything he stood for - in other words, a rank sentimentalization of the Mafia and also an extension of the more problematic implications of the earlier film. Against this is John Hess' argument, already referred to, which insists that the film's disjunctive time scheme precludes the possibility of such a reading because of the causal relationship it implies between the rise of Vito and the spiritual fall of Michael. To quote him directly:

The relationship between the two parts of the film is not a static cornparison but dynamic movernent: hope to realization, leaving the family to building the family, warm love to cold loneliness, questions to answers, admonition ("Michael, wave goodbye.") to event (death of mother). The film does not compare a success with a failure, but shows how the success leads directly and inevitably to the failure. (Hess, p. 85)

Hess also argues, along similar lines, that the cornic-opera sentimentality of the flashback scenes is strategic in conjunction with the coldness of the contemporary scenes, insofar as the former "soften us upn for the acridness of the scenes of decay that follow, becoming, in other words, part of the film's strategy of distanciation. I believe Hess' assessrnent to be accurate, though I think that his reading must be qualified by Our sense, as previously-mentioned, of the tragic grandeur of the spectacle of Michael in the throes of decline. Part of the otherworldly sadness of his spirituaf ruin lies in that relationship between the cold, shadowy blues of Michael's kingdom and the saturated golds of Vito's Brave New

World - the world of the earlier film only more so. What the colour scheme conveys, 1O6 and the gauzy images, the manipulation of classic Arnerican icongraphy,16 even the italian spoken constantly in the flashback scenes is a sense that the world Vito is seen to inhabit is meant to be taken as a dream of the past emanating from the desiccated consciousness of Michael, just as the Sicily to which he ventured in the first film seemed to emerge out of his heartsick father's dream life. The obvious aesthetic link is the use of dissolves to connect present and past as well as the straight cut to the present that introduces the Cuban segment. just as Michael's sojourn with Apollonia was jarringly interrupted by the shifts back to the gangland warfare in New York, a constant snapping-back to reality. Again, though, just as the omnipresent threat of violence, culminating in Apollonia's violent death, served to undermine the dream of the old world in Part One, so too do the outbursts of violence in the flashbacks in Part Two serve to remind us that the dream of Vito's rise is only that - the dream of a battered. weary son lost in idolization of his sainted father, the true Godfather.

The first section of Michael's story ends with a short scene of leave-taking between Michael and his son, in which the boy asks if sorneday ha too can help in the family business. Michael replies, "Maybe someday." cueing the first extended flashback, and De Niro's first appearance as the young Vito. From the shot of

Michael in his son's bedroom, seen in medium closeup, left of frame, there is a dissolve to a medium shot of Vito. right of frame. Vito's wife enters; there is

lei A notable example i8 the Statue of Liberty, seen in al1 its rnajesty in the Ellis Island sequence, and then towards the end of the film in miniature, in the form of a bronze replica Vito gives as a gift to relations in Sicily - the Don making a present of what America has to offer. 1 O7 another dissolve, to a medium long shot of the same scene. The shot now encompasses the object of Vito's gaze: the baby in the crib we gradually realize to be Sonny. To the contrast of this warm family scene and what Robert Kolker terms the "frightening and ironic connotations" of Anthony's innocent question to his father, we might add another frightening layer of meaning in this juxtaposition:

Sonny is ta become the Don's designated successor through primogeniture - in other words, is to join the farnily business, and of course, die for it.17

In the course of the first flashback, Vito attends a music hall performance of an operatic skit called "Senza Mamma", in which an immigrant bemoans his lot, stranded in America (signified metonymically by the giant mural behind him depicting the Statue of Liberty) while his mother languishes back in the old country.

The narrative on view here is a sentimental mirror of Vito's situation; the self- reflexivity is doubled by the appearance of Fanucci, his dark, menacing frame melodramatically blocking the stage from our view. Then, when Vito and his friend

Genco venture backstage to visit the object of Genco's affections, the young fernale lead in the opera, they corne across Fanucci again, terrorizing her and her father, the theatre-owner, for extortion money. While the film as a whole is largely free of the allusions to the iconography of past gangster movies that dot its predecessor

(such as the shooting of Barzini on the courthouse steps, mirroring Cagney's death at the close of The Roarina Twenties), in this scene we are recalled to an even

l7 Those farnilisr with the original Puzo novsl may note a double irony here. In the chepter dealing with the young Vito's exploits, from which the flashbacks in Godfather II were drawn, Vito's murder of Fanucci ia witnessed by the young Sonny, who later insists on joining the family business. Anthony's question in light of the book seems almost a qentle homage to the more violent source of inspiration. 1O8

earlier period of movies. We see Fanucci and his victims framed squarely, as though

bound on al1 sides by a proscenium arch. On this stage, Fanucci holds a knife to the

young girl's throat: the scene is, as Jeffrey Chown writes, "a tableau reminiscent of

a D.W. Griffith silent melodrama." (Chown, p. 102) Vito watches the scene coolly,

impassively, as though already sizing Fanucci up for the kill. Vito is soon to become the hero of this melodrama.

The next transition is a cut from Sonny playing on a rug "acquired" for Vito and his family by the young Clemenza, (Vito's first contact in organized crime, soon to be a lifelong partneri to a nighttime shot of a train barrelling around a corner. On the train is Michael, alone but for a bodyguard, on his way to meet Hyrnan Roth.

The remainder of this segment (at 50 minutes, the longest in the film) depicts

Michael's dealings with Roth and Pentangeli, the attack on the latter, the blackmail of Geary and, rnost crucially, Michael's Cuban riegotiations culrninating in the revolution, the failed attem pt on Roth's life , and Michael's discovery of Fred0's betrayal. These latter scenes delineate the superficial pinnacle of Michael's success; a key scene is the boardroom meeting with Cuban government representatives, and various captains of industry, where Michael is introduced by the Batista figure, in a witty euphemisrn, as "representative of Our associates in tourism and leisure activities." The camera tracks past the various V.I.Ps as a solid gold telephone is passed around, in a visual echo of the handling of Vito8s sumrnit meeting with the heads of the five families in Part One. Against the benevolent largesse Vito extends in the earlier film is the sour dispiritedness of this meeting, even as it underscores

Roth's later pronouncement, "Michael, we're bigger than U.S. Steel." The mood 1O9 rnirrors Michael's drained spirit, of course, and his knowledge that this, the biggest deal of his Iife, has already been undermined by Roth's incursions against him.

The near-uncanny resemblance of the first Godfather and 1 Henry IV is not quite so readily apparent in Part Two's refationship with the Shakespearean source.

What separates them is a feature discerned in most scholarship on the play: the degree to which Falstaff and the comedy in the tavern overwhelm the narrative of the prince and the intrigues of the court. To quote Harry Levin on the difference between the two plays: "Part One manages to balance the historic and comic elements, and to sound with Hotspur a tragic note. History, in Part Two, is outdistanced by comedy most of the way ..." (Levin, p. 8) In Godfather Il, on the other hand, we may ask, where are the equivalents of Doll Tearsheet and Pistol? As already noted, however, the elegiac strain and the concomitant sense of disillusionment that darkens the comedy in 2 Henrv IV is also visible in the still-more somber context of the second Godfather. Both film and play share the feeling, as

Levin puts it, "that we have survived a season of plenty and somehow lived on into leaner days." (Levin, p. 15) The most important manifestation of the darker tendencies of 2 Henry IV (where the play and the film dovetail most closely) is the tragic substructure common to both works; the tragic 'heroes' being, respectively,

Falstaff and his filmic equivalents. More will be said of that, but the film's equivalent of the disillusioning escapade at Gaultree Forest is the Cuban section, where Michael outwits Roth, but in the process of doing so demonstrates the decline of the heroic ideal that sustained the Corleone Family in our eyes and seemed to put them above the dirty tricks of their enemies. 110

This process begins with the attempted garrotting of Pentangeli by the

Rosato brothers, an event that parallels the sneak attack on tuca Brasi, with three differences worth noting here. First, the attack is botched; second, the staging, adopting a pattern already familiar in Part Two, lacks the dreamy sensuality of its predecessor (Brasi's slow sinking to the floor, the view through the fishbowl, the giant distension in his face caused by his tangue protruding into his cheek). The

Rosatos' assault, by contrast, is fast, abrupt, and takes place largely offscreen.

Thirdfy, it is announced as "a message from Michael Corleone." Aithough we later discover that this is a lie, it is a full twenty minutes before the issue is clarified for us. The likable Pentangeli appears in the interim to have been betrayed by his Don.

This troubling notion, coupled with the nearly-casual staging of the failed hit itself, here mitigates against the sense of awe or perverse attractiveness that marks the killings in Part One. Underscaring the general sense of disillusionment is the biackmail of Geary, seen in the scene immediately following the aborted attack on

Pentangeli.

As the big Cuban deal crashes in ruins, the hits begin in earnest. Michael sends his bodyguard (a big, silent, hulking character, his own Luca Brasi) to kill

Johnny Ola and Roth. The first murder proceeds on course; Ola is garrotted on a terrace. curtains blowing in the wind. The parodic overtones mentioned earlier are underscored considerably by the stolid figure of the bodyguard who, in his black clothing and broad-brimmed hat, suggests the first silhouette view of Fanucci at the music hall. Then the attempted pillow-srnothering of Roth in his sick bed at the hospital, possibly a minor-key reprise of the threat posed against the hospitalized 111

Don in the first Çodfather, is foiled, interrupted by the arriva1 of military police: the bodyguard is shot dead. This anticlimactic finish is juxtaposed with the dropping of balloons heralding the start of the New Year. The scene is a lavish party thrown by

General Batista, soon to be interrupted, of course, by the news of the coup-d'etat and the impending takeover by Castro's rebels (though none of the real names are used). The failure of the mechanisrn of violence by which the Corleones sustain their power is countered by the dawn of a new order, the overthrow of corruption and tyranny.

The depiction of the rebels is an interesting and troubling facet of the film's tragedy of passion. As Robert Kolker writes, the film's Cuban episode "could stand as one of the most hopeful moments of political insight in American film and the one clear expression of an alternative to the Corleone myth." (Kolker, p. 192) What is fascinating is that Michael appears to recognize this fact himseif; our first sight of hirn in Cuba is in the back seat of a Iimo besieged by beggars, his grimly self- conscious expression seeming to betray his understanding of his position vis-a-vis the locals - an exploiter. En route to a big conference, he sees a revolutionary blow himself up rather than give in to the authorities, an event he makes sure to mention while feasting with his prospective partners on a cake with icing designed in the shape of the map of Cuba. This apparent indiscretion on his part is clearly a ploy to undermine Roth, but his assessment of the situation (that the rebels can win) is obviously borne out by history. Michael is granted an insight into the potential of revolutionary idealism above and beyond the profit motive that escapes Roth, who contends that rebellion is in the country's blood - a constant, nagging elernent in 112

Cuban society, but nothing more than that. The geopolitical analogy underlining the gangland battles on the streets of New York in the first film is here extended to a point where the Corleones' dealings are inextricable from the reality of geopolitics.

The Underworld and the Upperworld have effectively merged insofar as the Mafia's rapaciousness in Cuba at once mirrors and acts in collusion with the imperialist excursions of the U.S. government.

Robert Kolker however detects some ambiguity in the film's treatment of this theme. He points out that there is little to contradict another reading which sees the revolution in Cuba as simply a triumph of the rampaging hordes. It is true that our view of the events is confined in essence to the view from Michael's lirno; indeed, the final shot in the Cuban segment shows Michael in the back seat of his limousine, besieged by triumphant people, who bang on the doors and roof of the car as it navigates its way through the congested streets. It should be pointed out, though, that there is considerable time devoted to footage of the swelling throngs of people, more than the simple pressure of narrative would appear to justify. Also crucial is the series of events that are juxtaposed with the Cuban revolution, both in the present tirne and in the past of the family patriarch, and how the meanings of these events are magnified by association. Most important of al1 is the effect of these events on the arnbiguous figure at their center, Michael himself. He has remained so far at a mysterious remove from us; his thoughts about the events in his life have been obscured by his calculating veneer - have only been available to us through inference. This starts to change, however, as the family starts to unravel. 113

This process begins in earnest with the single most important event in the

Cuban segment: Michael's discovery of Fredo's betrayal. His shock is not ours, however; we have already been informed of Fredo's involvement in the attack on the family compound via a brief scene, situated after Michael's meeting with

Pentangeli in New York and before the Rosato brothers' attack on Pentangeli, in which Fredo receives a clandestine nighttime phone cal1 from Johnny Ola. We are also made aware of Fredo's innocence in the matter (how he was duped into aiding the attackers' entry into the compound). Our knowledge of the truth deflects the emphasis from Michaef's dealings with Roth to the question of how he will discover

Fredo's role in the attempted hit, and, more importantly, to the question of what will happen to Fredo once he is found out. The scenes with Fredo in Havana are marked by the disconcerting ambiguity of Michael's behaviour, he always seems to be sizing his brother up, checking his reactions, especially in the nightclub scene in which Fredo lets slip that he has seen the onstage sex show previously with Johnny

Ola, contrary to his denial that he had ever met him. In the sequence in question, the moment of revelation marks a return to a more expressionist mode of discourse, where Michael's pain at his betrayal is made tangible to us in a manner equivalent to the moment of suspended time immediately prior to Michael's killing of McLuskey and Solloto in Part One. We see a tightly packed frame, encompassing Fredo,

Senator Geary (now securely in Michael's pocket) and assorted hangers-on on the right, and Michael, isolated in the left background. On Fredo's line, "Johnny Ola told me about this place. He brought me here," there is a cut to Michael, his eyes darting with shock. He is seen in a head-and-shoulder shot at frame right, while his 114 bodyguard Iurks ominously in the background at frame Mt. The scene ends with a repeat of the original wide shot, with Michael again isolated in the left corner of the frame. He bends over, clasping his forehead, white the brassy music ernanating from the stage starts to echo grotesquely on the soundtrack.

Michaal maices his painful discovery known to Fredo at the New Year's celebration. Surrounded by revellers, he grabs Fredo by the neck and plants the

Mafia kiss of death on his lips. "You broke my heart," he says once, then again more emphatically as he shakes his brother by the throat. Fredo escapes into the surging mass, then into the throngs of people outside; he turns a scared deaf ear on

Michael when he offers him safe passage out of the city: "You're still my brother," the Don cries imploringly from his limo, as Fredo disappears into the mob. The juxtaposition of the family rent asunder and the outbreak of the mass revolutionary spirit Ras clear dire implications; Fredo's betrayal, as misguided and ineffectual as it is, is identified with rebellion, which according to the Corleone ideology is treasonous, a threat to security. Michael's loss of his controlling ties in Cuba is equated with his loss of control over his family. Of course, the punishment for rebellion, as established in the earlier film, is death. The seeming contradictions in

Michael's behaviour toward Fredo - from self-righteous, murderous anger to a desperate invocation of their brotherly bond - are in iact completely consistent with

Michael's belief in the myth of the family: rage at Fredo's treason coupled with an automatic observance of the ties of family, however frayed they may be. Of course,

Fredo's breach of trust is, according to Michael's system of belief, ultimately unforgivable, as the remainder of the film bears out. 115

At this point, with the Corleones' main foes esssntially vanquished (with

only the Senate hearings on organized crime remaining to be overcome) the film

takes an introspective turn. With the enemies from without hardly a relentless force,

the emphasis shifts to the family's disintegration from within. Accordingly, the film

becomes increasingly somber and meditative, as Michael does. Even as the film

maintains its solemn distance from the young Don, even as the shadows darken

around him, it establishes a Iink with Michael's inner life through the remaining

flashback sequences that seem to emanate more and more from Michael's

consciousness. The relationship between these segments and the present-day

episodes becomes increasingly fluid, with the transitions back to 1959 effected

through either dissolves or fades, not straight cuts. What we see paralleled in the

contemporary and flashback segments are two rises to power: Vito's to the position

of Don with the murder of Fanucci; Michael's to the height of Robber Baron success

with his defeat of the Senate inquiry into the organization. Where Vito's nobility as

Robin Hood protector of the community is asserted, however, Michael's rise to a

position of near-legitimacy, signified by the speech he gives on the Senate floor, where he denies his criminal past and present, and by Senator Geary's heartfelt declaration of his love for the Italian-American community, is offset by a growing sense of the immense psychic cost for the increasingly isolated ruler. These scenes are equivalent to the play's meditation on the cost of power, epitomized by the increasingly wan, sickly Henry IV's speech culminating in the famous words: "Then happy low, lie down!/Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." (Act II, Scene 1, Il6

Lns. 30-31) We are not allowed to forget, however, that that crown is inherited, like

a form of original sin.

Michael's exhausted arrivai home from Cuba is met with the disconcerting

news that Kay has miscarried. The scene in which Tom tells Michael the news is

the first of the increasingly confrontational and emotionally violent exchanges that

chart the dissolution of the "outer family" of wives, children and brothers. As

Robert Kolker writes of Michael's reaction, "the old family obsessions, the need for

a 'masculine child', overcome any other feelings he might have." (Kolker, p. 180)

Michael asks if the dead infant was a boy; when Tom dissembles, Michael abruptly

shouts, "Can't you give me a straight answer for once!? Was it a boy!?" As should

be clear by this point, Michael's outbursts are those of a master manipulator, one

more than capable of directing his anger and frustration, however genuine it may

be, to best ensure that others submit to his will. The handling of this petulant

expression of anger however differs considerably from the treatment of his

browbeating of Pentangeli. The scene is modulated the better to record Michael's

shifts in emotional temperature; his angry response to Tom's insufficient answer is

seen through an abrupt cut to a closeup of him as he yells his displeasure.

