50 years of The Godfather: The Frank Coppola-Mario Puzo spell

Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in 'The Godfather'. One of the reasons the partnership between writer Mario Puzo and director Frank Ford Coppola worked so well in this film is that they both had a personal connection to where the characters came from.

You only have to know Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) savagery, pomp, steeliness and toxicity to realise Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) lives on even after 50 years.

Logan is Don Vito’s post-truth, media baron avatar of 2021. Logan owns the media empire Waystar Roy Co. in HBO’s—and modern television’s—most inventive drama about dynastic toxicity and generational transfer of power and wealth.

Don Vito, the patriarch and mafia don in Mario Puzo’s best-selling book The Godfather from 1969 and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of the same name from 1972, came back to the big screen last month after Logan left us terrified in Succession’s Season 3 finale in December, 2021.

As the backlog of Indian film releases roll out, one show of The Godfather, re-released by Paramount Pictures (with Viacom 18 in India) to commemorate the classic’s 50th year, continues to run at the PVR Luxe Theatre in Lower Parel, Mumbai, this week.

Also read: The Godfather turns 50: Epic story of one of the greatest movies ever made

It is a theatre experience that combines the power of nostalgia with compelling storytelling. And a good enough answer to the question: Where did the familiar family man gangster on screen, the one who who kills for competition and yet professes familial love and loyalty, come from?

Screen patriarchs Don Vito and Logan have a lot in common—both white men; both pivots around which their families spiral into emotional and criminal wreckage; both successfully create giant, insular megaliths based on power and money; and they both want to rule by controlling everyone from their family members to governments.

The point is, the influence of The Godfather on popular culture and film-making is beyond doubt 50 years on. From Martin Scorsese’s best gangster films (most notably Goodfellas, with more of the ragged low ranks of the American-Italian mafia world) to David Chase’s The Sopranos and Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, both for HBO, The Godfather has shaped and influenced the gangster genre in ways that few other films have. Closer home, Ram Gopal Varma’s Subhas Nagre ‘Sarkar’ (Sarkar, 2005) and Mani Ratnam’s Vela Naicker (Nayakan, 1987) are two memorable examples.

Like everything that’s for consumption today, critics have wondered how the millennial and Gen Z audiences, soothed by franchise spectacles and their accompanying merch, will react to The Godfather’s slow-burn pace and dark, black-and-rust colour scheme.

(‘Millennial’ and ‘Gen Z’ are labels fabricated by consumer behaviour strategists, and The Godfather is one of the best stories ever written and shown on screen—as long as there is feeling, sensation and the willingness to buy a movie ticket in a human being, The Godfather will have its appeal.)

Beyond its relevance for audiences, what The Godfather reminds us of is the process of filmmaking itself—about how enduring stories and films get created. In the meeting of Puzo and Coppola, there are lessons in how collaborations work best, and how cinema can transform and even uplift written stories. Most adaptations from books are disappointing. In this case, the film had details, the gaze and a visual feel and intelligence that lifted the material of the book a few notches higher.

Let’s go back to Puzo and Coppola.

When Puzo was 12, his father, who worked as a trackman for the New York Central Railroad, was committed to the Pilgrim State Hospital asylum for schizophrenia. His mother Maria raised the seven Puzo siblings. Puzo served in the US Army Air Forces in Germany in World War II, and later graduated from the City College of New York before becoming a novelist.

Coppola, who suffered from polio as a child, inherited a love of the arts from his classical musician father and studied filmmaking.

Both were New Yorkers, both were from Italian-American immigrant families. Puzo approached Paramount with a 150-page story pitch based on his novel, which was already a best-seller. The studio executives made the two meet. Coppola was, at first averse to the graphic violence on the pages of Puzo’s book, but he took up the collaboration—Puzo would be his co-writer, it was decided.

In an essay commemorating the 50th year of the novel in 2019, Coppola wrote, “He (Puzo) was the arbiter of what the novel’s characters would do, while I was offering a kind of interpretation from the perspective of what a movie director would do.”

American critic Pauline Kael wrote in her review of the movie in The New Yorker in 1972, “He salvaged Puzo’s energy and lent the narrative dignity. The abundance is from the book. The quality of feeling is Coppola’s.”

Coppola did away with some searing details about racial profiling and other dark realities of the time in America, staying with the nuances of the Corleone way of consolidating supremacy in an America that had recently lived through the Vietnam War, and was living through soaring inflation, political upheavals and movements to claim racial equality. Both Puzo, also a journalist, and Coppola, a director, were byproducts of this world.

It’s arguably a dream duo. Both men were keenly aware of how immigrant realities were expanding in America of the 1960s and 1970s, both shared a resentment about how Italian-Americans were stereotyped by Hollywood studios of the time and both were on the more-or-less similar economic spectrum of the capitalist system that had cemented in the country by then.

“I believe in America,” is one of the film’s opening lines. Unlike most gangster films of Hollywood before that, in The Godfather, the gangster is not the villain whose villainy is destroyed at the end for the gratification of the audience’s sense of poetic justice. Coppola and Puzo projected crime and mafia as an extension of the free enterprise that America celebrated.

Organised crime in The Godfather is a nightmare. And this blueprint solidified, and became a template for future filmmakers for 50 years. In the world of the Corleones, killing is a way of dealing with competition.

Although Don Vito dies in the most spectacular way (the cinematic merit of The Godfather is well beyond discussion; critics, writer and artists have spent 50 years doing it), nothing is resolved at the end of the first of three films. The family system goes on. For the first time, a melodrama expressed a tragic realism—and became an example of  how art and commerce could be friends. There was something in the way two New Yorker Italian-American men separated by a generation (Puzo was in his early 50s and Coppola in his early 30s when they met) found a common ground for the tragic-realist gaze.

It is, of course, a dubious assumption that creators and artistes separated by backgrounds, race and age can’t create enduring masterpieces that live for 50-plus years. But in an age when the fuzzy logic inherent in internet algorithms and social media buzz decide the success of a creative work, movie posterity demands more than new interpretations of franchises or dazzling technology or star-driven gimmickry. It needs collaborators invested in the “why” of a story, in shared histories and shared world views which can be challenged in meaningful ways. The Puzo-Coppola partnership worked because they both had a personal connection to where the characters came from, they understood the historical faultiness of the Italian-American experience. A lot has been documented about what they disagreed on—from the specs of what got magnified and what got left out from Puzo’s dense, salacious potboiler to who would get killed and how.

The Godfather’s return to the big screen and the overwhelming love it has received yet again is a reminder of how the right writer-director energy can create cinema that can resonate with multiple generations.

Also read: Al Pacino on ‘The Godfather’: ‘It’s Taken Me a Lifetime to Accept It and Move On’