CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 9/26/08

With Respect:
The Godfather From Puzo's Page

to Coppola's Stage

By jason davis

As Coppola's restored edition of The Godfather arrives on DVD, CS Weekly examines how the filmmaker honored Mario Puzo's best-selling novel while essentially altering the trajectory of the story with his Academy Award-winning adaptation.

Leave the gun. Take the Cannoli. Beware of spoilers.

As he notes at the outset of his audio commentary, writer-director Francis Ford Coppola is a firm believer in crediting the author of a text when adapting that story for the screen. Thus, Mario Puzo's The Godfather maintains that respect for the source material while refocusing the story through adaptation. While the Godfather of the novel is undoubtedly Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), the movie's eponym is more ambiguous. It could apply to either Vito or his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino), who ascends to the head of the Corleone crime family during the course of the movie. Though The Godfather, Part II parallels Vito and Michael's lives, again obscuring to whom the title refers, The Godfather, Part III irrevocably applies the title to Michael Corleone. Perhaps, though, one needn't rest the attribution upon the saga's final cinematic installment. Rather, one might note the subtle shifts inherent in the movie to divine that Michael, rather than his father, is The Godfather.

Though Coppola and Puzo collaborated on a screenplay based on the latter's book, The Godfather was directed, much like Coppola's subsequent masterpiece, Apocalypse Now, from a heavily annotated copy of the original text. Puzo divided his novel into nine books of successively shorter durations. Book I, which encompasses 34 percent of the story's page count, was virtually filmed in its entirety. Though several brief sequences were deleted from the finished film—including the death of Vito's original consigliere Genco Abbandando, Michael's hotel stay with his girlfriend Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), and acting boss Sonny Corleone's (James Caan) war council after the attack on his father—it's clear from the dialogue and mise en scène of the movie and its available deleted scenes that the book was Coppola's bible in executing the first act of the film. Following Michael's murder of the drug lord Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and corrupt Police Captain Mark McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), the film veers subtly away from the novel as Coppola restructures the narrative to emphasize Michael's journey toward the Don's infamous leather chair. Therein rests the first distinction between book and film: the former chronicles the fall of Vito, while the latter dramatizes the rise of Michael.

A reading of the novel reveals a number of subplots discarded to tame the 446-page narrative, though many of the excised elements leave vestigial plot points in the finished film that allow Coppola to make several critical points. Sinatra-esque crooner Johnny Fontane (Al Martino), Vito Corleone's godson, was a key character running throughout the book, but only appears briefly at the outset of the film version. On the Don's daughter's wedding day, Fontane asks his Godfather to give his Hollywood career a push by leaning on an uncooperative movie mogul. The film seizes upon this story beat to illustrate Vito Corleone's process of persuasion as outlined by Michael to Kay in an earlier scene. The viewer sees Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duval) attempt to reason with producer Jack Woltz (John Marley). Woltz refuses to come to mutually beneficial terms with the Godfather because his quarrel with Fontane is personal and has nothing to do with business. The mogul receives "an offer he can't refuse" that changes his mind, and Vito's godson gets the role that will make him a movie star. The film has used the outset of Fontane's story to establish the ruthlessness of the world, and now the singer (as well as his future duet partner Nino Valenti, who goes unseen in the movie) can exit the story, despite the fact that Puzo dedicates the entirety of Book II, as well as several chapters later in the novel, to the trauma of Fontane's voice loss, his attempt to get Nino off the booze, and his eventual career as a Corleone-financed movie producer.

Referred to discreetly as "the woman whose private parts are too big" by Coppola, the novel's subplot regarding bridesmaid Lucy Mancini (Jeannie Linero) and her affair with the Corleone heir apparent Sonny is glimpsed several times in the film, but the movie never reveals that a gynecological abnormality is the basis for her attraction to the well-endowed mobster. Puzo devotes a substantial portion of the novel to Lucy's plight, and though the screenplay ignores the storyline altogether, Coppola's direction still alludes to the nuance when we see Sonny's wife Sandra (Julie Gregg) demonstrating her husband's "bedroom prowess" to the giggles of her girlfriends during the wedding at the top of the film. Though Lucy's story—and its collision with Fontane's story strand—is digressive in terms of the overall narrative arc, her minimization in the finished film is indicative of an overall trend within the movie. Sandra Corleone is almost entirely absent from the film. Hagen's wife Theresa (Tere Livrano) is seen, but her reunion with her kidnapped husband was cut from the theatrical release. Carmella Corleone (Morgana King) is never even named in the finished film (she's credited as "Mama Corleone" in both this movie and the sequel). The book features several key scenes between the Corleone matron and Michael's eventual wife Kay. Though at least one was scripted, it didn't appear in the finished film, leaving Kay, Michael's first wife Appolonia Vitelli (Simonetta Stefanelli), and his abused sister Connie Corleone Rizzi (Talia Shire) as the only prominent female roles in the movie.