The approach here initiates a pattern of long-shot ennui and disillusion

followed Dy closeup rage that marks the confrontations that follow between Michael

and Fredo, and then between Michael and Kay - used to particularly devastating

effect in the latter sequence. What close examination of these scenes underlines is just how much of the violence in the contemporary scenes is confined to the spectacle of family breakdown. Concurrent with this is the change in aesthetics 117 since the first Godfather. The display of power in that film as shown in previous analysis is articuiated through the use of slow forward and backward dollies to draw us toward either the sources of family power (the opening backward track from the undertaker's face, gradually revealing the Don; the forward dolly on Michad as he outlines his plans for killing McLuskey and Sollozo) ot toward its manifestations (the horse's headl. There is only one such tracking shot in Part Two (and its use is indicative of the aesthetic change since the first film); the traveling shots there are are mainly lateral, the camera sliding across images such as the hunt for the attackers at the Corleone compound. The camera observes space: except for the one major exception mentioned above, occurring at film's end, it never penetrates it through rnovement. The aesthetics of Corleone power are reconstituted in this film so we look at its mechanics, at how it operates; we are not invited to be complicit with it. The sense of distance that made us regard the Corleone machine with awe in the first film has here hardened into an icy remove. What affections we might have for the Family have dwindled. as befits the film's therne of decline.

That sense of decline is much more subtly apparent in the flashback scenes that follow Michael's return from Cuba. The story of young Vito seerns superficially closer to the first film's narrative of power righteously maintained and justice meted out, but. juxtaposed as they are with the waning ofOthe family decades later, and compared to the legitimation of the family violence in Part One, the scenes depicting

Michael's father's rise seem to mark the path of Michael's descent. The flashback that immediately follows the news of Kay's miscarriage is the most pivotal one in the film. delineating the single crucial move that defines Vito's ascent. where he 118

"makes his bones", the murder of Fanucci. The transition to this segment of the film is a dissolve frorn Michael, pensively smoking in medium closeup, to Vito, upset: his infant son Fredo is sick with pneumonia, and is being cupped. Robert Kolker notes the sad parallel to the adult Fredo's situation, alone and scared in New York, but the juxtaposition also pairs the sick Fredo with Kay's lost baby. The flashback proceeds with Fanucci's threats aginst Vito and his family, and the younger man's inward resolve to wipe him out. "1'11 make him an offer he donnt refuse," he genially tells

Clemenza, in one of his few utterances in English and chronologically perhaps the first use of the line established in the previous Godfather as Corleone code for the threat of violence. Though we are alerted in this way to his intentions, where Vito's promise to "take care of everything" differs from the scene in the first Godfather which Kolker rightly regards as parallel, Michael's statement not only of his intent to kill McLuskey and Sollozo, but also of the way he intends to do it, is in the secrecy with which he carries out his mission, not even Ming his partners in on his plans.

Though the murder occurs against the fact of Vito's threatened family, the hit at this point lacks the ceremonial legitimacy with which Michael's pronouncement accords actions.

Vito meets with Fanucci, and very courteously offers him less rnoney than the Black Hander asked for. This gambit echoes Michael's appropriately brusque, firm response to Senator Geary's blackmail demand: "My offer is this - nothing."

Both incidents demonstrate the family reluctance to give in to their enemies' greed.

We may be inclined to admire the strength the Corleones display in these sequences, and to root for their success. But the ways in which father and son deal 119 with their respective adversaries are indicative of the divergent natures of their

respective exertions of will. even as their deeds indicate a shared willingness to

reson to violence. It would be tempting to regard Vito's kifling of Fanucci as a more

honourable act than Michael's blackmail of Geary; certainly, Fanucci's death does

not strike us as the sordid violation that the plot against Geary does, with its

attendant murder of an innocent. There is also the fact that Vito, like his movie

gangster ancestors, does his own killing; a skewed notion of gangster honour might

incline some of us to find Vito therefore more courageous. Certainly, the murder

scene is the one sequence in Godfather II that recalls the ritualized murders in Part

One with their cerernonial legitimation of the Corleones' violent maintenance of

power. After Fanucci, suitably impressed with the younger man's gall, takes his

leave of him, he makes his way through a religious Street festival taking place on

the streets of Little Italy. He ostentatiously pins money to the statue of a saint

covered with dollar bills, and with equally ostentatious disingenuousness takes

quick leave of a Puppet show in which two armoured knights joust furiously, saying

in Italian, "Oh, this is too violent for me." The spectacle onstage points self-

reflexively to the scene about to unfold, for unbenownst to Fanucci, Vito is

surreptitiously stalking him across a series of rooftops. Two warriors are about to

confront each other.

The soundtrack scoring in this sequence emanates from a brass band that

plays music combining Sousa-like marches and ltalianate motifs, with "The Star-

Spangled Banner" notable by its presence as one of the pieces played. We see families crowding the streets, American flags waving, church officiak in full regalia 120 marching. What emerges in this sequence is a sense of worlds merged: it is a dream vision of Old World and New combined in some kind of harmony. The play soon to be enacted in Fanucci's doorway takes on a profound resonance in light of this: it is the American Ca pitalist dream of individual social mobility , the quintessential

Horatio Alger story. However. appearing as it daes on the heels of the evocation of the socialist dream of collective social change in the Cuban episode, with its delineation of a virtually bloodless though tumultuous revoiution, the killing of

Fanucci takes on an additional suggestion of corruption. The act is metaphorically blessed, though, Iike the murders of the heads of the Five Families in Part One: just before the deed, we see a priest out on the street giving his blessings. During the act, when the handkerchief that covers Vito's gun catches fire, our view is shifted outside to fireworks jubilantly exploding, as if in celebration of the Black Hander's murder. But the details of his death itself are remarkably gruesome. Fanucci first notices Vito lurking in the opposite doorway with his gun covered up. Fanucci asks,

"What've you got there?" in the paternal (though rather patronizing) tone he had adopted in his previous scene with his new young business acquaintance. He is met with a bullet in his chest, then a second one in his cheek. After he slumps to the floor, Vito fires again into his gaping mouth for a final coup-de-grace. The murder has an appalling, almost sexual intimacy that Michael's killing of McLuskey and

Sollozo didn't have, with an overtone of sadism exacerbated by Vito's uninflected blankness - a mask of concentration undisturbed by the doubts that raged across

Michael's countenance before bis first hit. 121

This disquieting scene is eerily juxtaposed with a warm scene of family togetherness when. after disposing of the weapon. Vito joins his family on a stoop: we may reflect while he does so that Vito has clearly learned from the example of

Don Ciccio. the murderer of his family. As a guitar player seated on the step above both plays and sings the main Godfather theme, the young father, now well on his way to becoming Don, cradles his infant successor in his arms. "Michael. I love you very much," he tells him. One could argue that love of family is being used here to justify Vito's horrendous crime, but a more complex reading would, I think, place the whole sequence within the latger historic context the film provides - its charting of the process by which the accretion of success and power leads inevitably to corruption. versus the suggestion (and it is only that) in the Cuban segment of the possibility of a system of belief outside the ideology of relentfess upward mobility.

The images of familial. paternal love and ethnic pride and church and patriotism, crosscut with frightening violence and brutality, tend here to collide, whereas the equivalent crosscutting in the baptism mmtage tended, I thiok, to synthesize. Part

One establishes the myth, a mirror of the larger American mythos. like al1 gangster movies; Part 1wo deconstructs the Corleone myth, exposing its contradictions. even as it paradoxically retains much of its power. As Robert Kolker writes, concerning this interlude on the steps: "The central dialectic structure of the film. the unquestioning love of family and the brutal power that this love is used to shroud, is made apparent." (Kolker, p. 1811

Of course, this particular brutal wielding of power. the murder of Fanucci, is depicted as the single action upon which the family. the organization. the entire 122

Corleone criminal enterprise is founded: in the next flashback, we see Vito a few

years down the line, rnoustachioed, secure in his newfound power and influence. In

his appearance, and in his manner and general bearing, he is already closer to the

Don as incarnated by Brando in Part One. In his actions too (his selfless defense of

an elderly woman being evicted from her home) he is very much the noble protector

of the cornmunity we see at the wedding party in the previous film, dispensing justice to those denizens of the community with no other recourse.

Again. we may be inclined to approve of the father, and to rneasure the

distance the son has fallen (Michael in the lawn party sequence letting old

compatriots like Frankie Pentangeli wait in line while he attends to senators and

business associates). However, the juxtaposition of present and past in this pan of the film demands a less sentimental reading. That brief scene on the stoop, with the

guitarist playing the Godfather music while Vito cradles Baby Michael, has an

unsettling final curlicue. As the image of the soon-to-be Don with his successor-to-

be in his lap fades to black, the guitar music is doubled by the non-diegetic music

on the soundtrack, and then overwhelmed by it. The strings surge ominously as the image fades; what emerges from the orchestral undermining of this blissful image of

fatherly love is a sense of the irrevocable nature of Vito's decision to kill: the fate of

himself, his family and, most pertinently, Michael has been decided.

The effect is rather like the fade to black after Apollonia is blown up in the car in Part One. ln both cases, a dream life of the past. a kind of Eden, is ruptured

by violence; what emerges also in each instance is the deciding impact of each event on the course of Michae18slife. However, where in the first film this turning 123 point is the handiwork of the Corleones' dastardly enemies, in Part Two, it is the father's brutality, inextricably linked with his love of his son, that determines the direction his son will follow. You might say that this is the Godfathers' equivalent of the Tudor myth, with Vito's killing of his senior Fanucci equivalent to the pragrnatic

Bolingbroke's usurpation and murder of the flamboyant, arrogant eponyrnous king in

Richard II. Unlike his Shakespearean equivalent, though, Vito suffers no guilt, no il1 effects of any kind - ha is living out the American Dream of unlimited social mobility, after ail. His Iife also contradicts the Warshovian tenet that to be successful is to be hated and feared; he is revered by al1 (except his enemies, of course) up to and beyond the time of his death. That fear and hatred is reserved for his son; the son is essentially damned for his father's sins, as he is cornpelled to repeat them.

After the fadeout on the young family on the steps, we fade in on Michael's lirno arriving at his ice-covered Lake Tahoe estate. We see him trudging through the dark, empty house, unable to speak to Kay. We are rnoved briefly to the Senate hall, where Willy Cicci, Pentangeli's henchman, is testifying as to his role in the

Corleone family. The newsreel impersonality of this short scene is followed by the cold loneliness of Michael, seen in a long-shot pan, walking past a swing set and an abandoned red wagon, al1 covered in snow. We are next plunged into the darkness of his talk with Marna Corleone; mother and son are both seen steeped in shadow, as Michael asks in ltalian if by being strong for his family he can lose it. His mother responds that he and Kay can always have another child; he replies in turn that he 1 24 means his familv, his father's family. To his mother's reply in the negative, he grimly points out that times are changing: he has heard the "chimes at midnight."

The next dissolve takes us to his father at his earl y pea k of influence in the community. After the comic episode with the glum slumlord Roberto, we see Vito with the young Clemenza, Tessio, and Genco, as the sign is put up on the Genco olive ail Company. There is a dissolve to Michael testifyirig before the Senate committee, denying his role in the killings of Mcluskey and Sollozo and the heads of the Five Families. His heroic past, seen in Part One as the family's salvation, is here blankly denied: it could not be otherwise. The ascension to the level of power and influence of which his father could only dream for his son is close to fruition. The process that seems to begin with Vito's aiding of the poor widow Colombo is complete but for the jettisoning of the family ties, and of the family history, that hold Michael back. This process of rejection is the film's equivalent of the rejection of Falstaff, as further analysis will show.

You could argue that Godfather II has multiple Falstaffs, several characters who must be renounced. The clearest Falstaff figure, however, is the hearty, robust

Pentangeli. At the fancy-dress lawn party, he is seen gauchely drinking out of a water hose. He is also an enthusiastic drinker of wine, like Falstaff, famously, with his paean to the character-building virtues of sack. In a manner reminiscent of his

Shakespearean counterpart, his Dionysian vitality provides the only joyous notes in the party sequence. Yet that drunken vitality seems intrusive, threatening when he knocks over a glass of wine at the dinner table - a bad omen, as the exchange of looks across the table underlines. 125

The next scene delineates the old man's battle with Michael over the Rosato brothers, with Pentangeli insisting that he be allowed to have them kilfed, and

Michael arguing that such a move would jeopardize his impending deal with Roth, who backs them. Though the argument's subject is territorial rights, the exchange between the old capo and his young Don has a deeper vein of meaning. Pentangeli cornes to represent the old order, the Mafia of Michael's father, of Tessio and

Clemenza, whose family he inherited. (Practically the first thing Fredo says to

Pentangeli is "Seeing you reminds me of New York - the old days.") One could go further: Pentangeli, more than any other character in the contemporary scenes, is a living embodiment of the Old World, the Sicilian culture largely subsumed under the veneer of Americanness which is ironically decried by the despicable Geary

(attacking the way the family "pass themselves off as decent Americansn). Against the parodic WASP blandness of the Sierra Boys' Choir seranading Michael with "Mr.

Wonderful" is the near-desperate enthusiasm with which Pentangeli attempts to lead the band in a tarantella, only to have them lapse into "Pop Goes the Weasel": he stomps off the stage, gesticulating with frustration, as the crowd collapses into mirth.

Where Pentangeli's presence has the most subversive force, where he seems more than a comic, life-loving Sicilian, is in his utilitation of Italian, the language he reverts to at key moments in the argument with Michael, when their disagreement takes on the dimensions of a power struggle. When he demands that the Rosato brothers be killed, Michael replies in the negative: to this, Pentangeli issues an emphatic "Morte." When he attacks Michael's assimilated ways, his 126

wealth, his partnership with Hyman Roth, he does so in the old language, which

Michael also uses when he refutes Pentangeli's insistence on having his own way

with the key words, "Your family name is still Corleone, and you'll run it like a

Corleone." This assertion of monarchical authority aside, Pentangeli exists as a

reproach to Michaei, and his distance from the Old World. The use of ltalian here,

as elsewhere in the film (most poignantly in the flashback sequences, where the old

language obviously dominates), is central to the film's elegiac strain, as Martin

Scorsese discerned in an appreciation of Godfather II written for Esauire magazine:

"Its use of language is extraordinary. Sicilian dialect becomes more than a secret

code for initiates; it is an umbilical cord connected to an archaic society that carries

its ancient rules into the New World. By defining and fhem, we guarantee eyl

survival." (Scorsese, p. 74) No one is more conscious of who constitutes lhem than

Frank Pentangeli: it is this, somewhat ironically, that guarantees his status as an

insubordinate, and therefore puts him at risk under Michael's near-totalitarian

regime.

It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Pentangeli represents a viable alternative to Michael's rule: he is no more a subversive force than Falstaff is.

To quote Derek Cohen, on the way Falstaff's comic avarice, his cynicism, the

mock-heroism his bogus warrior status signifies are circumscribed within the limits set by the court:

Some may laugh at the idea of the reign of Falstaff, some may be horrified by it. Some may argue that the idea offers a world that is very littie different from that which presently exists. The point is that what is offered by way of alternative ..As always partial, and always produced in the play in terms of static and hierarchical values ...no-one in the play puts into words the idea that the monarchy may be overthrown and replaced by a non-hierarchical cornmunism ... As an option it could exist only in the minds of certain readers. (Cohen, p. 49)

Of course, Godfather Il can and does broach the idea of such an option

(though not sufficiently enough for some critics of the film's politics). If what subversion of the established order there is in the Shakespeare text is always and ultimately subject to absorption by that order, the film at least willfully challenges that order, or certainly the distorted mirror of Arnerican society that is the Corleone

Family. The challenge Pentangeli presents is greater then Falstaff's, on the one hand, because he is not the cornic aiazon Falstaff is, with his grandly cornic self- importance (8.g. his throwaway lines, like this goodbye when called to war:

"Farewell, hostess. Farewell, Doll. You see, my good wenches, how men of merit are sought after." (Act Two, Scene Four, Lns.351-352) Pentangeli is a serious threat to Michael. especialfy when he is called upon to testify against him.

Naturally, the somber context doesn't allow for the degree of levity the play does: there is no equivalent of the tavern, with the outrageous malapropisms and braggadocio therein, and there is no room for "comic" violence in the world of The

Godfather.

For that same reason, though, Pentangeli may seem less a potentially subversive figure than Falstaff, as there is little irony attached to his stature as a living Ancient. a remnant of the heroic past, except insofar as that heroic past is undermined by other means. Yet, the figure of "Frankie Five Angels" (as Tom Hagen calls Pentangeli as he takes his final leave of him) is the recipient of the residual affection we might retain for the Family from Part One, whereas Vito is

comparatively tarnished.

