GOING TO THE MOVIES
David Denby
THE TWO GODFATHERS
Near the end of her review of
The Godfather
(Part One), Pauline
Kael wrote, "These gangsters
like
their life style, while we-seeing it from
outside-are appalled ," and, Kael concluded, "Nothing is resolved at the
end of
The Godfather,
because the family business goes on. Terry Malloy
didn't clean up the docks at the end of
On the Waterfront;
that was a lie.
The
Godfather
is popular melodrama , but it expresses a new tragic realism." It's
often hard
to
tell who's included in Kael's "we" (on any given occasion she
may mean the entire movie audience, the readers of
The New Yorker,
or a lim–
ited group of like-minded persons) , but if she intended to characterize the
likely common response, she was way off the mark. Most people obviously
were not appalled by the gangsters, and I doubt that many viewed the continu–
ation of the Corleone enterprise or any other element in the movie as tragic.
For all its pessimism and violence,
The Godfather
was hugely enjoyed as a kind
of grisly comedy. These mad, paradoxical killers-sadistic and pious, flam–
boyant and self-abasing-awed and amused the audience with the weirdly
archaic style of their behavior. Feudatories in the corporate age, dour cele–
brants of obscure codes and implacable loyalties, they killed with such fervent
sensuality they were almost romantic.
At the same time, they were no threat to us. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford
Coppola were very shrewd about this, and more than a little disingenuous.
They knew the public loathes ordinary, unorganized movie criminals-mug–
gers and rapists and rooftop snipers-and regularly applauds when Clint
Eastwood wipes them out like vermin . Thus in their movie about the aristo–
crats of crime they were careful never to suggest that the audience itself could
be hurt by any of these fellows; indeed, all the everyday victims of Mafia
extortion and violence (store-owners, truckers, union members, etc.) were
simply omitted, and the issue of harm to society at large was never raised,
leaving us (meaning nearly everyone) free to enjoy the intramural mayhem
without anxiety . Since Puzo and Coppola did no more than barely outline the
economic causes of Mafia rivalry , conducting endless, incomprehensible
