What Is The Godfather Saying?

By JAY COCKS

After the first hurrahs for The Godfather, critical reaction to the movie has snagged on a few key questions. Does it revel in Hollywood gangster melodrama? Does it sentimentalize the Mafia? Does it present the Mob as a metaphor for all business or politics? One of TIME's cinema critics gives his assessment:

"I believe in America."

Those opening words, heard over a black screen, are a testament and a plea--not so much a pledge of allegiance to an adopted country as an obeisance to a shadow government of profound power. An Italian immigrant funeral director has a daughter who has been dishonored. Because of a lack of evidence, the courts offer him no justice. In the tradition of his native land, he turns to a man who understands such matters and who will be able to give him satisfaction. In return he owes the man a service. And he must respectfully call him "Godfather."

No American film before The Godfather has ever caught so truly the texture of an ethnic subculture. Director Francis Ford Coppola knows his subject so well that he imparts an almost visceral understanding that does not permit easy judgments. Coppola gets it all down, and gets it right: the Don dancing proudly with his daughter on her wedding day; the informal ritual of family dinner, and the whole preoccupation with food. Even the dialogue has the unmistakable cadence of the street, as when a Corleone lieutenant describes an untraceable revolver as "cold as they come." The characters become neither stock villains nor national stereotypes, because Coppola has set them in a world of careful complexity.

But the fact that Coppola scrupulously humanizes his characters does not mean that he sentimentalizes the Mafia. The men are racists and hypocrites. They form a so ciety closed to women, who are indulged, protected, finally depersonalized. One may admire the Godfather for his refusal to traffic in dope, but his reasons are practical, not moral: he stands to lose all his political contacts, because they -- not he -- consider narcotics "a dirty business."

In this world, "business" becomes the ultimate morality, the final and irrefutable excuse for the most insidious disloyalty and the most brutal slaughter. During the wedding that opens the film, the Don metes out favors and punishments; during the christening that ends it, his son and successor Michael pledges faith in God and renounces the devil while gunmen, acting on his instru tions, murder rivals all over the city. "Today," says Mi chael, "I took care of all family business."

Coppola extends this moral masquerade even further, using the Mafia as a metaphor not only for cor ruption in business, but for corruption in all centers of power, emphatically including government. "My father is no different from any other powerful man," Michael tells his WASPish girl friend Kay. She says, "You're being naive. Senators and Congressmen don't have people killed." Replies Michael: "Who's being naive now, Kay?" When the Don expresses regret that Michael could not have been "a Senator, a Governor," the son promises him, "We'll get there, Pop." As the film would have it, he will.

Although it is nominally about crime, The Godfather has no more in common with the razzle-dazzle Warner Bros, gangster yarns of the '30s than The Wild Bunch had with Shane. The Godfather's primary concern is not bullets and murders but dynasties and power. In the cool savagery of its ironies, expressed within a traditional framework, it is much closer to, say, Bertolucci's The Conformist. In its blending of new depth with an old genre, it becomes that rarity, a mass entertainment that is also great movie art. &3183; Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.