Our affection for Falstaff is of quite a different sort; it is his irteverence that

wins us over, not least his comic deflation of the heroic past (as in, to give a rather

sad example, his soliloquy on the veracity (or lack thereofl of the pathetic Justice

Shallow's rscollections of his wild youth: "This same starved justice hath done

nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street, and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the

Turk's tribute." (Act Three, Scene Two, Lns.283-287).) Falstaff even lampoons unintentionally. as in his casual, scatological reference to the rather more exalted narrative of Lancelot Du Lac when he makes his entrance in Act Two, Scene Four.

To quote the text directly, with clarifying stage directions included: "'When Arthur first in court' - Empty the jordan - (sings) 'And was a worthy king.'" (Lns.31-33)

Pentangeli, on the other hand, upholds the old rules of honour in a way which we may find admirable, especially in light of Michael's fall. The plan whereby the Corleones nip Pentangeli's testimony in the bud - shipping his brother from

Sicily to Washington to sit in at the hearing - has often been interpceted as a forceful reminder for the capo of the Sicilian code of omerta - silence - with the stern-faced brother there to register disapproval of Pentangelils "singing." However, the old man's recantation can equally be seen, I think, as the result of fear for his brother's life - a fear which we register approvingly, especially in light of the painful resolution of Michael's fractured relationship with Fredo. In any event, even as he makes a fool of himself before the cornmittee (gesticulating broadly as he says how 129 the investigators kept saying "Michael Corleone this and Michael Corleone that," with his final feigned recollection of his response to their badgering being "and I said, 'Yeah, sur^!'"), we are made aware that he is a fool with honour, where

Falstaff is a greedy fool, with his famous promise to turn diseases into cornmodity.

Yet both characters alike are too firmly circumscribed within the Underworld and its static hierarchy, ultimately too circumscribed within its tenets, to pose any substantive challenge to it.

The other, darker side of the conception of Falstaff - the megalomania, the opportunism, the expfoitativeness - is incarnated in the figure of Hyman Roth. Roth is a meaner, less sentirnentalized representative of the Old Order than Pentangeli.

He is associated long before he appears with an eariier era of organized crime; during the lawn Party, Johnny Ola, in an exchange with Michael which stands as a more solemn equivalent of Falstaff's reminiscences with Shallow, points out that

"One by one al1 of Our old friends are gone," with the exception of Roth as he

"always made money for his partners." Yet, like Tessio in Part One, Roth apparently sees Michael as less worthy of loyalty than his father was, a bad business risk if left alive. Like Falstaff, Roth pians to use his fatherly bond with the young royal to further his drive toward power: his plans for Cuba are a still-more rapacious, and more serious equivalent of Falstaff's mock-plans upon hearing of his charge's ascension to the throne: "Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England are at m y commandment." (Act Five, Scene Three, Lns. 132- 1 33) Roth's exploitation of

Batista's Cuba may also strike us as a grimrner, large-scale version of Falstaff's callous use of the soldiers pressed into his service, the pathetic Iikes of Mouldy, 130

Bullcalf, and Feeble. The modesty of Roth's living accomodations in s Miami suburb is perhaps comparable to the humbleness Falstaff effects at key points, Iike the mock-servile cries of "Lordship" when greeted by the disapproving figure of the

Chief Justice, though Roth's posing is at once more sophisticated and more complexly intertwined with his "true" self than is the case with Shakespeare's jolly knight. (Like al1 successful leaders in the Godfathers, and like Hal in the plays, Roth knows how to playact authanticaily.)

Perhaps the main quality uniting Roth and Falstaff, though, is the vein of imagery that connects them with the dirty business of aging, the decline of bodily functions. Falstaff's first line in 2 Henrv IV is "Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my water." (Act One, Scene Two, Lns. 1-2); Roth ruefully says at one point that he'd "give four million just to be able to take a piss without it hurting."

(This is very unlike the graceful depiction of aging in the first Godfather's loving portrait of Vito.) Also, both Roth and Falstaff turn disease into commodity: Falstaff with his plan to take advantage of the limp caused by his gout, by pressing for the pension funds due wounded soldiers; Roth with his apparent use of his various illnesses as a cover for his plans to oust Michael aher taking his money.

The above cornparison of Roth and Falstaff requires many qualifiers, the better to properly record the differences in the figures' repective statures. The two can be seen in part as distorted reflections of each other across the great power divide: Falstaff with his shabby justices and his tatty fellow denizens of the tavern;

Roth associated with heads of state and CEOs, and with senators who "belong" to him. Although Roth is pan of the group of Falstaffs "rejected" at film's end, he also 131 stands, somewhat paradoxically, as the film's equivalent of the play's Chief Justice,

Falstaff's nemesis, and, with the King receding further into sickly oblivion, the father figure of the court who competes for Hal's allegiance. As has often been pointed out, there is little real contest in the play; Hal appears only once briefly with the old knight before the final renunciation in a dispirited replay of the first play's tavern hijinks.

In the film, on the other hand, Pentangeli has an undeniable moral authority as a living reminder of the world of Michael's father. This clear disparity between play and film is reflected in the twin sequences that roughly parallel the two scenes in which Falstaff and the Chief Justice spar: that is, the successive scenes in which

Michael meets with Roth, and then Pentangeli. As earlier analysis has shown, it is open to question for a good while as to whether Michael has thrown his lot with his business associate or with his own capo. By the time the issue is clarified, circumstances have determined Michael's actions: both old men must be rejected.

Even long after Michael's knowledge of Roth's betrayal is made known to us,

Pentangeli's decision to testify against his Don, resulting from his erroneous belief that Michael has betrayed hirn, as per Roth's clever engineering, has clearly doomed him as well. Yet Roth manages, even as his deal with Michael crumbles, to give his young ex-partner the benefit of his wisdom, in a speech that parallels one given by the Chief Justice to the new young king.

In the latter, the Justice, referring to an earlier offstage incident in which the prince struck hirn and was promptly imprisoned, asks His Majesty to imagine having a son of his profligacy, who tramples law and order, and then to imagine a figure 132 like the Justice applying insulting leniency to the situation. This speech is made under the imagined threat of harsh royal rebuke, now that the madcap prince has taken the throne: it ends with "After this cold considerance, sentence me,/And, as you are a king, speak in your statewhat I have done that misbecame my place,/My person, or my liege's sovereignty." (Act Five, Scene Two, Lns.98-101) Of course, the new King Henry V accepts his senior counselor's sage wisdorn, and allows him to continue to 'bear the sword'; the scene ends with Henry assuring everyone, "No prince or peer shall have just cause to say,/God shorten Harry's happy life one day."

(Act Five, Scene Two, Lns. 144-1 45)

Michael, of course, cannot Say the same, nor can Roth daim absolution, but

Michael's deeds for the remainder of the film suggest that he has taken Roth's life lesson to heart. When Michael asks him who ordered the hit on Pentageli, Roth, by way of reply, recounts the story of Moe Green, once a kid who "looked up ton him, later the founder of Las Vegas. Green, of course, was one of the Corleone foes killed in the baptism montage in Part One; Roth, obviously fully aware of this, says that he let the death of Green drop because he knew his ternper, his headstrong nature. Most of all, he let it go because, as he emphatically States, "It had nothing to do with business!" Roth here articulates the central philosophy of the gangster as conceived in the Godfather films: business is, to use Robert Ray's phrase, a "loose pragmaticn that overrides al1 other considerations, that supersedes al1 ties. Far from rnerely justifying the hit on Pentageli, Roth's speech also serves to rationalize his incursions against Michael, and finally, not so much to rationalize as to anticipate

Michael's actions in the last part of the film. 133

Writing of the Henrv IV plays, Harry Levin says the following: "Honor, as a

military virtue, sets the ethical standard of Part One, weighed in the equipoise

between Hotspur's rnagniloquent apostrophe and Falstaff's reductive catechism.

Justice is the civic virtue prevailing in Part Two, where misrule must capitutate to rule." (Levin, p. 8) Good business in Godfather II is equated with the preservation of order, the elimination of al1 threats to the security of the farnily. The barrier between the Underworld and the Upperworld is here elided even more than in the first film, where the forces of order as conventionally conceived are conspicuous by their absence. Here the appearance of lawmakers, of government, emphasizes the metaphoric Iink.

More than that, the Upperworld appears as the final tier of Michael's clirnb, its representatives Michael's partners in his Cuban endeavours, along with Roth.

With the senator who heads the investigative committee in Roth's pocket, the cycles of justice are here presented as subsumed in Underworld politics; the hearings become simply a higher species of gang warfare. As such, the sense of

Michael as dispenser of justice, however rough, however draconian, is underscored considerably. ln the name of the family, Michael must impose "justice," even if that means destroying the family. The major recipient of that imposition of law and order, the film's true equivalent of Falstaff, is the pathetic Fredo.

Of the play's raffish cast of characters associated with the tavern, the one nearest to Fredo in terms of personality and the prince's attitude toward him is

Poins. When the ailing Henry IV hears that Hal has dined with hirn, he says, "Most subject is the fattest soi1 to weedsJAnd he, the noble image of my youth,lls 134 overspread with themen(Act Four, Scene Four, Lns.54-56) This mirrors the Family's disapproval of Fredo which, white more clearly articulated in the book (in Vito's conternpt for Fredo's sexual profligacy), is apparent in Marna Corleone's derisive remarks to him about having been Mt on the doorstep by gypsies, a painful childhood memory which he sadly relays to Michael in Havana. Poins' dissolute ways are remarked upon by Hal himself when he describes himself as "keeping such vile Company as thou art." (Act Two, Scene Two, Ln.45) Though Michael, like

Hal with Poins, cornes nowhere near to falling under his surviving older brother's influence, for Fredo has none over him, a similar kind of contempt emerges toward him when he tells Tom that Fredo has a good heart but is weak and stupid, and cannot be entrusted with the care of the family: Fredo is the sad, debauched black sheep who must be kept subordinate. Connie of course holds an equivalent position, with the disapproval she rates over her succession of husbands and lovers.

In the patriarchal society of the film, however, Fredo bears the burden of shame. In the play, Poins says, "The worst they can say of me is that I am a second brother,.." (Act Two, Scene Two, Lns.6 1-62): in other words, the worst they can say of Poins is that he is the younger son, and therefore without inheritance. The rather paradoxical situation in Godfather Il is that of a monarchical hierarchy which honours upward mobility, and ascension through perceived merit. Where primogeniture has determined Poins' station in Iife, and he is content with that,

Fredo has been left behind: "I'm your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over," he rages in the brothers' climactic confrontation. To quote John Hess on the film's delineation of the conflict between the brothers: "The relationship is worked out 135

primarily on psychological terms in the film, but behind that psychology is

competition for money and power. Fredo wants business of his own because this is

the only way ha can feel like a man." (Hess, p. 90) He rebels against the cycle of

dependence, and it is this impulse that makes him easy prey for Johnny Ola's

deceit. Where Poins is allowed to disappear from the narrative of 2 Henrv IV rather than be rejected, Fredo's actions push Michael to make the cataciysmic choice that

marks, more than any single act. the depths of his descent.

The pivotal scene quoted above, the boathouse clash between Michael and

Fredo. exemplifies the film's complex strategy of formal dislocation. Without doing anything radically outside the normal tropes of classical Hollywood cinema. the film subtly subverts typical shot/countershot strategies in its treatment of the brothers' confrontation. The scene is set; the two men are half in shadow, near-silhouettes against the frozen lake seen through the window. Though the scene is broken up into constituent parts. as is conventional. it keeps reverting to its rnelancholy master-shot: the scene distances us where we expect to be drawn in emotionally.

At the pivotal moment where Fredo blows up at his Don ("Taken care of me?!

You're my kid brother and you take care of me?!"), we move from a medium shot of Fredo back to the two-shot. rathet than the more typical reverse (as we have seen elsewhere in the film).

Comparing the film to its precursor, John Hess writes that Godfather II "is an awkward, rough film which often seems on the verge of breaking down." (Hess. p.

83) While he may be overstating his case, it is certainly true that the film's scenes of family conflict are composed without the elegant. mounting intensity of, for 136 example, Michael's war of words with Moe Green in Part One. The intensity that does arise in these scenes does not emanate from the spectacle of the farnily unit under siege, as in Part One, but from the breakdown and fragmenting of that farnily; hence, the film's aesthetics mirror the change. The boathouse scene is at once distancing and unsettlingly fractured. The "i was stepped over" line is followed by

Michael's reply, "That's the way Pop wanted it." Rather then cutting to Michael as he gives the line, as would be customary, the scene stays on Fredo in medium shot, the better to focus on his grirn inadequacy in the face of the patriarchal power at

Michael's command. We see Fredo bursting with anger, constricted by the chair into which he sinks as he shouts, "It ain't the way I wanted it!" Whether working in intense closeups and medium shots or cool long-shots, in long takes or shotlreverse shot, the film retains an analytic rigour that forces us to look at power relations in the Sick Society on display, as Hess seems to suggest. What registers is the intractability of authority in this society. Michael responds to Fredo's grievances with the film's equivalent of the play's "1 know thee not, old manNspeech, the words with which Henry V renounces Falstaff when the knight approaches him at his coronation. Michael says, "You're nothing to me now. You're not a brother; you're not a friend. I don? wanna know you or what you do." After giving his equivalent of King Henry V's restraining order against Falstaff and his cornrades, telling him to stay away from the hotels and casinos, and to schedule his visits to their rnother so thay never coincide, he leaves his brother, who utters a plaintive

"Mikey." Michael then makes clear to Al Neri what he wants done after his mother dies. 137

There is one more Falstaff who must be disowned and that is the diffident equivalent of the portly knight left over from Part One: Kay. Yet her position in the narrative is more akin to that of anather Shakespearean character, one of the prominent figures in the other work to be dealt with in this study: Cordelia. Derek

Cohen writes of the challenge Lear's daughter poses to a social formation predicated upon the endless cycle of want, which valorizes acquisitiveness, possessiveness, and rapacity. Against this, her defiantly moderate expression of love for her father is resoundingly subversive: "1 love your MajestyfAccording to my bond, no more, no less." (Act One, Scene One, Lns.92-93) Comparing Cordelia's undermining of the ethic of want with Edmund's usurpation of wealth and power, which implies, of course, an obeisance to the dominant ideology, Cohen writes:

"Cordelia, far more radically subverts, or, rather, threatens, the entire political schema by w hich patrilineal succession and its adherent policies survive. " (Cohen, p. 96) This finds its Godfather parallel in Kay's failed atternpt to wrest her children from her husband's sphere. It is Kay who articulates most directly the film's subversive impulse, its attack on the Corleone mythology: this prompts Jeffrey

Chown's remark, made in reference to the final scene of Part One, with the door closing on Kay, that, "In some ways, the sequel is Kay reopening the door and shouting, 'You're a liar.'" (Chown, p. 72) Her confrontation with Michael is also the one instance in the film in which he genuinely seerns to lose control of himself, the only time his calculating veneer is dropped. Kay's fate, of course, like Cordelia's, is banishment from the kingdorn. 138

Kay's personal rebellion is al1 the more shocking because of the First Lady

role into which she is consigned for much of the film, receiving Mrs. Pat Geary

while the Senator himself threatens to "squeezew Michaei in the next room. Before

the blowup with Michael, there are rnere traces of her discontent visible to us, the

first being her gentle reminder to her husband of his promise to her that the family

would be completely legitimate in five years: "That was seven years ago," she

points out. Next there is her attempt to leave the estate, prevented by Tom who

insists that she remain on the grounds for her protection; this scene is at once an

ironic reversal of the scene in Part One in which Tom turns her away from the

compound when she inquires about Michael's whereabouts, and also an illustration

of the degree to which the Corleone kingdom has taken on the features of a

prison.'' Then there are the series of reaction shots of Kay significantly inserted

during Michael's testimony denying any criminal involvement: her disapproval is

barely hidden. Things finally corne to a head after Pentangeli denies any knowledge

of Michael's criminality before the Senate. In a Washington hotel room, Kay tells her

husband she intends to leave him and take the chiidren. The scene unfolds as a

partial reprise of the scene in Part One in which Michael tells Kay not to ask him about his business, then relents and lies, her tentative indignation met by his steely aggression, then followed by a strategic softening foliowed by a softly whispered untruth. In this case, Michael's anger is exacerbated by her subversion of his perceived daim to their children, and to her; the preservation of the state under his

l8 The scene alôo follows immediately the Geary blackrnail scene with the anonyrnous woman murdered as per Corleone orders, an ominoua juxtaposition. 139 rule demands the securing of the family. Michael tellingly frames his refusal of her

demands as an assertion of the laws of patriarchy: "There are things that have been

going on between men and women for thousands of years." As in the earlier film,

and in a manner familiar throughout Part Two, Michael finally shouts his wife down.

As it proceeds, the scene reverses the pattern of the equivalent scene in the

first Godfather; where the "Don't ask me about rny business" sequence, set in

Michael's father's dark, burnished office, moved through divisive medium closeups

to a pair of two-shots, denoting the couple's renewed harmony in the wake of

Michael's lie, this sequence moves through cool long-shots, framing the pair in their

impersonal hotel room as they argue, to closeups framing Michael and Kay

separately as Michael issues soothing words about his ability to change, culminating

in Kay's startling revelation. This shot/reverse shot pattern, as is typical of the

film's use of the trope, tends to isolate the characters in the frame, where the

equivalent scene in the first film keeps Michael and Kay visible simuftaneously in

many of its alternating shots through over-the-shoulder carnera placement. Here, as

elsewhere, shot/countershot reinforces their separation.

