It only takes about three quarters of an hour until the godfather gets caught. The attackers’ bullets puncture the fleeing body, which collapses on the hood of his car and slowly and gravely slides sideways on the body. The hair is disheveled and the face aching as the colossal paunch keeps tipping over, hitting the ground, finally being completely covered by its cloak. Vito Corleone was shot. Marlon Brando, who plays him, makes a whole choreography out of it.
Later, towards the end of the film, another scene in which a body is gripped with deadly heaviness. Vito’s son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has taken over the business of his late father and, during his son’s baptism, has all the opponents eliminated, one after the other. At the height of this crescendo of violence, the head of a feuding family is caught. The man fleeing up a flight of stairs gets the bullets in his back. He throws his arms up, leans back, falls, tumbles down the steps.
Choreography meets gravity in 1972’s “The Godfather,” directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, who is only 31 years old and already filming a Mario Puzo bestseller. Later, two sequels (from 1974 and 1990) complete the world-famous film trilogy, which tells the story of the Corleones mafia clan over half a century. The first part, which is now back in cinemas in a digitally restored version and will be released on the home entertainment market at the end of March, is set in post-war New York. It’s one of those legendary, much-quoted classics in film history that hardly needs an introduction.
The shooting alone is a film in itself. Mafia and Italian American communities resist production. Frank Sinatra recognizes himself in a role and feels vilified. Coppola, who initially had little interest in the material, later almost drove the producing company Paramount insane with his demands. The producers didn’t agree with either Brando or Al Pacino at first until Coppola got his way.
But this improbable, resisted masterpiece is also so large because of the weight and heaviness of its bodies and figures, which emerge from the film’s ocher-black chiaroscuro. Brando alone is a monument in itself. A thick layer of make-up makes the then only 47-year-old actor twenty years older, while the pads stuffed into his cheeks give him the expression and voice of a hoarse bulldog. The only thing that seems to move on his face are his eyebrows.
Earlier Hollywood gangster films relied more on external action, dynamics and speed. Just like Coppola’s New Hollywood sidekick Martin Scorsese, who created some of the genre’s modern classics himself with 1973’s “Mean Streets” and later “Goodfellas” and “Casino”. In “Godfather,” on the other hand, the camera only has to move sluggishly towards Al Pacino, who is enthroned on a chair with his legs crossed in the company of his family to let power pass from father to son. A power that expresses itself through calm and restraint, which is first radiated by solemn bodies before bloody deeds follow.
The calm after the attack is a still life
It is fascinating to see how Coppola often compresses the action into a narrow, static space in this sweeping epic, creating the greatest tension from complete stillness and allowing it to end again. For example, when Santino, Vito’s eldest son, is shot at a toll booth. A man ducks, a car reverses, doors burst open, windows smash, a door opens, and Santino staggers into the machine gun fire. There follows a series of shots showing the aftermath. Shattered glass and a blue sky, a hand (Santinos) that juts out into the picture at the lower edge of the picture as if accidentally included. The calm after the storm, almost a still life.
The film is not the work of a young, overly talented mannerist who would string together detailed, motionless individual tableaus. Rather, the movement shifts from the outside to the inside, where it traces the contours of an intimate family portrait. The most beautiful scene is the one where Vito (Brando), shot and motionless, lies in bed and the shot fades to his son Michael (Pacino), who had to leave the country.
He is in Sicily, the original home of the Corleones, where he strolls over sunny hills. The scene is taking place at this moment in a different place in the world, but also “in” the body of the old patriarch, his memory. Because the son is repeating the story of the father, who once came to America from Sicily. For his part, Michael will soon be back to take his place at the head of the clan in America. In the second part of the trilogy, we follow Vito (played by Robert De Niro) as he makes his way from the old to the new world at the beginning of the century.
The gravitational force of the “Godfather” does not only come from the heaviness of the body, but also from a family tradition from which there is no escaping. A tradition to which we also belong, cinephile lovers of Coppola’s masterpiece, who can now make the pilgrimage to the cinema to once again watch the godfather’s body fall.
The Godfather, USA 1972 – Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Book: Coppola, Mario Puzo. Camera: Gordon Willis. Starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Robert Duvall. Paramount Pictures, 175 minutes. Revival: March 3, 2022.