Despite the fact that Connie's abusive marriage is key to the assassination of Sonny, it also serves as the first illustration of a woman's place in Michael Corleone's world: Connie surrenders her freedom in marrying Carlo (Gianni Russo). Though Sonny savages the wife beater for hitting Connie, the Corleone men seem content to let the abuse go—it's out of their hands now that she belongs to Carlo. Appolonia, the 16-year-old peasant girl Michael marries while hiding in Sicily after the dual murders of Sollozzo and McCluskey shows us the next truth when she's killed by a car bomb meant for her husband: innocence has no place in Michael's realm. Indeed, the hunting of her killer Fabrizio (Angelo Infanti) was filmed, but remains unseen. Finally, Michael marries Kay, a non-Catholic, non-Italian from Connecticut whom he once assured he would never follow in his father's footsteps. By the film's end, he has literally shut her out of his life as the door to his study closes on her in the final shot.

The character of Kay is a particular point of comparison between the novel and film. In both versions, she's introduced as Michael's date to Connie's wedding. In each case, she's told about Vito Corleone's business and how Michael has no interest in joining the family firm. As noted earlier, the book offers more snapshots of the couple's evolving relationship, but some of this was excised to streamline the story. After Michael departs for Sicily, Kay comes to the Corleone compound to inquire after him. She's met by Hagen, who explains that Mike will get in touch when he's able. Kay asks to use the phone to call a cab and is ushered inside. Here, the scene ends in the film, but both the book and screenplay carry on with Kay encountering Carmela. In the script, Kay asks the older woman to pass on her letter to Michael and Mrs. Corleone agrees over Hagen's legal objections:

                                     MAMA
         You tell me what to do? Even he don't tell me what to do.
                   (to Kay)
         You listen to me, you go home to your family,
         and you find a good young man and get married.
         Forget about Mikey; he's no good for you, anymore.

The loss of this brief exchange is two-fold: first, it establishes some idea of Vito and Carmella's relationship. Even the all-powerful Godfather doesn't command his wife. Without this beat, we only have Connie's relationship to illustrate male-female dynamics within the Corleone family, and that train wreck tells a very different story than the one to which Mrs. Corleone alludes. Second: we see Carmella warning Kay away from Michael. In the book, Kay ignores this advice and continues, albeit intermittently, to inquire after Michael and eventually discovers that he's been back in America for some months. Mrs. Corleone invites Kay to the house, and there she's reunited with Michael before the story time lapses into their married life. The screenplay originally featured no rapprochement between Michael and Kay. She was merely waiting for him at the airport with their son when he returned home from Las Vegas. A year or so after principal photography, Coppola remedied this narrative oversight with a scene that now finds Michael seeking out Kay in Connecticut upon his descent into the underworld. Already, Michael is the more active character. When she calls him on becoming a mobster, he offers a rationalization based on a passage from page 365 of Puzo's novel:

"My father is a businessman trying to provide for his wife and children… He doesn't accept the rules of the society we live in because those rules would have condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force and character. What you have to understand is that he considers himself the equal of all those great men like Presidents and Prime Ministers and Supreme Court Justices and Governors of the States. He refuses to accept their will over his own. He refuses to live by rules set up by others…"

The dialogue onscreen delivers the point more concisely and, like the text of the novel, ends with a promise of legitimacy within half a decade. What's not apparent in either version of the story until later is that Michael may as well be talking about himself, as Vito has effectively begun the transfer of power to his son. Indeed, the peace Vito guaranteed at a meeting of the entire American underworld a few scenes earlier was promised solely to insure Michael's safe return to America. The movie doesn't concern itself with the complicated logistics of pacifying the Barzinis and Tattaglias, but the novel expends great detail upon the elder Corleone's machinations. Why does Coppola shortchange the audience on these specifics? To service the primacy of Michael Corleone. In the book, Vito plans the entirety of the film's climax. Only a massive coronary prevents him from seeing his son execute (quite literally) his grand design. While the book places much of its thematic weight on Vito's failure to see his plans through—to topple his enemies and steer his family into legitimate business—the movie rests its finale on Michael. It is Michael who plans the simultaneous murders of gambling mogul Moe Greene (Alex Rocco), Dons Victor Stracci (Don Costello), Carmine Cuneo (Rudy Bond), Phillip Tattaglia (Victor Rendina), and Emilio Barzini (Richard Conte), and the movie executes these killings while Michael attends his nephew's baptism as an alibi.

Alongside the elegance of juxtaposing the love of God with the murder of one's enemies, the film has the added benefit of literally making Michael the godfather of Connie's child while he becomes The Godfather in the eponymous sense as well. Even the film's hit list strengthens the character of Michael as his father's successor. All four competing mob families in New York are eliminated, rather than the book's targeting of the two antagonistic factions. Adding Vegas honcho Moe Greene to the slaughter (he was killed earlier in the book) makes the action a clean sweep for Michael. Though it was filmed, Michael's wrathful killing of Fabrizio shortly after the foregoing sequence was deleted from the finished film in a final stroke that confirms what the new Godfather said upon his own father's shooting—"It's business, not personal," an inversion of the sentiments he expressed in the novel.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

The Godfather (The Coppola Restoration) courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment

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