The fragmentation of their marriage is assured by Kay's stunning disclosure:

her miscarriage was not a miscarriage but an abortion, like their marriage is an

abortion; as she says - "something unholy, evil." She tel!s Michael that she

wouldn't bring another one of his children into the world; she tells him also that the aborted child was a son. Michael's mounting anger is recorded in the closeups of him, glaring at Kay, that alternate with closeups of Kay in her petulance, the face of a person unused to expressing anger. Finally, she issues the coup-de-grace: she 140 tells him that she knew he would never forgive her, not, as she says, "with this

Sicilian thing that's been going on for two thousand years." With that, Michael releases his fury, unabte to contain it any longer. In closeup, Michael charges her; in long- shot, he connects, knocking over a chair as he sends her flying backwards into the couch. Against her injured protestations, he shouts, "You won? take my children away!" then walks out of frame, leaving her to reply weakly, "They're my children too."

Jeffrey Chown says the following about this development in the narrative: "It is... a jolt from the otherwise convincing period realism of Godfather II, as abortion is more of an issue of the 1970s and seems too contemporary an alternative for Kay in the 1950s." (Chown, p. 1 16) Barring the fact that abortions happened long before Roe vs. Wade, there is also the fact of the language Kay uses to frame her decision. The terminology associated today with abortion ("termination of pregnancy" and so on) is noticeably absent: instead she tells Michael that the child was a son and she had it killed. The act is therefore made to mirror Mafia tactics.

Also, it suggests the monstrous matriarchs of classical tragedy, like Lady Macbeth conceiving of plucking her nipple from a baby's boneless gums and dashing the brains out. Other horrific Macbeth imagery springs to mind: to quote Shakespeare out of context: " .. .frorn his rnother's wom bluntimely ripped." (Act Five, Scene

Eight, Lns. 15-16) The horror of the scene is magnified by the sequence that immediately foliows: a flashback to the young Corleone family's arriva1 in Sicily.

From Kay weeping on the couch, we are moved via straight cut (to emphasize the

Iink) to a train pulling into a station, off which step Vito, his wife, and their children. 141

The idyllic scenes that follow are countered by one final act of vengeance. The young Don is introduced to the decrepit, aged Don Ciccio: as he feared, the Andolini boy who escaped his grasp has corne to exact revenge. Though part of us may approve of the deed, what we see is horrific. The old Don is weak, deaf, a pathetic old-timer. The murder seems horribly cruel; Vito slashes him across the belly, virtually disembowelling him. What we are seeing is the "Sicilian thingn in practice, the endless cycle of vengeance. The connection is made, though, between Kay's act of defiance and the killings that have gone on for "two thousand yearsn: the murder even suggests a "womb untimely ripped." There is no escaping the cycle, it seems. We are made to linger on Don Ciccio's body, seated in grim repose like the bodies of McLuskey and Sollozo, the tokens of a Don's rise.

From the farnily's departure from Sicily we are moved via dissolve to the

Lake Tahoe compound in mourning, for Marna Corleone is lying in state. We see

Connie, now returned to the family fold; she now says she realizes that Michael was always being strong for the family, like their father was. To quote Robert

Kolker:

Her return... is reminiscent of Howard Hawks' Scarface (19321, when Tony Carnonte's sister joins him in his bulletproof fortress, declaring her love and devotion, only to have the police shatter everything ...Connie's hysterical assumption of the role of farnily mother only points up her parody of the old family life and the empty power that is the fruit of Michael's aggression. (Kolker, p. 188)

While police bullets do not rend the family bond in Godfather II, the actions of its gangster hero are sufficient toward the same end. The death of Marna

Corleone has signalled Fredo's demise, even as Michael appears to honour Connie's plea that he forgive their hapless older brother. The scene depicting the brothers'

reunion is disturbingly ambiguous; Fredo embraces Michael as the exultant Nino

Rota score that accompanied Vito's arriva1 at Ellis Island wells up on the soundtrack, music associated with fresh starts, the New World, and dreams of the past. (It is also heard as the Corleone family arrives in Siciiy.) We see Fredo's hands in closeup as they clasp Michael tightly; this imagery recalls silent-film rhetoric. The disconcerting sense of false sentiment that emerges is magnified by Michael's glance at Al Neri, which seals Fredo's fate; we may be reminded of Michael's words to Pentangeli about th8 necessity of keeping your friends close and your enemies doser, presented as wise words passed down from his father. This look Michael directs at Neri is not murderous, filled with hatred: he looks lost, unfocused. About

Michael, Kolker says the following:

Al1 through the narrative of the Godfathers, Michael ernerges as a half-hidden figure, dissembling, obsessed. In Part Two he seems to disappear before our eyes. A man without a conscience, whose past exists in ritual without substance, and whose future seems to consist mainly of killing off opponents, he does not appear fully present before us. Michael is trapped between the myth of the past and his present actions; Michael exists as a perpetual threat to everyone around him; we never know him fully. (Kolker, pps. 185-186)

1 would add to Kolker's analysis the observation that Michael's actions seem dissociated from him, as if the Corleone machine is functioning on its own steam, even as it moves at his behest. Michael's isolation at film's end is the result of a concatenation of the choices made of his own free will and the oppressive weight of the Sick Society's demand for the maintenance of security at all costs, a demand which puts Michael as much at its mercy as his victims. This is the ambiguous 143 position of al1 tragic heroes: their terrifying suspension between personal error and the wotkings of what might once have been called fate, but in the context of the gangster movie rnay be reconfigured as "society." Justice must be imposed; order must be restored. The film shares with the Shakespeare narrative what J.A.B

Somerset calls a "'necessary' resolution that cuts off energy and life." (Somerset p.44) The difference, of course, is that the film makes explicit what could only be implicit in Shakespeare: also, obviously, there is no redeerning Agincourt in

Michael's future.

This point is underlined by a final killing montage that reverses the legitirnating impetus of Pan One. An interesting prelude to this sad sequence is the last meeting between Tom and Pentangeli in the army base where the old man is being held for his protection, like Kay in the family compound: the world of the film is a prison. The two men smoke cigars behind an ugly chain-link fence; like Roy

Earle and Cody Jarrett before him (and also Kirk Douglas' leonine protagonist in The

Brotherhood), Pentangeli is a figure of the past stifled by ugly modernity. Tom, however, reminds him of a way out: an ancient Roman tradition whereby plotters against the Emperor had their families taken care of if they cornmitted suicide. The message is clear: the discovery of Pentangeli's body is part of the accumulation of corpses at film's end. What the three murdered Falstaffs have in common is their association with venerable tradition. Fredo is shot in the head while fishing on the lake, as he recites Hail Marys as a good-luck charrn toward an abundant catch;

Roth, moments before being shot dead in FBI custody at Miami airport, tells reporters that, as a Jew, he wishes to spend his Iife's twilight in the state of Israel. 1 44

To quote Peter Cowie on this sequence: "...ail three men contrive to transcend the grubby reality of their lives, and to meet death with dignity. Consequently, Michael endures not as a victor but as a loser, deprived of any inner belief whatever.

Without enemies, without friends, his life is a void." (Cowie, p. 109) The murders are presented sirnply, without any flamboyance.(Fredo's death actually occurs offscreen, signalled by a ricocheting gunshot.) We see Michael in long-shot through the window of the boathouse, hanging his head in shame. Where the killings in Part

One were at once valorized and rendered beautiful, with that process of Iegitimation extending inevitably to the Corleones, hem, by contrast, the victims are sanctified.

The final shot in this sequence is the rowboat, seen in the distance holding the slumped figure of Fredo and his killer, Al Neri both silhouetted against the water and sky. Seagulls screech; waves lap gently against the boat. This is the image that haunts the guilt-ridden Michael in Part Three.

There is one more flashback, however. From the image of Michael sitting, morose, silent in his dark house, there is a gradua1 dissolve as vintage forties music fades in on the soundtrack. Suddenly, startlingly, Sonny appears. As 2 Henrv IV is haunted by the memory of the fallen Hotspur, finding its starting-point in the false news of his victory at Shrewsbury, and counting as a major scene Lady Hotspur's denunciation of Northumberland for his betrayal of his son, so too does Godfather II invoke the memory of its precursor's slain warrior, here seen long before he was robbed of his youth. The scene, as is gradually revealed, is the Corleone house on

Long Island, December 1941. The family has gathered to celebrate the Don's binhday. We see Sonny introducing Carlo Rizzi to the younger, happier members of 145 the family; Tessio later appears with cake. The last of the core family to be shown to us is Michael; with Sonny's words, "Oh, that droopy thing over there, that's my brother Michael," we see the future Don, looking shockingly young. The cutting here denotes his separation from the family, a sense of distance exacerbated by his revelation that he has joined the army in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl

Harbour.

Though the earlier flashbacks could al1 be read by inference as emerging from the myth of the Corleone patriarch as perceived by Michael, even as they undermine that rnyth, this sequence stems most clearly from Michael's ruminations, his memories - and it cuts to the heart of his tragic dilemma. Against Sonny's insistence that to join the war effort is to fight for strangers, for those outside the family, and is, by implication, a betrayal of the family, Michael places stock in his

"country," the larger world outside the environs of the family, presumably encompassing both the Underworld and the Upperworld: he wants to be a good

American. ln response, he is met with violent disapproval from Sonny, who tries to punch him, and frorn Tom, who says that Michael's decision circumvents the plans he and the Don have for Michael's future. Michael expresses indignation at this, at his family talking about future. However, he loses this argument; his family exits to greet the Don as he arrives, leaving Michael alone in the frame, much as he left

Fredo and Kay.

What this sequence does is revise our view of Michael and his decision to take control of the farnily; here he seems much more the reverse-Hal, associating himself with the endeavours of the Upperworld to the shame and disapproval of his 146 family. In this scene, though, Michael's destiny seems less inevitable, his path less certain, but we are left with a definite sense, against our possible earlier impression of Michael's cold, ruthless opportunism versus his father's large-scale benevolence, of the role the beloved Don Vito Corleone played in the manufacturing of his son's fate. From Michael smoking at the dinner table in silence, there is a dissolve to an image, reprised from the last Vito flashback, of the puppetmaster waving his young son's arm through the open window of the departing train: in English, he says,

"Michael, say goodbye."

These final scenes may remind some of us of the work of the American cinema's foremost tragedian - Orson Welles. They are specifically reminiscent of

Welles' first two films, Çitizen (1941 ) and The Maanificent Ambersons

(19421, with Michael at once a Charles Foster Kane, alone in his darkened Xanadu, and a Georgie Amberson Minafer, grieving in the face of his "comeuppance", the lonely architect of his farnily's decline. It is worth noting, as well, Welles' adaptation of the Henrv IV plays, the (sadly) little-seen Chimes At Midniaht (1966).

As Welles' title rnight indicate, his reading of the plays casts Falstaff as an aging relic of Merrie England, a world slowly receding into memory, with his protege in debauchery a Machiavellian harbinger of the new, cold modern world, The

Renaissance Man. (Welles, p. 102)

Godfather II is a similar reading of these Shakespearean themes, with one major difference, we see hem how the new Corporate Man is the fruit of the efforts of his ennobled precursor (who for that reason no longer seems quite so noble). The dream of upward mobility that starts with Vito's arriva1 in America is tarnished by 147 the cycle of violence that maintains the power accumulated through the acquisition of personal property and wealth; we must also realize that Vito is as much a victim of that cycle as his son, a product of violent power politics. Even if we recognize that, however, what we are left with nevertheless is his son's desolation. The film's final shot is a forward dolly-in on Michael as he sits haunted, impassive, on his lawn as autumn leaves blow around him. Years have passed; his hair is going gray. The forward track mirrors the similar camera rnovements in Part One that are invariably associated with the infinite power of the Corleones. Here, though, we are pulled toward the horrific emptiness at the core of al1 dreams of unmitigated power. The film's final image is Michael in closeup, his face half in shadow and partly obscured by his hand - the most powerful man in Arnerica. Chapter Four

The Godfather Part III

The enormous cultural impact of the first two Godfathers can be measured not only by the number of Oscars won, but also by the pop-culture ubiquity of the

Corleones in the decades since the release of the first installment of the saga, in particular of 's magisterial portrayal of Vito in Part One. It seems fair to Say that the welter of parodies (Saturdav Niaht Live and SCTV sketches and commercials for throat lozenges) and homages (Harry Belafonte's portrayal of

Seldom Seen in the recent Kansas Citv (1996)) is indicative of the deep impression made on (North) Arnerican mass culture by Brando's Godfather.

Such was that impact, in fact, that the Classical gangster movies that followed in The Godfather's wake in the seventies tended to be judged against the

Godfathers and found wanting; none of the films in question, mainly period gangster biographies in the fifties tradition like Dillinner (1 973) and Le~ke,hadanything like the critical and financial success of the Corleone diptych. The Godfathers' transformation of the Classical Gangster can be felt in a substantive way only in films emerging a decade later, the prestigious releases of the mid-eighties that ushered in the wave of gangster movies that continues to this day unabated. The group of films in question might be termed "post-Godfather." Films like 1985's

Prizzi's Honor, with its Mafia Outlaw Couple narrative suspended within a grotesque intertwining of crime, business, and family, and Once U~ona Time In America

(1984), with its epic scope, its narrative of rnernory and loss, are both products of a 149 period in the gangster genre when the epic magnification of the "Gangster as Tragic

Hero" narrative in the first two Godfathers had been thoroughly digested, becoming subject to the baroque parody of the former, and the wistful elegy of the latter: both films clearly emerge out of the Godfather legacy and would have been nearly unthinkable without the influence of the Corleone saga.

What many of the post-Godfather gangster films dernonstrate is the degree to which the movie gangster is conceptualized today without al1 the layers of criminal metaphor of the past. Godfather 111 (1 990), only the most obvious product of the series in this regard, exemplifies this tendency. By the beginning of Part

Three of the Corleone saga, Michael has gained the world, so to speak; life at the top rungs of economic and political power is the film's main concern. A telling indicator of Part Three's departure from the old Horatio Alger rags-to-riches model is the character the film offers as an equivalent of the bigoted Senator Geary: the old, bearded crank who interrupts the Wall Street announcement of Michael's acquisition of controlling stock in Immobiliare, shouting that you can see the map of Sicily on

Michael's face. (His rant is silenced when his microphone is switched off .) Films Iike

Pritti's Honor, Godfather III, and Casino (1995), are concerned with the upper reaches of power as constituted in a period when ethnic distinctions have become more fluid, when the question of upward mobility has been settled for the ethnic underclasses of yesterday - the Italians, Irish, and Jews who constituted the criminal classes of the gangster films of years past. One has only to look at scenes like the Senate sequences in Godfather II, redolent as they are of the Watergate hearings with the bitter, paranoid Machiavellian at their center, to see the degree to 1 50 which the Upperworld of our time has become the true subject of many a modern gangster film in the wake of the G~dfather$~

Yet there have been a number of films since the mid-eighties that have restored to prominence the original Warshow mode1 of the gangster film: films like the 1983 Scarface and Good Fellas (1990) have demonstrated the continuing endurance of the original rags-to-riches conception, the former with an astonishing faithfulness obviously befitting its remake status. (The current period has even seen a new gangster adaptation of Macbeth called Men of Resoect (1990).) What the revival of the old Classical Gangster narrative signals is one of the striking features of the important American genre cinema of the contemporary era: a hyper-self- consciousness of generic lineage concurrent with a concerted reaffirrnation of classical tradition. 1 believe that Çodfather III is, in its stately way, every bit as rnuch a part of this contemporary sensibility as the fractured, hyperbolic Çasino.

The final installmem of the Corleone saga is very much aware of its place in dramatic tradition: Shakespearean traged y, the gangster genre, and the Godfather rnythology - virtually a genre unto itself. As in Casino, moreover, this self-reflexivity also manifests itself in its recognition of the impact on filmic practice of unhindered

l9 The 1983 Scarface, with ita Cuban immigrant pmtagonist. is a major exception. as Mark Winokur points out in Siaht and Sound (Winokur p.1 1)' to the general tendency to ignore the real criminal underclasses of today (Koreans, Jamaicans, Chinese) in favour of the sarne old ethnic groups, the better to keep from the screen the socisl blight that produces gangsterisrn in contemporary society. Though his reading is not utterly without merit, he neglects, not only the gangster's social elevation in contemporary cinema, but also the historical impetus of the gangster film post-Godfather. Many of the gangster movies of the past decade or so are period pieces (Good Fellas, Once Uoon a Time In Americe) or narratives depicting the Underworld as a dacrepit, aginq institution (Priai's Honor) or combinations thereof (Casino). Either way, the overdetermined aense of "pastness" in these films and the consequent sense of the past being used to confront the present obviously escapes Winokur. 151

multinational corporatism. Where in the Scorsese film this takes the form of the

rendering of Las Vegas as a metaphor for modern Hollywood, with its casino

operator protagonist a megalomaniacal auteur superseded by the incursions of

theme-park conglomeration, in Godfather III, we see in Michael's resistance of the

past, even as he tries to embrace the myth of the past, something of an

acknowledgement of the film's status as a product of sequelization, being of course

one of the major corporate strategies in current Hollywood.

