THE GODFATHER: the book vs the film
Recently, THE GODFATHER was $1.99 on Kindle. I’ve been meaning to watch the movie for years since it’s apparently one of those classic films everyone is supposed to see, but I never like to watch a movie before I read the book, and I had never quite gotten around to it. But I finally managed it this week, reading the book and watching GODFATHER parts I & II.
Usually, the book is better than the movie. With some exceptions, of course. As a writer, it dismayed me to admit that the movie version of the James Bond adventure GOLDFINGER is a lot better than the book version of GOLDFINGER. The movie fixes several of the book’s plot holes, and the villain in the movie is substantially cleverer than his book counterpart. (Also, the movie has Bond’s excellent final duel with Goldfinger’s implacable henchman Oddjob, which would have been hard to do in a book.)
For THE GODFATHER, it was interesting to see that both the book and the movie had different strengths and weaknesses.
The movie’s strength was that it cut out a lot of the extraneous subplots from the book, especially a lot of the stuff involving Johnny Fontaine and Las Vegas. It also dispensed with the book’s many (and frankly tedious) sex scenes – you could tell that Mario Puzo got his start writing for men’s magazines in the 1950s. The book’s strength was that Puzo was a clear and effective writer. Puzo wrote very transparent prose and made it easy to follow a complicated plot and numerous characters, and that’s harder to do than it looks. I think the movie’s biggest weakness is that it would be very difficult to follow without first reading the book. If I hadn’t read the book a day before seeing the movie, I think it would have been a challenge to understand what was happening and why. (“Like, why are they driving to this place and shooting this one guy?”)
So if you saw the movie and found it hard to follow, I would recommend reading the book. The book was easier to follow than the movie.
But in both the book and the movie, Don Vito Corleone is one of those characters who just springs to life, like Sherlock Holmes or Conan the Cimmerian or Ebenezar Scrooge, and becomes more famous than his creator. I am pretty sure that more people are familiar with Don Corleone as the stereotypical image of a mafia don and the catchphrase “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” than there are people who know who Mario Puzo (or Marlon Brando) actually are.
Vito Corleone seems like he would have been a superb feudal baron, the sort of well-loved and well-feared lord who is a good friend and a formidable enemy. But then organized crime is in many ways a feudal enterprise – supporting the local “big man” in exchange for protection seems to be humanity’s default mode of government. The problem with that system of government, of course, is that it is entirely dependent on the character of the “big man”, who has no check on his destructive behavior save his own restraint. Vito Corleone is a gangster and a racketeer who makes money off misery, but he retains a sense of honor, and he very clearly seems to sincerely believe himself the defender of weaker people against corrupt authority.
His son Michael, by contrast, inherits all of Vito’s intelligence, ruthlessness, and charisma, but he doesn’t inherit his father’s sense of honor, his ability to forgive, and his sense of “social debt” to others. We never really see Michael helping the “little guy” under his protection, the way Vito did with the undertaker’s daughter or the widow about to be evicted from her apartment. Consequently, while Michael wants to stay out of the family business, in the end he become a far darker man than his father. It puts me in mind of the Bible when it says that the iniquity of the fathers will be visited upon their sons. Despite his admirable personal qualities, Vito’s life of organized crime passes to his children, and it ruins all four of them in different ways.
-JM
My great-uncle Bonnacorso came from Sicily and explained it to me thus: In Sicily (and Italy, but those were imitators, according to him) you had the nobility put in charge from afar and the ‘shadow’ noble family that had run things for hundreds of years and kept doing so under the table, so to speak. They were imported as strikebreakers and came as a tribe: extended families and the Capu to handle things. When they got to America and found out the situation, the Capu decided that he’d been lied to and said no deal. He then looked around to find work for his people. Prohibition had just been declared, and given that smuggling was a prime skill for them, they went into rumrunning.
Alas, he said, success destroyed the system that had kept running in adversity. The first generation held to tradition, the second generation threw it away, and the third generation went down in flames. It’s probably more complicated than that, but ‘uncle Tony’ saw it firsthand, and this is what he told me.
Thanks! That was an interesting history. I suppose one of the problems of any government or business enterprise is how to pick a good successor to a competent leader.
Prohibition seems to have been one of those things that totally failed to resolve the problems it was designed to address and created many new ones in the process.