The Godfather: When Don Corleone Discovered America

Tom Santopietro was 18 when they turned off the lights at the movie theater in Waterbury, Connecticut, and something lit up inside of him. It was March 1972 and the aching voice of the gravedigger Amerigo Bonasera rose from the first sequence of “The Godfather” to ask for revenge to Don Vito Corleone. “I believe in America. America has made my fortune,” the gravedigger began, while the Don was listening to him, cherishing a kitten with sinister sweetness. Tom’s mom suggested that they go, but Tom didn’t move.

Tom’s father was Sicilian and his mother, Nancy, was English; for the almost two hours of the movie, while his horrified mother would repeat that they should go, he was riveted to what he would call in his book 40 years later, “The Godfather effect.” It was something much more overwhelming than the effect of a masterpiece movie. It was the discovery of a confused truth kneaded with disgust and pride, seduction and repulsion: He understood what being an Italian immigrant to America had meant. How terrible the experience of his Sicilian grandparents had been, thrown into the American melting pot amidst scorn, poverty, social refusal, ghettos and the temptations of crime. Attached only to the family, to float and sink. For two billion viewers all over the world — The Godfather I and II were dubbed even in Tamil — the imaginary saga of the family of Vito Andolini, turned into “Corleone” by a scornful immigration official on Ellis Island, was and still is a wonderful cinematic product, the best of what Hollywood was able to deliver in terms of photography, direction, acting and the great Nino Rota’s Puccini-like notes. It is still fresh a generation after its launch, like a painting that still smells like wet paint. But for millions of Americans with Italian blood, seen as odd characters incapable of correctly pronouncing the “r” and “th” English sounds, that work was the revelation of something that went way beyond the intentions of the director, the actors and Paramount Studios which distributed it — as Coppola himself admitted.

After a few decades, it may seem incredible that during the making of the movie many Italian-American associations preemptively protested and attempted to stop Coppola. The Italian-American Civil Rights League organized demonstrations of indignant people in front of Paramount Studios to ask that the movie be stopped because it would have reinforced the identification of Italians with the Mafiosi. The Sons of Italy, the Knights of Columbus, local communities of immigrants, threatened to picket in front of movie theaters that would screen the movie. They were not completely wrong. The equation Italian equals Mafioso is something that whoever has travelled or lived in the United States knows only too well. The “curse of the vowel” at the end of your last name which identifies you as an Italian is still a giveaway that, in the eyes of those speaking with you, triggers the impossible to ask question, “Could he possibly be, too…?” In 2009, when Cosa Nostra, or the Mob, the crime organization, had long been in decline, an FBI report indicated that Americans of Italian descent, 6 percent of the U.S. population, were responsible for 0.00782 percent of crimes. And yet according to the authoritative opinion poll society Zogby, 74 percent of people, three out of four Americans, were and probably still are persuaded that Italian-Americans still have some relationship with Cosa Nostra.

But if the Godfather effect was that of permanently carving the bas–relief of the Mafioso Italian family into popular culture, the paradox was the one that Santopietro felt in the dark of that movie theater in Connecticut: the definitive Americanization of the Italian experience, its assimilation into the mainstream. Both in Mario Puzo’s book, on which the first movie was based, and in the cinema version, the thread of disillusionment, skepticism and delusion toward the promise of America is the true secret moral of the work. The “family” is certainly criminal, but the world that surrounds it is not better — it’s simply more honeyed and hypocritical. Cops, journalists, judges, politicians that “you carry around in your pocket,” as Sollozzo the “Turk” accuses Don Vito of doing, are all corrupt or corruptible. The big financial capital is corrupt too, as the Don explains when he warns, “Italian-Americans must learn from philanthropists like the Rockefellers — first you rob everybody, then you give to the poor.” In the end, with their brutality, lack of forgiveness of betrayals, their duplicities and infamies, the bosses themselves and their men are more sincere.

The story of the Corleones is a completely fictitious epic, only vaguely inspired by the five families in New York. If it entered American culture, this was because fiction told the truth, to the extent of introducing expressions into common vocabulary: “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” “Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family” and the saying that the smartest ones are always those who betray you. No Mafia men ever used them, but even Cosa Nostra’s goodfellas adopted them, after hearing them on set where the producers, Coppola, the actors, especially James Caan, “Santino,” the violent and coarse heir, invited them to copy their tics and moves. Words like Don, omerta’ (conspiracy of silence), caporegime (boss), consigliore (counselor) have become common.

Never has the almost $20 million spent to produce the first two movies (critics and admirers prefer to overlook “The Godfather Part III”) returned so much in terms of cultural influence. The almost half-billion dollars made at the box office, the nine Oscars in total between the first and the second films, the uncut rerun of the saga that an American TV channel screened uninterruptedly for twenty–four hours, have never given the human measure of the Godfather effect. Watching the film, Tom Santopietro says that he, a middle-class child raised in the suburbs and educated in private schools where they wore blue blazers and grey pants, understood what his grandfather meant when he would talk so much about the family. Santopietro has never dreamed of imitating Don Vito, organizing illegal trafficking or cutting off horses’ heads for intimidation. But still, 40 years later, when he sees Marlon Brando give Al Pacino last advice before dying, and then chase his grandchild among the tomato plants, when he sees De Niro refuse the charity of a food box, but bring his wife a nice pear, his eyes fill with tears. He thinks how Italian-Americans have come a long, difficult way to accept their legacy and become what they are today. Today, two of the nine judges of the Supreme Court are Italian–American. It has taken over 100 years for Italian families — the real ones — to get there, but they are now completely legitimate.