The film's self-consciousness is indivisible from its faithfulness to the classical tragic narrative. It brings Michael Corleone to the very end of his lifecycle, the victim of violent retribution; thus it provides the sense of closure common to the

Classical Gangster triumvirate of the thirties, and to classical tragedy. Yet its

S ha kespearean source, the venera ble Kina Lear, is famousl y resistant to the doctrine

of tragic inevitability, the sense of moral bookkeeping so central to our received

perceptions of classical narrative. As Walter C. Foreman Jr. writes, "Inevitability is sometirnes considered necessary to the sense of tragedy ...ln Kina Lear one does not have this sense of a foregone conclusion to the action: Kina Lear is the least inevitable of Shakespeare's tragedies. " (Foreman p. 1 14) Yet one can demonstrate the existence of an interna1 logic in Lear that makes the end the only one possible. lndeed many have, which is why there seems scarcely any need to "justify" it anyrnore. By the same token, Çodfather III has an end that adheres more closely to gangster tradition than do the ends of the other two installments of the Corleone saga, and yet it flies in the face, in many ways, of that tradition as well. However, the film's tragic conclusion has a grim logic in light of the history of the family that can be justified with ease. Furthermore, the film's very sense of finality is at once

very classical and very contemporary; its sense of itself as standing at the end of a

classical tradition is visible in the strain of apocalypticism also apparent in Casino. It

shares with that film a sense that. for al1 the control the films' gangster royalty (and

their authors) exert over their respective worlds, the possibility of al1 dissolving into

bloody chaos is orninously imminent. The same could be said, of course, of Lear.

What Godfather III helps to demonstrate is the continued aptness of this

Shakespeare text, and, by extension, Shakespeare texts, in our postmodern world.

Any analysis of Godfather III must corne to terms with its status as a film

maudit. Of course. value judgement is not the issue here, but what should be

addressed is the film's supposed irrelevance in light of the preceding diptych, the

sense held by many of the series being extended beyond its actual point of

resolution. ('s review is a useful summary of this particular vein of

opinion.) Beyond what this sense of "unnecessariness" might contribute to what we

might discern as the film's self-reflexive discourse, we might start by asking what

facet of the American experience is being dramatized here; specifically, what aspect

of the progress of Arnerican capitalism is being represented? The following is Robert

Ray's chart of the Corleone family's upward progress over the first two films:

As a whole ...The Godfatherb) managed to represent ail the stages of American development: the immigrant arriva1 (the child Vito sitting alone in an Ellis Island room, under the Statue of Liberty's shadow); the wilderness struggle for material comforts and status (Vito's early activities in New York's Little Italy); the Robin Hood phase of frontier individualism (Vito's early criminality); the robber baron period (the mature Don Corleone of Godfather 1); and finally. the entrenched, organized corporate state (represented by Michael.. .) . (Ray pps.344-345)

What stage of American development does Part Three delineate? What we see in Godfather III can be related to Mark Winokur's reading of the contemporary gangster film as exposing the underpinnings of benevolent corporate paternalism.

(Winokur p.13) In the spectacle of the aged Michael, with his charitable works and the philanthropie foundation he has created, significantly, in his father's name, being dragged back against his will into the cutthroat world he thought he had abandoned, we see something of the truth of power relations behind the veneer of charitable beneficence that marks corporate endeavours in the social sphere of today's world.

Yet the film goes deeper than that. Part Three depicts the paradoxical concatenation of the stifling omnipresence of the mythological past and the vain desire to repeat and revise that past. The film's tragic vision is composed in part by

Michael's suspension between cornpeting mythologies: the myth of decline versus the myth of the golden past. One might be tempted to unleash the following argument: if Michael by the end of Part Two is sornething of a Richard Nixon, then in Part Three he has metamorphosed into a Ronald Reagan, a kindly paternal figure desperately intent on restoring a blighted world to a rose-coloured vision of the past, a "morning in America."

What such a reading ignores, obviously, is the guilt-ridden figure at its center. Like Henry IV, he is an aged ruler conspicuously sick at heart, haunted by the past deeds that got him where he is - in his case, the sin of fratricide versus 154 Bofingbroke's act of regicide. The impact of the murder of Fredo on his battered psyche is abundantly clear; it is constantly reiterated throughout the film in a manner akin to the continuous references to the king's usurpation of the throne in the Henrv IV plays. It finds particularly strightforward expression during the opening ceremony in which Michael is granted the Order of San Sebastian, when the

Archbishop's blessings are interspersed with the haunting images depicting Fredo8s murder, and the church official's Latin screed mingled on the soundtrack with

Fredo's sad final succession of Hail Marys. Michael's philanthropy, his jettisoning of al1 criminal enterprises, his persistent eschewing of al1 forms of violence, his retreat into the arms of Mother Church - what al1 this indicates is a gangster repentant, a gangster intent on purging his family of al1 sin. This intention does not appiy to himself, though, for as he tells Cardinal Lamberto later on, he believes himself

"beyond redemption", a damned being hopelessly cut off from the Elect. His efforts are very much like Henry IV's oft-stated desire to launch his kingdorn on another

Crusade, and, like Henry IV's thwarted wishes, are clearly guided by sorne species of self-delusion.

Where Michael's dreams of absolution turn into sad folly is in his paradoxical embrace of the world his father represented: he doesn't understand, as we shodd, that it is his father's world that determined the unhappy turns his life took, that made his fateful decisions seem necessary at the tirne. Michael's quest cornes to seem unhappily like a retreat into dream made in ignorance of the lessons of history.

The path the Corleones take in Godfather reverses the trajectory of that old

American dream. The very first images in the film are the ruins of the Lake Tahoe 155 estate. The now-funereal strains of the "Godfather Waltz" usher in the first shot, a downward tilt and pan from a grey sky past the lakeside gazebo seen in the lawn

Party sequence in Part Two, the scene signifying the Corleones' peak of financial prosperity, ending on the image of a statue bearing a cross, seen in silhouette against that banen horizon. It signifies the specter of the past that now haunts the place.

Like its precursor in the trilogy, the film's opening seems to stem directly from the end of the preceding chapter: we even see a shot, reprised from late in

Part Two, of eutumnal leaves blowing across the grounds. The images of the compound in disuse. sornehow wracked with the memory of past tirnes, are gradually overlaid by Michael's narration, that starts over a slow pan across the image of Anthony's abandoned toy wagon. The sense carried over here from Part

Two is that of the film's intirnate collusion with Michael's interior life. His voice, now cracked and parched with old age, cerries over into the church sequence; his words are those of a patriarch trying to reassemble his family to honour him, as

Lear brings his daughters together at the start of the play. Michael's hopes for the family pivot on his son, Anthony, and his daughter, Mary, as Lear's hopes for his continued power rested on his daughters' expressions of love: the key line in

Michael's voiceover is "The only wealth in this world is children."

Yet the hope for the future that this suggests is mitigated by the pervading sense that Michael is trying to turn back the dock, to rewrite history. The whole family has moved back to ; in the course of the film, the family will trek back to Sicily, to Corleone, where Michael will show Kay his father's 156 birthplace. Symbolically, these movernents correspond to a retreat to the Old World, in the face of the New one's decayed promise. History cannot be changed: time travel is impossible. MichaeI and Kay can never get back together, despite Michael's wistfui pleading, and neither can the beloved Vito be revived.

One could argue that the film's major concern is the power of myth, its intractability even as it stays sadly distant from us. This concern is inextricable from the film's self-reflexiveness, its awareness of its place in dramatic tradition. For the first time in the series, Shakespeare is invoked in the dialogue, in Joey Zaza's glib reference to the Bard's knowledge of the lying nature of bastaid children, and in

Altobello's "Et tu, Vincento." The sense of the Corleones theatre, present in the first two parts of the series, is taken to new heights, most flamboyantly in the final crosscutting of the flurry of Corleone murders with an onstage performance of the classic Sicilian operatic narrative, Cavalleria Rusticana: Michael even gets to utter a soliloquy, the first in the trilogy.

The mythic past that bears most heavily on the film is, of course, the myth of The Godfather. The film's relationship to its precursors is not so much in the dialectical nature of Part Two vis-a-vis Part One, but rather that of a film of the nineties against two classics of the seventies. The sense of the earlier entries' classic status as a burden on the new film is visible 'in its constant invocation of the earlier works' aesthetics in the form of quick, fleeting reminders of the old films.

Peter Cowie quotes Coppola saying, round the time of Part Two, that "'As a whole, the first film ought to haunt the second like a spectre'." (Cowie, p. 96) This is more insistently true of Part Three, the ghostly echoes of the earlier diptych seeming to measure the distance of the present from that mythic past while serving as a

constant reminder of the inexorable influence of that past on the events of the

present. Thus, even as we long for Brando, Duvall, John Cazale and so on, we feel

assured that the films' endless cycle of violence will continue.

The following is a list of some of those echoes of Parts One and Two,

leaving aside for the moment the major sequences (the party sequence, the killing of

Joey Zaza, the climactic killing montage, and, less obviously, the confession scene) that parallel rnany of those that dot the first two installments in the trilogy:

- the slow backward track from the face of the pleading Archbishop,

stopping when the back of Michael's head appears in the left foreground;

this mirrors Part One's opening shot of Bonasera pleading before his

Godfather, though its effect is greatly diminished by our previous viewing in

this scene of Michael's attentive face - which appears to be precisely the

point, as Michael is here being ignominiously duped.

- the modulation of light and shadow in the car scene where Altobello begs

Michael to let the other Dons benefit from the Corleones' new Vatican deal,

which significantly mirrors the lighting in the car scenes with Michael,

McLuskey, and Sollozo, just before their fateful meeting, and also the lighting

in the scene following the meeting of the Five Families, where Vito realizes

who the real culprit in the attacks on the family has been. Michael's

response to Altobello's request is "This I cannot do," roughly the same

words with which Vito refused Bonasera's request to kill his daughter's

attackers. 158 - the use of dips from the other films. not only the scene of Fredo's murder.

but also the images of Michael dancing with Apollonia and Kay. We also see

framed photographs of production stills from Part Two. notably in Vincent's

initial confrontation with Joey in Michaef's office. where Connie's heated

cornplaints that Joey runs his neighbourhood (Vito's old neighbourhood) like

a sewer reverberate ironically off the presence of a portrait of the young Vito

on Michael's desk.

- the presence of as Tom Hagen's son Andrew. doing an

uncanny impression of Robert Duvall.

The ghosts of the past are manifestly present in Çodfather III, in a manner that dovetails oddly with Derek Cohen's assessment of Kina Lear's relationship with the past in his book Shakes~eareanMotives. The Shakespeare text presents, as he writes. "its pre-play past in a vague. usually shadowy light through the use of allusion and a kind of spontaneous reference only ephemerally and fragmentarily realized." (Cohen, p. 119) The ephemeral nature of Part Three's relation to its precursors testifies not to the mueness of the past. but rather to its oppressive weight, even in its intangibility. It is that past that destroys Michael just as the arbitrariness of the events of the chaotic present destroy Lear. It is worth remembering that chronologically the first key event in the Corleone saga is Vito witnessing the murder of his mother. This horrific occurrence rhymes in fearful symmetry with the tragic denouement of Part Three. the murder of Mary before

Michael's eyes by a bullet meant for him. This is the devastating moment toward which the film. and, by extension, the entire series builds. Of course. it also mirrors 159 the tragic denouement of &; what follows is an exploration of how Godfather II! situates the venerable Shakespeare text within the world of the Corleones.

James C. Bulman writes,"lt is difficult to place Kina Lear in the traditions of

Shakespeare's heroic plays because Lear's heroism seems of a different sort, biblical rather than pagan... Many critics have corne to regard Lear not as a traditional hero at all, but as a tyrant who errs, endures humiliation, and earns redemption as Morality play tyrants do." (Bulman, p. 147) Prince Hal is also seen as distinct from the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies, not merely because he is not a tragic hero himself in the clear sense, but also because he lacks, as Derek Cohen points out, the capacity for towering self-assertion that characterizes characters Iike

Macbeth or Hotspur. As I have pointed out in earlier chapters, Michael Corleone is a gangster with few precedents in the history of the genre. His trim self-containment, his utter lack of murderous spontaneity, sets hirn apart from Tony Camonte, Cody

Jarrett, or his brother Sonny. This quality links him with what we see of his father as a young man in the flashback scenes in Part Two. However, the pattern of his life determines that he is not to be the magisterial Godfather Vito was in his old age. I have already made cornparison between the Michael of Part Three and the guilt-ridden Henry IV, whose head lay uneasy with the crown. Catherine M. Shaw in her article, "The Tragic Substructure of the Henrv IV Plays," writes of this King

Henry not as author of events but instead their victim, with circumstances determining thât he is denied the Jerusalem he longs for. The same holds for

Michael, but the underplaying of Henry Bolingbroke's demise is what finally separates him from the Don. 160

The trajectory of the narrative of Godfather III is similar to that of Kina Lear:

if a suitable aiternate title for the play is The Redem~tionof Kina Lear (8s A.C.

Bradley proposed), then the film could just as easily be called The Redern~tionof

Michael Corleon@. That would only be part of the story, however. James Bulman

writes that Lear's response to all that happens draws heavily from heroic tradition.

His obstinacy, his pride. his rage, his sorrow - al1 can be situated within the heroic

idiom. To quote Bulman again, on the play's use of that idiom: "It creates a counterpoint with the homiletic idiom to keep Lear defiantly regal even when he turns humble, and the tension between idiorns accounts in part for the complexity of Lear and for what we most admire in him; his assertion of selfhood in the face of horrors that laugh such assertion to scorn." (Bulman, p. 147) The Michael of Part

Three has attained something of his father's capacity for expansiveness; he is much more garrulous, his smile is broader and more frequently-seen, his gestures are bigger, his manner less precisely calibrated. This transformation is concurrent with his failing powers. however. the loss of his ability to lead. to assert his iron grip.

These changes with age and personal catastrophe also coincide, as we see in Lear, with the crumbling of his sense of identity, his loss of selfhood. Michael's struggles take center stage in Pan Three in a way they don? quite in the other two films, and just as the travails of the aged king do in m.ln this tragedy of isolation, moreover, we see in Michael some of the titanic qualities that are largely missing in the first two films (except fleetingly in his rages in Part Two). What that large-scale assertion of self signals for Michael, however, as it does in a very different way for his movie gangster precursors. is his imminent destruction. Like Tommy Powers, 161

Rico Bandello, and so on, what Michael endures at the end of his lifecycle is not just the tortures but the humiliations of the Damned. The man engulfed in shadows at the end of Part Two wiil by Part Three's end emerge into the light. As with Lear, al1 will bear witness to his suffering.

The process begins with the very first shot of Michael, in the midst of the ceremony granting him the Order of San Sebastian. What registers immediately is how his face has slackened, and how odd his hangdog "droopinessn seems in conjunction with his severe brush-cut and the ceremonial, quasi-military regalia he wears as part of the service. What we see before us is a man - more crucially, a

Godfather - who has become a figure of abject penitence. John Powers in his review of the film points out the sense of rueful cornedy in the film's reinterpretation of Michael. As seen at film's beginning and in the extended party sequence that follows, ha is a shuffling, dour figure (though with an odd streak of playfulness) who doesn't here resemble Lear so much, as I have pointed out, as he does Prince Hal's father, "so wan with care." With Michael haunted by his criminal past, even as he tries to remake and revise the past, the party sequence in this film mirrors these contradictions in the filmmakers' conception of its tragic hero. The party here is strewn with echoes of the equivalent bash in Part One. The sequence commences with Connie, now a bold, severe figure, strikingly clad in red, singing in ltalian like her mother did at wedding. Johnny Fontaine appears, again serenading Connie; Enzo the baker provides a cake. We also see Lucy Mancini,

Sonny's surreptitious girlfriend, accornpanying their illegitimate son, Vincent. Taking the sequence as a whole, its look establishes the burnished golds that dominate the 162 film's colour scheme in al1 its locations, ranging from the vast, echoing halls of the

Vatican, to the parched Sicilian landscapes, to the Palerrno opera house that is the site of its tragic climax. In the opening, especiafly, the golds are Iike a calcification of the sunburnt oranges of the wedding scene of Part One. (Pauline Kael's remark that the film "seems to belong to a brown past" [Kael, p. 3141 is really only the truth.)

Even more important, though, is the approach taken to the continued dialectic of family celebration and dark backroom dealings. Michael retreats three times to his office to attend to business; what al1 three scenes illustrate is Michael's attempt to expand to fiIl the magnanimous shoes of his father (whose gravelly tones his voice often suggests). He generously allows his son Anthony to go his own way toward a career in opera (much as his father must have finally approved the direction he took before events pulled him back to the family fold); he accepts Don

Altobello's offer of a million dollars to the Vito Andolini Corleone Foundation; and he tries to play the peacemaker in the feud between Vincent and the vicious enforcer

Joey Zasa. Yet al1 three scenes illustrate the unbridgeable gap between Michael and his father's world. The latter scene dissolves into violence when Vincent tries to bite Joey's ear off; Altobello will later betray Michael; Michael's acceptance of his son's independence is prompted largely by "bad mernories": Kay reveals that

Anthony knows Michael killed Fredo, giving the stricken Don no choice but to relent to his son's wishes. These developments al1 mitigate against any sense that Michael has become the leader his father was, for al1 the wistful grasping at the world of the 163 past apparent also in the outsize ethnicity of the celebration, with the presiding band evidently acquainted with the tarantella.

The whole sequence moreover leaves an impression of opulent claustrophobia, for al1 the superficial gaiety. The 5th Avenue townhouse in which the party is being held is a conspicuously enclosed space, the walls Iined with framed memories. The periphery here is not peopled with Corleone soldiers and FBI agents but with reporters speculating about Michael's connections with Las Vegas, and about the presence of the odd rough character like Zasa's soidier, nicknamed

"The Ant." These interlopers are warded off not by the likes of the belligerent

Sonny, but by the family's suave press secretary. For al1 his acquired "legitimacy,"

Michael's status is still somewhat ambiguous. He is still under siege; we still see him engulfed in shadows, notably after the painful confrontation with Kay. The whole sequence is pervaded by the sense that Michael's "legitimaten status actually rnakes him more vulnerable. Kay tells him that now that he is so respectable he is more dangerous than he ever was, but the truth is that now he is more endangered.

Unlike his father, who served as benign overseer of Part One's opening festivities,

Michael is subject, as sad center of the occasion. to the prying eyes of the press, and to the violent incursions of the Underworld, which sees Michael as easy prey.

It stands as a crucial divergence from the aesthetics of the earlier films that the lighting of Michael's office is little different from the lighting of the ballroom.

The first film's sense of the sharp contrast between interior and exterior worlds, and the second film's sense of interior and exterior collision and overlap is here replaced by a sense that the interior and exterior worlds are no longer separate. While this is 164 surely Michael's aim as respectable tycoon/philanthropist, what this produces in fact is the feeling that the whole edifice is ominously subject to collapse: note the ear-biting scene, the act in question being unthinkable within both the benign gangster kingdom of Vito and the rigid dictatorship of Michael at mid-life.

The film's attitude toward gangster violence is exceptionally ambivalent, even against the ambivalence of the first Godfather toward the Corleones' defense of their kingdom. On the one hand, there is apparent a marked reversion to the flarnboyance of the violence of the first film, both in the attacks on the Corleones and in the hits they order, with a concurrent surging empathy for the family as they face their enemies - this time underscored by the sheer unmitigated hatefulness of the villains, a veritable gallery of Dickensian grotesques (AltobelIo, Zasa, Lucchesi, the Archbishop, with his hypocritical mask of piety along with his title rendering him a close relative of the Archbishop of 2 Henrv IV). Yet the Corleone killings are deprived of the legitimizing mechanism that marked (however ambiguously) their ritual slayings of their foes in Part One. The ways in which this is so will be discussed more fully later on. Suffice it to say for now that what is missing in Part

Three is the sense of any genuine source of legitimacy. This lack is apparent in what little is seen of the old ceremonial noblesse oblige that marked the rise and rule of Vito and his youngest son. The uniform Michael wears when we first see him may bring to mind the soldier's uniform he wears in his first scenes in Part One, yet he wears it awkwardly. as I have already suggested. There is a similar awkwardness apparent in the one instance where Michael issues a threat of violent retribution; when Vincent tells him of Zasa's insubordination in the ear-biting scene, 165 he calrnly shuffles over to where Joey sits and says, "If there is some guy going around saying 'Fuck Michael Corleone', what do we do with a piece of shit like that? He's a fucking dog." This may bring to mind Henry V urging Cambridge,

Scroop, and Grey to pronounce the precise method of punishment suitable for traitors to the throne (which 3hay are, of course), but the parched melancholia of

Pacino's delivery belies the strong words, while Michael's uncharacteristic use of profanity underlines the impression given that Michael is here cloaking himself in borrowed robes, forcing himself at great effort ta Zasa's Street level. Where Vito's discornfort with Luca Brasi was balanced by his ability to utilize and control the darker forces he came to represent (though not as clearly as in the novel), here the violence of Zasa and Vincent is in direct conflict with Michael's aspirations, al1 the more so because Michael's overdetermined "legitimacy" makes him subject to insubordination by those unafraid of violence. The abiding sense of the old power structure on the wane is exacerbated by the status of the church in this film: after serving in the first two G~dfather~as a source of blessing for the Corleones' murderous endeavours, it becomes, fittingly, at once a potential source of salvation for the soul-sick Michael, and also the cause of his ruin.

As chair of the Vito Andolini Corleone Foundation, Mary stands as the locus of Michael's redemption - the figurehead of the charitable works by which he hopes to raise the family still further into the Upperworld, away from its tarnished history.

As a figure of unblernished innocence, is made to embody the

Christlike attributes of Cordelia - the forgiving Cordelia who, when her father tells her she has some cause not to love him, replies simply "No cause, no cause." (Act 166

Four, Scene Seven, Ln.76) Where Anthony has corne to chafe at his father's rule

(he thinks the Foundation is a front), Mary still seems to cling to him. (The defiance of him implicit in her romance with Vincent is given little dramatic weight.)

However, the subversive aspect of Cordelia, the side of her that rebels against the patriarchal society that binds her, continues to be embodied in Kay. As the last surviving Falstaff figure from Pan Two. Kay stands as a Stern reminder of

Michael's gangster past. Part of what gives the film its haunted quality is the fact that Michael's central tragic error, the killing of Fredo, precedes the action of the film; one could argue that the whole film stands, in terms of the trilogy as a whole, as representing the last three phases of Ruth Nevo8stragic schema. The third, as

Nevo defines it, is the period of crisis, a reversal of fortune; the fifth and last is, obviously, the tragic denouement, and the fourth is, more complexly, the stage w here, " ...the tragic hero, whose ioner perturbation, whose inner overthrow reached a stage of disintegrating violence in Act Ill...renounces or repudiates this world of values." (Nevo, p. 23) The first Godfather only has tragic implications; the second completed its tragedy of passion with its epic vision of the passage of

America through the twentiethtentury. Part Three is, as I have already stated, the part of the cycle that cornes closest to classical tragedy, yet as it stands it would be difficult to apply al1 the "rules" of tragedy to its narrative, as the main tragic

"mistaken has already happened. The painfulness of Michael's first scene with Kay arises from the contrast of Kay, brimming with anger over Michael's past crimes, and her pitiful, stooped ex-husband. (The theoretical viewer unfarniliar with the first two films would have trouble understanding Kay's indignation.) Kay's new, grand 167 bearing renders her more than a match for the increasingly enfeebled Don, but she is more than that: she bears with her the burden of Michael's past, and she therefore stands as a living reminder of the a priori source of the tragic events of

Part Three.

As this new conception of Kay develops, she is gradually transformed into the film's nearest equivalent of the Fool; it is as if the regalness of Cordelia has been transposed to the madcap eiron who accompanies Lear through the Storm.

She shows a new capacity for sardonic subversiveness when, in response to

Michael's sentimental comment as to how every night during his exile in Sicily he thought of her, she points out the fact of his marriage to Apollonia. (Her "Honour, huh?" at the puppetshow even brings to mind Falstaff's speech on the demerits of honour in 1 Henrv IV.) What Kay brings to the film is a sense of mockery, of the ironic vision providing a clearer perspective of the family history, like a Fool of the

"higher orders," outside the carnivaiesque lower rungs to which many of the characters in Lear consign him. The clownishness of the king's jester does not, however, conceal his acid understanding of his master's folly; when Lear blurts out,

"1 did her wrong," the fool replies with a riddle: LIcan tell why a snail has a house ...Why, to put's head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case." (Act One, Scene Five, Lns.21, 24, 26-27) Kay has a similar kind of understanding that mirrors that of the Fool and Cordelia. It should be noted that the Cordelia split of Godfather III can be likened to the sense operative in Lear of Cordelia and the Fool as parallel figures, linked linguistically in the king's sad pronouncement, late in the play as he carries Cordelia in his arms, that his "poor 168 fool is hanged." (Act Five, Scene Three, Ln.306) It is with Kay that Michael has his equivalent of Lear's joyous reunion with his prodigal daughter - in the scene in the kitchen of Don Tommasino's estate, where Michael asks his estranged wife to forgive him, and she, with glorious improbability, admits that, through everything, she has always loved him. There is a sense of biissful unreality in this scene that is much Iike that of the Shakespeare equivalent. We rnay be reminded of Lear's "Corne let's away to prison/We two alone will sing like birds i'thtcage./When thou dost ask me blessing, l'II kneel downIAnd ask of thee forgiveness." (Act Five, Scene Three,

Lns.8-11) Yet, just as the guards interrupt this joyful moment in Lear, so too does hard reality intrude upon this gentle scene: in this case, the news of Tommasino's death. Kay for the remainder of the film stays on the periphery of events, though she is very much present at the grief-stricken finale.

The film is also in part, I think, a reversal of the terms of the Shakespeare text. The nearest equivalent to Gloucester, the play's second fool-patriarch, similarly faced with usurpation by his offspring, is AltobelIo, whose appearance of dim effusiveness may suggest his counterpart in the play. (Like Edmund's father, he aiso speaks early on of his lustful youth, though in his case the matter is brought up to assert the clarity of his thinking now that the lust for women is gone.) The old Don is established as parallel to Michael as Gloucester is to Lear: he is Connie's godfather, a fact made known to us very early on and reiterated several times in the dialogue. However, it transpires that he is plotting against Michael; as with Hyman

Roth, his talk of retirement, his elaborate pose of modesty, are al1 part of a carefully-calculated veneer designed ta conceal his rapaciousness. It is finally 169

Connie, now a participant in the farnily business, who disposes of him (just as

Regan maims Gloucester). ln her wizened, scheming old age, she has finally becorne

a Goneril-Regan-Lady Macbeth figure, only in her case her efforts are on behalf of

the farnily and her brother. In fact she is the character rnost committed (with the

possible exception of Vincent) to the family ideal still contained in the rnernory of

the old Corleone patriarch, Vito. (It is she who cornplains of the disgrace Zasa has

made of Papa's old neighbourhood.) Though to a degree the film frames her active

defense of the family in a positive Iight, it is hard to shake the sense that she is

filling the space in the narrative held by Cordelia's sisters in the play, whose

usurpation of their father registers not as a subversion of the ideology of power at

al1 costs, but as a reaffirmation of it. Her eagerness to strike back at the farnily's

enemies is a direct contravention of Michael's aspirations for the family, and therefore tends to place her in something of an antagonistic po~ition.'~

A rueful acknowledgement of Michael's alienation from his last surviving

sibling is the scene immediately following his confession to Cardinal Lamberto.

When he tells Connie of the event, she responds that it is unlike hirn to open up to strangers; she unthinkingly asserts the ideal of the family as a hermetically sealed

unit, unresponsive to the outside world. She then brings up Fredo's death,

Michael's crowning sin; she tells Michael that it was a terrible accident but now it's

1 distinctly remernber rny first viewing of the traiter for Godfather III. As 1 recall, I got the impression that the film's narrative would involve Connie and Vincent's betrayal of Michael: this perception doubtless emerged frorn the sound-bite clip in which Connie tells her nephew, "You're the only one !eh in the family with oui father's strength.' Though this turned out not to be the case, of course, the film does tend to allow for the possibility of such a scenario in the way it links Vincent and Connie outside Michael's sphere of influence. This could also be read, obviously, as part of the film's general invocation of drametic history - the narrative of Lear becomes a possibility within the text. 170

"finished." The sequence ends with her declaring her undying devotion to Michael before she leaves the scene, weeping. Touching as this interlude is, it is reminiscent of Connie's declaration of love for Michael in Part Two, with the accompanyinq ptea that he forgive Fredo. This time, Connie, now attuned to the codes that put a rational face on the family murders, finds a way to rationalize Michael's killing of

Fredo without casting aspersions on his memory. This serves to illustrate - especially given Michael in the midst of his spiritual upheaval - just how far removed from the family Michael remains. As in the eariier scene, Michael stays silent, impassive as Connie speaks. As before, his isolation in the shadows is intractable, here al1 the more so because of Connie's adoption of the family ethic that he now realizes has blighted the pattern of his life.

The character who crystallizes most clearly the film's ambivatence toward the crirninal endeavours of the Corleones is Vincent. Like Edmund, he is a

"bastard," and therefore outside the respectable circle of the family; when he first appears at the forma1 party in Michael's honour, he is seen tussling with security guards who fail to recognize him. Then there is the ear-biting incident; through al1 of this, Vincent wears an inappropriate leather jacket, for which Michael duly admonishes him. His trajectory from this point of disreputability is upward. of course, toward power and honour, like many a gangster before him, and like Lear's

Edmund,

In Edmund's initial soliloquy on bastarddom we see something of a blueprint for the vertical rise of the classical gangster from a position of disinheritance toward the peak of worldly success: "...Why bastard? Wherefore base,Mlhen my 171 dimensions are as well compact,lMy mind as generous, and my shape as true,/As honest madam's issue... if this letter speed,/And my invention thrive, Edmund the baselshall top th'legitimate. I grow, I prosper./Now gods, stand up for bastards."

(Act One, Scene Two, Lns.6-9, 19-22) However, where Shakespeare typically took a dim view of bastard children (other evil examples in his work being Don John in

Much Ado About Nothing and the straightforwardly-rnuriikered Bastard in Kinq

John), the conception of Vincent exemplifies the Godfatherg' democratization of the process of primogeniture. Vincent is not Michael's son, let alone his firstborn, but as shocking a disruption as the ear-biting is, it dernonstrates nevertheless the nerve and audacity that make him the rightful successor to the throne, as Michael seems to realize when he asks after the debacle with Zasa that Vincent stay close to him for the next while, a request that seems in retrospect the beginning of the preparation for Vincent's ascension.

The self-serving subversion of patrierchal rule that marks Edmund's rise is displaced ont0 Joey, with his enraged insubordination of Michael at the meeting of the Commission heads: Vincent is in actuality much closer (at least on the surface) to faithful Edgar. Vincent's loyalty is never in doubt, al1 the more so because he is evidently steeped in the myth of the family. Production stills of James Caan as

Sonny are seen framed in his apartrnent; as if in personal homage to his father, his walk duplicates Sonny's arm-swinging stride, as John Powers points out. There is a brief scene, an interlude, in which Vincent ushers Mary around Vito's old neighbourhood, where Mary (and us) are shown a sign advertising Genco olive oil

(Vito's old "legitimaten business). When asked by Mary to talk about their fathers, 172 he says that Sonny was the "prince of the city," and he flatly denies that Michael had anything to do with Fredo's death. Even as we see that he parrots the official line with ease, he irnpresses us nevertheiess as very much a gangster hero with movie-star charm: he represents not only the endurance of the Corleone myth after decades on the wane, but also the possibility of the myth's renewal as a vital force.

We are primed to admire the skill with which he disposes of the masked attackers in his apanment, and the cool with which he does so."

Yet the film is still quite ambiguous about Vincent and his role in the family.

In the scene in which he wards off the attackers in his home, he displays a preternatural cool which suggests Robert De Niro as the young Vito (whom he often resembles). Here, as elsewhere in the film, he kilk with remorseless audacity and without conscience. We also register how he uses Grace, the woman caught in the middle of the attack, as essentially a decoy. We may at once admire his strength as proof of his fitness to lead and disapprove of hirn for the same reason: he, even more than the film's ostensible villains, signifies the past Michael longs to escape.

(The old Don sees his nephew's capacity for violence as standing apart from his own noblesse oblige - "It's your nature," he tells him - even as he seems to see his

21 It ie worthwhile comparing Vincent to Miehael's son Anthany. Though he ie a minor character, he is interesthg insofar as he is made to double Vincent just as Edgar has the role of usurper thrust upon him by Edmund's machinations. In Anthony'e case, the rote of gangster is adopted in his portraye1 of Turiddu in Cavalleris Rusticana, where his conflict with Alfio is depicted as a partial replay of Vincent's run-in with Zasa, with not only the esr-biting (a key scene in the opera) but Vincent's crotch-grabbing reprised hem. The opera sequence is also notable as the only time Anthony shows any kind of panache, indicating the film's quelified reversion to the old genre dictum that gangsters are more exciting than normal people; Anthony's bland moral indignation seems much less potent thon Vincent's bold embrace of the family history - the conception of Michael's son may even remind us of the hapless Joe Massara in Little Csesar, with his singing and dancing aspirations. 173 leadership potential: this effectively mirrors our ambivalence about him.) Our doubts about Vincent may also stem from the sense that he is being presented to us as a hero of melodrama, of the movies. In that initial key scene in his apartment, his glamourous derring-do, and his shiny red robe, suggest an action hero along the lines of James Bond. There is an additional hint of self-reflexiveness in the brief shot of Vincent holding one of the rnasksj -en at gunpoint, right of frame, while the other intruder holds Grace at knifepoint, teft of frame: the square composition suggests the shot, framed as if by proscenium arch, of Fanucci terrorizing the theatre-owner's daughter in Part Two. The lingering sense of Vincent's callow insubstantiality is underscored once the family arrives in Sicily, and Vincent suddenly adopts the poised manner and elegant dress sense of Michael in the earlier films; he seerns like an actor enamored of The Godfather.

The self-consciousness with which Vincent is presented to us may suggest

Edmund's personal self-reflexiveness when he sa ys, "My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom O' Bedlam..." (Act One, Scene Two, Lns. 131-1 32)

Like Edmund, Vincent is a trickster, a man of disguise: note the police uniform he wears when he guns Joey Zasa down. Yet the sense of his endeavours as theatre does not seem to emanate from any ironic stance he consciously adopts: though he acknowledges Anthony's ear-biting on stage with a knowing smile, nonetheless he is not the eiton Edmund is. In the scene in which he pretends, at Michael's behest, to defect to Lucchesi, what is ernphasized is not his own ability to playact and deceive but Michael's continued role as grand puppetrnaster. Like his father with

Luca Brasi, Michael tells Vincent to act the role of traitor; his instructions are 174

intercut with Vincent carrying them out. Here Michael has cast his nephew in the

Edrnund role, and Vincent in turn plays the role to perfection - but his skill renders

him somehow devoid of substance.

Vincent's key scene is the Zasa murder sequence, which takes place, like

Vito's killing of Fanucci, during a Little ltaly Street festival. As with that scene's

place in Vito's upward trajectory, Joey's murder is presented as the crucial

stepping-stone in Vincent's rise; underscoring this are the two sequences' clear comrnonalities: both end with an ominous fade to black, coupled with a dark

orchestral score, charged with foreboding. Both establish the scene with a lengthy

delineation of the irnpending victim's pompous assertion of himself as benign

overiord of the community. (Zasa hypocritically denies the existence of a "Mafia" or

Tosa Nostra," much as Fanucci insisted the puppetshow in performance was "too violent" for him.) Furthering Zasa's place in the pantheon of Corleone victims is the

way the camera lingers on his dead body in tableau in the final shot of the sequence.

Yet, like the Fanucci murder sequence, this scene calls up contradictory feelings, albeit for different reasons. The actual killings of Zasa and several of his men are comparatively "clean," displaying little of the sadisrn that marked Fanucci's death. Yet we are given little hint of the preparations for murder, aside from a brief meeting seen several scenes earlier in which Connie, Vincent, and Al Neri debate the whys and wherefores of the hit, and a brief insert of a police officer's boot in a stirrup, signalling Vincent's ride in on horseback ta finish Zasa off. So, when the hooded figures carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary start firing machine guns, we 175 are nearly as surprised as Zasa, his bodyguards, and the many "pain-in-the-ass innocent bystandersw in the vicinity, and therefore not made so compiicit in the crime. Of course, the presence of onlookers (notably a shocked littie girl, whose mother duly covers her eyes) is indicative of both the scale and the public nature of the killings; unlike the baptism killings and the slaying of Fanucci, the Corleone murders here are not private backroom events, nor are they sanctified by association with religious ritual (not even ambiguously) but are rendered rather as an overwhelming force, running roughshod over venerable ritual. More than that, they are complexly equated with the religious Street theatre via the hooded figures: the big hit thus seems to emanate from sacred tradition, even as it mocks it. In that way, the scene exemplifies the extent to which the rnurderous endeavours of the farnily have corne to mirror those of their enemies. It is the holy church to which

Michael retreats that tries to destroy him, after ail, that betrays its sacred trust. The film's overriding sense of desecration, of sacreligious violation is encapsulated in the insert closeup of the statue of Mary collapsing to the ground; the additional layers of meaning this shot accumulates in light of the film's denouernent should be clear enough. The scene also mirrors the film's tragic climax in another way; the attacks on Zasa and Michael are both initiated by the use of a clownish, taunting decoy to distract the bodyguards: the violence of the family and their enemies is seen in much the same flamboyant terms, inevitably colouring our response to the main architect of the family violence, Vincent.

John Powers points out the similarity of Vincent's riss, in canjunction with

Michael's time out of commission, to Michael's ascent simultaneous with his 176 father's debilities in Part One, but we are left less certain about Vincent's ability to lead the family. The process of legitimation does not function for Vincent the way it did for Michael. After the fade on Joey's body, we are moved directly to Michael in his hospital bed, shouting his disapproval. Powers indicates the source of much of our uneasiness about Vincent when he writes: "...the film ends without our knawing what kind of godfather Vincent's destined to becorne. Will he become another Michael, and, if not, whv net? This question cuts to the heart of the whole series." (Powers, p. 20 11 The scenes described above do suggest the brutality that might accompany Vincent's reign, but the fierce loyalty he displays to Michael and the family hints that he would probably be incapable of murdering a brother. Powers is essentially correct when he cites this ambiguity as a gap, but one could argue that the film's sense of tragedy mitigates against the sense of a gangster continuum that rnarked the earlier Godfathers, with the family apparently continuing in perpetuity.

This brings us back to the films' Shakespearean sources; as historic chronicles, the two Henry IV plays leave us with a sense of a continuous story lasting beyond the bounds of the story proper, as do the first two Godfathers

(though obviously they lack the sarne basis in history). With a play generically designated a tragedy, however, we will see more of a leaning toward closure, and toward a sense of finality. Lear is obviously a premier exarnple of this. fo quote

Northrop Frye, writing of the "social contracts" formed at the ends of tragedies in

Fools of Time, "Sometimes the social contract ...is of great depth and significance, as it is in the Oresteia ...sometimes, as often in Shakespeare, it is merely an 177

exhausted and demoralized huddle. Whatever it is, it usually expresses some

limiting or falling away of perspective after the great heroic figures have been

silenced." (Frye, p. 6) He goes on to quote, fittingly, the iast lines of Leart spoken

by Edgar: "The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much,

nor live so long." (Act Five, Scsne Three, Lns.326-327)

We get a similar sensation at the end of Godfather III - more so, because our

last view of the "huddle" Michael and Mary leave behind is not the end of the film.

We are Mt, rather, with Michael, alone again with just his memories for succor. We

last see Vincent on the opera-house steps covered in the blood of Mary's inadvertent assassin, whom he has just killed out of reflex. He is staring disconsolately at the old Don, in the midst of his agonizing apotheosis. There is little sense here of the family re-forming into a viable mechanism beyond the confines of this tragic narrative.

The film's ambiguous sense of the farnily is mirrored in its aesthetic, which is something of an anthology of Godfather tropes. The film takes up Part Two's use of silhouette, and its tense alternation of closeups and long shots in scenes of inter- familial conflict, notably in the scene in the kitchen shortly before Michael8sstroke, with the master shot reserved for him exploding at Vincent. More characteristic of the film, though, is a pronounced reversion to the unifying aesthetics of Part One, with the opposition of warm, intimate shot/countershot sequences in which the bond of family is asserted, as in the scene where Michael advises Vincent in his hospital room, or the meetings of Kay and Michael bven their first and most divisive one), versus the cool, neutral shotjreverse shot patterns used in scenes of conflict, 178 like those between Michael and Joey Zasa. The farnily rent asunder in Part Two is here partly reconstructed; this mirrors to some degree the complex attitude toward the kingdom in Lear, where the tragic protagonist's profound questioning of the ideology of monarchy is partly contravened by the desire the play encourages in us to see the monarch restored, and his foes vanquished. The latter sense is subdued somewhat in Godfather III by our mernories of the totalitarian regime Michael presided over in Part Two: the vision of the family in Part One can never be fully recaptured. The pervasive feeling of the crippling loss of something intangible to begin with is powerfully conveyed in the film's strategy of distanciation, one distinct from the distancing tendencies of Godfather II. What the film conveys periodically in its framing of its characters is the very tenuousness of their existence: Vincent's aforementioned insubstantiality frequently extends to al1 the characters in this rnanner. The frame is often split, bisected; off-center framing will push the figures focused on to the ends of the frarne, a notable example of this kind of composition being the stroke scene, with the stricken Michael and the frantic Al and Connie seen in long-shot at the extreme right of frame, with a huge expanse of kitchen dominating the center and the left side. We also see frames within frames; a recurring image is that of a character passing out of range of a doorway, leaving us with a view of a doorframe, the unpeopled expanse beyond, and the adjoining wall.

This device is poignantly associated with scenes of lost or fated love: we see it when Vincent carries Mary off to consummate their flirtation, and when Kay sadly walks away from her abortive reunion with Michael, in a minor-key replay of the scenes in the first two Godfathers where Michael closes the door on her. These 179

related devices function in these scenes to ensure our awareness of the intangibility

of the characters, to remind us how easily effaced they are by the spaces in which their stories are enacted. The film as a whole aims to situate the Corleones within an enduring cyde of myth from which they are inextricable; what it demonstrates is

how the frame of genre can become a prison.

Of course, the main prisoner is Michael. As with Lear, the aged Don's main struggle is with the problem of identity. Yet again, cornparison of the play and film

reveals the film's reversal of the play's terms. For Lear, being stripped of his authority, his knightly entourage, and the love of his daughters is what casts him,

both spiritually and physically, into the wilderness. Jonathan Dollimore, writing of

Lear's "madness," says it is "Iessdivine furor than a process of collapse which reminds us just how precarious is the psychoiogical equilibrium which we cal1 sanity, and just how dependent upon an identity which is social rather than essential. What makes Lear the person he is - or rather was - is not kingly essence

(divine right), but, among other things, his authority and his family." (Dollimore, p.

195) One may feel that Dollimore's polemical application of critical rnaterialism takes sorne rather reductive turns and still regard his analysis here as basically sound. In the scenes of Lear raging on the heath, the imagery reverberates with the pain of dislocation, fragmentation, of the collapse of identity, beginning with Lear's parting words to his daughters: "...this heart/Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws/Or ere l'II weep. O fool, I shatl go mad!" (Act Two, Scene Fout, Lns.279-281)

Thete is Lear's vacillation from prose to verse; there are the rages foiiowed rapidly by moments of exhausted pride (his attempt to command the thunderous elements in Act Three, Scene Two, with these words emerging soon afterward: "No, I will be

the pattern of ail patience;/l will say nothing." (Lns.37-38)

There are also the passages which for centuries now have been read as

redernptive, transformative, where Lear appears to corne to an understanding of the

plight of the lower orders: "Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!/Why dost

thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.Khou hotly lusts to use her in that

kind/For which thou whip'st her." (Act Four, Scene Six, Lns.157-160) Dollimore

points to the Brechtian implications of the "stormn scenes, when he writes that,

...p rinces only see the hovels of wretches during progresses (walkabouts?) in flight or in fairy tales. Even in fiction the wheel of fortune rarely brings them that low. Here, as so often in Jacobean drama, the fictiveness of the genre or scene intrudes; by acknowledging its status as fiction it abdicates the authority of idealist mimesis and indicates the better the reality it signifies.. . (Dollimore, p. 192)

ln Godfather III, of course, Michael never attains Lear's level of madness

(except perhaps rnomentariiy), nor is he so "unaccommodated." As with al1 the

Godfathers, the film, as a product of the American commercial cinema, cannot go to the carnivalesque, absurdist lengths that the Shakespearean texts could within the context of Elizabethan/Jacobean drarna. Yet, I have already discussed Part Two's remarka ble anal ytic rigour, and Part T hree's self -ref lexiveness: it should be reiterated that the Godfathers go quite far toward questioning the usual illusionistic terms of genre cinema without jettisoning genre entirely.

In the case of Godfather III, this questioning finds its narrative impetus in

Michael's attempts to transcend his gangster destiny. Michael's dialogue throughout the film is rife with assertions of what he feels to be his "true" self. He asks 181

Vincent early on, "Am I a gangster?" to which his nephew responds in the negative; when Vincent asks his uncle how he can deal with Joey Zasa, he replies, "I'm a businessman, first and foremost." In Sicily, he tells Kay, "l'm not the man you think

I am." Where Lear is torn apart, once stripped of his lcingly identity, Michael is assailed by the gangster identity he believes he has abandoned. In the monumental halls of the Vatican, he has the famous mantra of Part One thrown back at him; when he inquires as to why the lmmobilaire deal is being held up, the grey Don

Lucchesi tells him, "It's not personal; it's only business. You should know,

Godfather." In the world of the film there is no sacred sphere of legitimacy above corruption, as Michael gradually discovers, just as there is no escaping the past.

Michael receives something of Lear's education in his own equivalent of the "storm" scenes. Yet, even as he awakens to the truth of things, even as he starts to expand his understanding beyond the limits of the "business" pragmatic to which he has devoted his life, he becomes terribly vulnerable. As the film portrays it, the

"legitimaten status to which he clings like a liferaft is no guarantee of protection; one could argue, in fact, that it makes him more prone to attack. A telling juxtaposition of news items can be seen in the brief montage delineating the

Corleone takeover of Immobilaire: adjacent to Michael's picture on the front page of the Wall Street Journal is the following heading: "Car Bomb Kills British Finance

Minister. "

The storm section of Godfather III begins about a third of the way through the film, with the helicopter attack on the Dons as they meet to divide up the wealth Michael is leaving behind: as in Lear, the violence commences with the 182 division of the kingdom. The sequence unfolds initially as a partial equivalent of the conferences in Parts One and Two; unlike those earlier meetings, however, this one is not above the violent fray. The killings are scaled differently than the murders in the first two films, with a baroque apacalypticism new to the series. (Much the same could be said, as I have already indicated, about Vincent's retaliatory attack on Zasa.) After Michael, Vincent, and Al make their escape, we are brought back, in timeless Godfather fashion, to the scene of devastation. There is in the shots of the bodies of the old Dons, mingled with neo-classical statuary, a mythopoeic grandeur that suggests the destruction of an old, venerable order.

The irony, as Michael soon realizes, is that the killings emanate from a still older order: this is not the work of the upstart usurper Joey Zasa, the New overthrowing the Old, but rather the work of the unholy union of the aged Don

Altobello, Lucchesi's Sicilian Mafia, the world of politics and finance (the Swiss banker Keinszig) and the Church (represented by the Archbishop). In true bar fashion, the revelation of AltobelIo's guilt cornes to Michael like a thunderclap of clarity as his mind falls apart, in his case, in the midst of a stroke. This, along with the final scene, is perhaps the film's clearest invocation of Shakespeare; there is even a storrn raging outside as Michael is stricken in the family kitchen. What's more, the gibberish Michael starts spouting seems a conscious echo of Lear's mad rages: twice he shouts "Thunder can't hurt!" - lines which find their Shakespearean parallei in Lear's "çpout, rain./Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters./l tax not you, you elements, with unkindness." (Act Three, Scene Two, Lns. f 4-1 6)

These lines are followed by shouts of "Altobello, you deceitful old fuck!", which 183 suggest Lear's venomous tirades against Regan and Goneril. Vincent, Connie, and

Al soon manage to get Michael into the adjoining hallway, where in his confusion he starts slapping his head: that gesture is followed by a jump-cut. mirroring his dislocated consciousness, to a shot of the four still struggling at a further stage of progress along the same hallway. Here, just as Lear in his madness keeps relieving the source of his pain, Michael repeatedly shouts "Fredo!"

Though Michael recovers from his "madness" rather quickly, where Lear keeps raging on and on, what follows, until the climactic opera/murder montage, is like a becalrned equivalent of the narrative progress of Lear after the old king's retreat into the Storm. Though the film progresses, Iike the play, through the machinations of the kingdom's enemies, and like the first Godfather, through the rise of the Don's successor, the main focus is the aged ruler coming to painful grips with the philosophic ramifications not only of his leadership but also of the ideology that has sustained his rule (even more so in the film, as it lacks a fully-defined equivalent to the Gloucester-Edgar subplot). To effect this new understanding,

Michael, like Lear, must set off on a quest, not to experience the "world upside down," to use Margot Heinemann's phrase, but rather to see the world in reverse.

The family is taken on a symbolic odyssey into the past, to Sicily, where Michael is seen relieving via flashback the dream that was Apollonia as his son serenades him with her theme Song.

The centrepiece of this section of the film is the confession scene, where

Michael unburdens himself of his past crimes under the gentle prodding of the saintly Cardinal Larnberto, the film's one "true priest." The scene proper begins with 184 the Cardinal's parable of the stone, the odd fact of the stone in the fountain staying dry to the core mirroring the way Europeans have lived surrounded by Christianity for centuries though, as he puts it, "Christ has not penetrated their souls." With these words, Michael starts to feel faint. A forward tracking-shot, moving in from a two-shot to a medium shot of Michael, records his moment of weakness, as he is given juice and candy to relieve this near-diabetic seizure: the foward dolly, being a familiar signifier of of the Cotleones' power, is in this film reserved for scenes where Michael's vulnerability is made painfuliy apparent, the other major dolly-in on

Michael occurring during the helicopter massacre sequence as he realizes an attack is in progress. Here, though, the Cardinal intuits the interna1 cause of Michael's pain, and asks, over Michael's insistence that he is "beyond redemption," that he give confession. ("1 always have time to Save souls," he suavely states.) The two men stand face to face against the ivy-covered pillars of the church courtyard, and

Michael slowly, half-reluctantly, reveals his sins: "1 betrayed my wife. I betrayed myself. I've killed men, and I've ordered men to be killed." BeIls toll as he speaks*

To quote John Powers on this scene: "Michael's confession is obviously a turning- point, and watching it we rnay recall the earlier films, when Michael played a satanic inquisitor who, promising forgiveness, forced his brother-in-law Carlo and his brother Fredo to admit their perfidies - then had ihem murdered." (Powers, p.

199)

It is Michael's admission of the latter sin to which his confession builds, of course: the scene's silhouettes, its proximity to water (the fountain), and its cut at a crucial emotional turning-point to the master shot al1 recall the handling of Michael's 185 scene in the boathouse with Fredo in Part Two, where the ruthless Don disowns his

hapless brother against the snow-covered expanse of Lake Tahoe. Here, we see

Michael breaking down in anguished closeup as he says, "1 ordered the death of my

brother. He injured me. I killed my mother's son. I kiled my father's son." On that

last line, Michael starts weeping profusely, as if in profound understanding of how the murder of Fredo, ordered presumably in defense of the family his father built, was actually a violation of the family. We are also moved to a shot of the two men, priest and confesser, separated by pillars, with both their faces in shadow as though engulfed in dark mernories. The frame here becomes a diptych of suffering and penitence. This imagery recalls the iconographic art of centuries past; as such, even as, as elsewhere, the scene suggests Michael's imprisonment in the forms of the past, it also stands as the one part of the film, of the whole trilogy, where the rituals of Mother Church seem to be infused with real, transcendent meaning, above and beyond the blood rituals of the Farnily.

Complicating the scene is the hardness of the Cardinal's voice as ha tells the weeping Don, "Your sins are terrible. It is just that you suffer," just as Michael hardened in the face of Fredo's rnisery. Yet the Cardinal stiIl offers the olive branch of forgiveness, telling Michael that his Iife can still be redeemed. After the absolution, Michael looks up, struggling to stay composed. The last shot of the scene is Michael in closeup, framed by the church pillars, his face exposed to the daylight. We are soon moved to the scene on the stoop with Connie, where Michael laments how, as he puts it, "The higher up I go, the crookeder it becomes. Where the hell does it end?" He then mulls over the plight of the people of Sicily, how 186 they've kiiled each other for centuries over money, pride, and to keep from being slaves of "the rich pezzonovantes." The sense of awakening in these scenes is comparable to Lear8swhen he issues the following prayer: "Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,/That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,/How shall your houseiess heads and unfed sides,/Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend youlfrom seasons such as these? O, i have ta8eniToo Iittle care of this!" (Act

Three, Scene Four, Lns.28-33)

Though the talk with Connie tends to reinforce Michael's isolation, the sentiments he expresses, coupied with the two-shot binding brother and sister

(suggesting the scene late in the first Godfather between Michael and Vitol, tend to

place Michael at the scene's stiil moral center. where Vito was situated in many of his scenes in Part One. Michael seems to have finally become the morai leader his father was, only much more so, as it is impossible to imagine Vito experiencing the

kind of awakening Michael does. That process continues with Michael's meeting with Kay, the soliloquy beside the dead Don Tommasino in which he promises to

"sin no more," and the crucial moment where he relinquishes control of the family, handing it over to the eager Vincent. That scene ends with Michael being ushered out of the room while the Corleone soldiers kiss the new Don's hand. The door thankfully closes on Michael this time as the "Godfather Waltz" plays on the soundtrack. It seems that perhaps his life be redeerned.

Northrop Frye, however, indicates the problem of situating the tragic vision within the doctrine of Christian redernption when he writes, "...while a religious or

philosophicel system that answers al1 questions and solves al1 problems may find a 187 place for tragedy, and so make it a part of a larger and less tragic whole, it can never absorb the kind of experience that tragedy represents." (Frye, p. 4) The tragic impetus of the film must be fulfilled; Michael must act out his Kina Lear ending aher ail. The film has as its flamboyant climax an extended montage sequence in which, as at the end of the first Eodfather, we see Corleone murders intercut with a public ritual in progress. in this case, Anthony's debut performance in Cavalleria Rusticana.

The ritual of killing is once again equated with a ritual of venerable tradition, sanctified over time. In this case, however, the meaning accorded the famiiy's murderous settling of accounts is vastly different. The slayings thernselves are swollen with melodrama, with a near-parodic sense of theatre. There is Al Neri's gun. hidden in a box of chocolates; the juxtaposition rhymes with the poisoned cannoli Connie gives to Don Altobello. There is also Calo's kamikaze slaying of

Lucchesi. effected via a pair of eyeglasses: al1 of these images are scored to the rising and falling orchestration of the music. The end of the opera ushers in the successful completion of the murders; the bodies of Lucchesi, Keinszig, and the

Archbishop (the last falling toward the camera until it darkens the frame) ail appear in conjunction with the opera's last crescendo. As the house lights are raised and the audience applauds, it is clear that they are honouring by association the spectacle of the Corleones' revenge as much as they are the operatic tragedy they are w itnessing .

That opera functions itself as a construction en abyme within the film. another frame within a frame. Mascagni's tragedy of passion is anchored, as Peter

Conrad points out, to the stages of a village ceremony celebrating Easter Sunday 188

(Conrad, p. 9)' the very day on which this particular performance is being held. That ceremony, with its hooded figures, resernbles the one disrupted by Vincent and his soldiers in New York, but Mascagni's juxtaposition of rituels also mirrors the baptism montage that marked Michael's path ta ascension. The Corleones' revenge murders are again placed within a cultural mythology that demands to be revised and repeated over and over again, just as Mascagni's opera is: again, as Powers writes, "Coppola is aiming to place the whole Corleone saga inside a cycle imbued with the force of myth - the eternal recurrence of the same ungodly events."

(Powers, p. 202) That "Sicilian thing" is once more in operation, both onstage and off.

However, the extended sequence is complicated by the addition of scenes depicting the Corleones' enemies engaged in their own processes of revenge: we see in action the Vatican conspiracy to kill the newly-elected Pope, the former

Cardinal Lamberto, and, still more crucially, we see the assassin hired to kill

Michael, significantly disguised as a priest, making his murderous preparations in the opera house. Michael is here rendered uncharacteristically the object of a murderer's gaze; through the process of association montage, however, he is also rendered, despite his promise to "sin no more," the source of murderousness. Calo is shown in a secret meeting with Lucchesi, where ha introduces himself as bearing a message from Michael Corleone (whom he apparently still sees as his leader); as with the attempt on Pentangeli in Part Two, Michael is associated with violence with which he has nothing to do. The connection is driven home by a cut from Calo plunging the eyeglasses into Lucchesi's neck to the impassive face of Michael as he 189 watches the opera: a shift reminiscent of the dissolve from the horse's head scene

to Vito's frozen countenance in Part One. However the tainting of Michael via

montage is only part of a larger process by which the family's endeavours are

inextricably associated with the moves made by their enemies. The film's ostensible

villains may profane the Easter celebration, as Santuzza does in Cavalleria when she

curses Turiddu with her wish that he have an evil Easter. but then so do the

Corleones. Thus the Corleone killings rhyme with the discovery of the Pope's dead

body. and al1 rhyrne with the sound and images of the opera. There is a direct cut from the Pope's attending nun crying. in Italien, "The Holy Father is dead," to a shot of a giant crucifix being carried in procession onstage. As Peter Conrad writes,

"Christ may rise again on Sunday, but Turiddu won't." (Conrad, p. 10) Neither will the Pope, or Mary, or finally. Michael.

The stage is set for the play's tragic climax. The post-opera crowd descend the steps of the opera-house that closely resemble the steps down which Fredo ran to escape Michael in Part Two. Mary, angry and upset over Michael's demand that she and Vincent split up, runs back to her father, planting herself right in the line of the assassin's fire. He shoots at his presumed target, Michael, but the Don only gets hit in the arm: it is his beloved daughter, the focus of al1 his hopes for the family's redemption, who receives the brunt of the gunfire and falls down dead.

Mary is the first major "pain-in-the-ass innocent bystander" to be killed in the trilogy, her death the first accidental killing; as such, the murder represents the breakdown of the whole system of revenge and retribution that had worked so efficiently throughout the series. Yet, the horror of the whole scene arises not from 190 the arbitrariness of her death, as in Lear, but rather from what we rnay cal1 in

retrospect its inevitability. Mary, like Cordelia or Juliet (with Vincent her estranged

Romeo), may be regarded as something of a figure of passion-tragedy, an innocent

killed by the Sick Society that constrains her. Yet the tragic emphasis here is on the

spectacle of the king engulfed in suffering. As with Lear, there is the added

humiliation of the onlookers in the scene, who observe him in his torment; we get

closeup inserts of Vincent, Kay, and Connie watching Michael, always the one in

the shadows, the backroorn deatmaker, in the midst of horror. His agony is

expressed in despairing medium closeup. We see his face misshapen, twisted into a

horrifying silent scream, "his distorted features and dark, empty mouth," to use

John Powers' phrasing, "the very image of an annihilated soul." (Powers, p. 201)

He finally lets out a breathless screarn, as though barely able to get the air out of

his lungs. His countenance here is the very image of negation, the visual equivalent

of Lear's words of recognition at the conclusion of his narrative: "...no, no, no

IifeiMlhy should a dog, a horse, a rat, have IifeJAnd thou no breath at a117 Thou'lt corne no more,/hlever, never, never, never, never." (Act Five, Scene Three,

Lns.306-309)

Unlike Lear, however, Michael's suffering is exacerbated by the sense that the death of his daughter is the end result of the cycle of violence of which his crimes are only a part, a cycle preceding even the murder of Vito's mother some eighty years earlier. Michael's deep, profound anguish suggests he recognizes this, much as Rico Bandello's death reverberated with a profound sense of a futile, wasted life. But Michael's understanding, we sense, is greater; the passage of the 191 film places its tragic hero within the intractable patterns of history, and finaily accords hirn a comprehension of the fateful concatenation of personal error and the sins of an entire culture, not just Sicilian or Mafia culture, but the culture of success at al1 costs, that put him where he is, with those sins coming back to haunt him.

As with Lear, Michael's dead daughter does rise again for him, in a reprise of the shots of him dancing with Mary that concluded the extended party sequence at film's beginning. This time, however, they dance to Mascagni's Intermezzo. As the music plays, we then see in succession Michaei dancing with Apollonia in Part One, and again, with Kay in Part Two: reverberating through al1 these images, underneath the music, is the sound, carried over from the dance with Mary, of glasses ciinking in celebration. This montage of Michael with the women ha lost because of the life he chose slowly shifts, via dissolve, to a medium closeup of Michael, much older now, in a state of sad repose. Once again, we are left alone with Michael and his mernories, but this time his private pain is intimately intertwined with the sad music of the opera: much like Santuzza, Michael is essentially excommunicated, lost in isolation and inextricably attached, moreover, to the cultural history from which he emerged. His lank hair and his hat recall Brando in his death scene in Part One, but the tomato-garden Jerusalem where Vito died, with his young grandson in attendance, is clearly lost to his own son. The monumental, sun-baked ruins within which Michael sits have a strange, parched abstraction that underscore the loneliness of our last view of Michael; he sits, in long-shot, at the extreme left of frame, in a lawn-chair, with only a scraggly dog for Company. To the last strains of 192 the Intermezzo, he keels over, dead; the dog starts as its master's body hits the ground, and then walks over to sniff the corpse.

All of Vito's dreams for his family's future have resolved in this final shot, a suitably ironic end to the trilogy. What image and music here affirrn is Michael's status as a tragic hero; the irony arises out of the terms of that affirmation, with

Michael explicitly depicted as expiring like a Puppet pushed and pulled by tragic- operatic strings. For al1 the three Dons' string-pulling, for al1 the Dons' accumulated power, the resolution had to be this way. Michael in his old age is a Don struggling for redemption, who is finally sacrificed on the altar of gangster tragedy, and while the gods themselves do not throw incense, we may long to. Conclusion

In the preceding pages, I have attempted to extend the essential Warshow thesis - that the gangster is the key tragic hero within popular culture - into a lengthy consideration of the adfather trilogy and its relationship to the three

Shakespeare plays adapted therein. The twin emphasis has been on the ways in which the films both alter the Gangster as Tragic Hero conception (as made flesh in the Classical Gangster movies of the thirties) and dernonstrate its endurance, with the trajectory of Michael Corleone's life as seen in the three films pushing him further in the direction of the Classical, or Warshow Gangster - from the peak of worldly success through a stage of profound isolation to the depths of anguish and defeat, culminating in a lonely death.

As much as any of the films in the thirties gangster triumvirate, the

Godfathers demonstrate the truth of the Warshow reading of the gangster as a scapegoat figure, whose death relieves the anxieties bred by the success ethic central to the American culture of optimisrn. The first Godfather, with its confluence of the Henrv IV Part I narrative of a kingdom beseiged, and saved by a hidden warrior hero, and the glorified outlaw ethic of the "left" cycle of films of the New

Hollywood, conferred a new legitimacy on the gangster, particularly in the magisterial figure of Vito Corleone. This sense of a ceremonial order granted the gangster family in the film renders them utterly different from the usurpers of power and success who populated the Classical Gangster films of earlier (and later) periods; in The Godfather, the forces of law and order who circumvented the 194 gangster's aspirations in the earlier films are made aither corrupt or conspicuous by their absence: true rough justice lies here in the hands of Don Corleone. Yet traces of the Warshovian tragic vision are apparent in The Godfather, in the deep vein of ambivalence, of uneasiness toward the gangster figure that the film inherits from its gangster-movie precursors - particularly in its depiction of the supplanting of the benign Vito and his bold, hot-tempered oldest son Sonny, the film's Hotspur, by the cold, ruthlessly self-contained Prince Hal figure, Michael: like Hal the true heir, but also a prince whose rise to power signals the kingdom's loss of vitality, even as his corporate mien implies the continued upward rise of the family in the upper reaches of business success.

Michael's consolidation of power and simultaneous imposition of a brutal new order is the focus of Part Two. As in 2 Henrv IV, the prevailing sense is of

"justicen imposed on the kingdom. The tragedies of "order" that formed the basis of the Warshow conception are hem replaced by a tragedy of passion, with the film's

Falstaffs silenced by the Sick Society that has replaced the old, golden world of

Michael's father. Even so, the film rnoves closer to the Classical Gangster subgenre in its depiction of the spiritual descent of the tyrant at the fount of the Sick Society.

Michael, concurrent with the ascension to power (seen in flashback) of the family's founder-patriarch, Vito. The first film's ambiguous narrative of decline here becomes a narrative of rise and fall equivalent to the old Warshovian gangster story dynastically expanded: the rise of the father precipitates, makes tragically inevitable. the fall of the son. Taken together, the first two Godfathers reflect many of the divergent though overlapping tendencies of Hollywood cinema at that time: the 195

idealization of the American past, of family, of ethnicity in the face of perceived

erosion and decline, coupled with a pervasive fear, and concurrent demonization of

authority.

With the release of Part Three of the trilogy in 1990, the fa11 of Michael

Corleone is completed. Northrop Frye writes in Fools of f ime, "In the tragic vision

death is, not an incident in life, not even the inevitable end of life, but the essential

event that gives shape and form to life." (Frye, p. 3) In Warshow's reading of the

gangster film, death is the final retribution for the gangster, who has already

suffered the ignominy of isolation and defeat, not despite his acquisition of power and success but because of it. Part Three sees a realization of the promise of death

by violence that is the legacy of the normative gangster films of the early thirties,

but the retributive cycle is not completed in the farniliar sense. Even as Part Three moves toward Warshovian closure, its adaptation of the Kina Lear narrative mitigates against it being the tragedy of order that that would suggest. Michael

Corleone's tragedy of isolation emerges from his gradua1 understanding of the pattern of his life, and the futility of the redemption through further acquisition (the

Vatican deal) that he seeks, but his role as family patriarch, and his personal history, and the history of the family, conspire against him. The sense of an omnipresent past that crushes Michael is delineated largely through the film's persistent foregrounding of its place within dramatic history, its links to

Shakespearean tragedy, grand opera, and even the Godfather series. The consequent sense of the film's tragic hero as a prisoner of genre establishes

Godfather Ill as a clear product of nineties genre cinema, with its self-reflexiveness, 196 and its strain of fin-de-siecle apocalypticism. The generic imperative that those who

[ive by the usurping sword also die by it does catch up with Michael, but contrary to the sense of order ambivalently restored at the ends of the Classical Gangster films (those preceding & foliowing the Godfathers) is the sense of terrifying chaos unkashed at the end of the third Godfather. Mary dies by the sword by which her father lived, just as Cordelia does; it is not the spectacle of the guilty one punished that cornmands our attention hem, but that of the death of an innocent and the horror of those left behind.

Yet the sense of terror and pity mingled at film's end arises out of the inevitability of the final chaos in light of the family history, versus the seeming arbitrariness of Cordelia's death. For al1 of his clinging to Iegitimacy, Michael must still act out every gangster's destiny according to Warshow; he must wind up

"alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies ..." (Warshow, p. 133) He must die alone. Ultimately, Godfather III, as much as any product of the current era of movie gangsterism, reaffirms Warshow's sense of the genre as a potent tragic corrective to the Hollywood culture of optimism. In the Blockbuster Era of Forrest

Gum~(1 994) and lnde~endenceDav (19961, an era ironically initiated by the first

Godfather, a film iike Godfather Ill provides in its tragic finale the kind of catharsis

Warshow discerned in the resolution of the gangster film. When Michael Corleone dies, even in our horror, we are safe. As Warshow writes, "...for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail." (Warshow, p. 133) Books

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