From the opening moments of The Godfather, it was clear that it transcended the art of cinema. Marlon Brando is coolness personified as the crime boss faced with a request from a prosperous Sicilian undertaker seeking justice after a savage attack on his daughter.
This is not a mere confrontation between one man asking for assistance from another. This confrontation is between two worlds: the old-world values which Don Corleone lives by, and the new world of America, where both men have achieved prosperity through very different means.
For the Godfather, by not actively seeking his protection previously, the undertaker Bonasera has disrespected him and turned his back on a more honourable way of life.
“[Y]ou thought the world a harmless place where you could take your pleasure as you willed. You never armed yourself with true friends. After all, the police guarded you, there were courts of law, you and yours could come to no harm,” he tells him in the original novel.
The Godfather was released in 1972, just three years after Mario Puzo’s novel became a best-seller. Puzo freely acknowledged that he did little research in advance of writing The Godfather novel, adding that he “had never met a real honest-to-goodness gangster.” While elements of his description of a Mafia family are inaccurate, Puzo and the director Francis Ford Coppola captured much of the essence of a perverse lifestyle, which continues to fascinate viewers and readers.
What is it about the Mafia that so intrigues us?
Consider for a moment the sociological context of Southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno, which is the stronghold of the various Italian Mafia organisations as well as being the ancestral homeland of most Italian-Americans. The Italian South is unquestionably poor, but poverty is never a sufficient explanation for crime.
The famous American political scientist Robert Putnam spent many years examining the performance of Italian regional governments. Putnam found that Southern regional governments performed dismally when it came to delivering basic services. Furthermore, he observed an even more dramatic difference between the people of the region. Membership in associations of all kinds was far more common in the North, and this civic mentality appeared to make it easier for people to work together. According to Putnam, the historical roots of this contrast lay in the mediaeval period, where guilds and community associations flourished within republican-minded Northern city states while Norman rulers in the South operated an absolutist feudal system.
Putnam was not the first American scholar to be disturbed by the lack of Southern community spirit. In The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, published in 1958, Edward Banfield contrasted a town in the region of Basilicata, which he called ‘Montegrano,’ with his previous experiences in America. No real community associations existed in Montegrano. No local newspaper was published, and nobody within the community offered assistance to the nuns running an orphanage in a crumbling monastery.
Patriotic fervour and religious piety appeared to be absent. The only ties which appeared to matter were the immediate links of blood and marriage. Banfield wrote that the governing philosophy appeared to be one of ‘amoral familialism,’ where people acted according to the rule: “Maximise the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.”
This underlying culture had serious political consequences: not long after the reign of Mussolini, Banfield suggested that in an environment like this, people would naturally gravitate towards the rule of strongmen. While Il Duce may have been on the author’s mind, the same principle would suggest that small-scale tyrants could also find favour.
Banfield’s assessment of this community in Basilicata appears too harsh at times, but a decade earlier, the leftist writer Carlo Levi had written about his time living in internal exile in the same region. Though far more affectionate, Levi also detected a similar indifference and backwardness, describing the region as being part of “a pre-Christian civilisation.” The social conditions which existed in Basilicata mirrored those which existed across the South of Italy.
Even the name ‘Italy’ must be placed in context when considering these trends. When the peninsula and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily were brought together as one country, only around 2.5% of the population could speak Italian, with regional dialects being far more common.
The process of national unification was by no means straightforward, and unhappiness in the South about the outcomes, particularly the introduction of conscription requiring sons and husbands to give years of their lives in service to a distant government, gave rise to outright insurrections.
The Catholic Church and the new Italian government were the only major societal institutions, but neither of them truly had a hold over the people, with the bitter Church-state estrangement from the Risorgimento era onwards adding to the alienation felt by the Southern Italian people.
People who feel alone naturally seek protection from those who appear strong, and it is little surprise that such forces would emerge.
Indeed, the British historian John Dickie has written that it was during the period around the time of Italian unification that the Mafia was born, with the first mafiosi likely borrowing their now-infamous initiation rituals from 19th-century Masonic societies.
Another consequential development in the late 19th century was the advent of mass emigration. In their history of the Italian-American experience, Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale noted that 80% of the Italians who arrived in America were from the Mezzogiorno. The scale of the exodus is remarkable: almost a quarter of Sicily’s population emigrated between 1901-1913 alone.
Those Italians who found a lasting home in America were hindered in their progress by the same deficiencies that blighted the Mezzogiorno. Surveying the history of New York City’s major ethnic groups in the early ‘60s, Nat Glazer and Pat Moynihan were struck by the abnormal ‘village-mindedness’ of the Southern Italians. Widespread illiteracy and regional language barriers were obstacles to socio-economic progress, and in contrast to the Jewish population, for instance, the uprooted Southerners failed to establish many group-wide organisations.
Alienation from the Church and state persisted, with the added complication of Irish dominance within the archdiocese and the city’s political machinery. Just as with other ethnic groups, the influx of immigrants through Ellis Island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries included criminals—Irish gangsters, Jewish mobsters, and so forth. In time, the monumentally foolish policy of Prohibition would make this task easier, but it was the Italian-American crime groups who achieved the most prominence and success.
Banfield’s ‘amoral familialism’ helps to explain this and also helps to explain the thought process behind the writing of The Godfather. Mario Puzo’s son said that his father believed that “nobody had more family values than Italians” and that he also believed this was why Italians were “so good at being in the Mafia.”
The trilogy begins with an iconic wedding sequence in which the essence of the character (and ultimately the weaknesses) of each of the Corleone children is communicated. Al Pacino’s Michael, the youngest son, stands out for his Marine Corps uniform as much as for his dialogue with his decidedly non-Italian girlfriend, played by Diane Keaton. It sets him apart from his family, being a statement of his full integration into American society. The significance of his enlistment is shown in the flashback scene in The Godfather Part II, which shows a Corleone family meal taking place right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. To the elder brother Santino, the young American men rushing to recruiting stations were “saps, because they risk their lives for strangers.” The novel is even more blunt. When shown a picture of his newly decorated war hero son in Life magazine, Don Corleone scoffs that “he performs those miracles for strangers.”
This was not the standard Italian-American view; on the contrary, large-scale Italian-American participation in World War II was one of the key milestones in this group’s successful assimilation. Yet the Godfather’s words speak to a reality of Southern Italian life which was observed by Carlo Levi, where blood relationships between villagers were “all the more intense since they had so little attachment to either religion or the state.”
The opposition of the real-life Mob to the making of The Godfather film is a storied tale, and their antagonism succeeded in eliminating references to Mafia terminology from the script. This diminished the film’s authenticity. But instead of becoming a fictional story which they could not see themselves in, the world of The Godfather instead became something that real-world gangsters aspired to emulate. Italian-American Mafia leaders began to be referred to as godfathers in place of the traditional Italian word, compare.
Listening to the recordings of mobsters on FBI wiretaps, the crusading U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, whose investigations helped break the back of New York’s so-called ‘Five Families,’ observed that some were consciously modelling their speech on characters from the film. More bizarrely still, the iconic movie theme could be heard in the background as gangsters watched the film again and again.
There were, of course, many differences between the Mafia world and what was depicted. Don Corleone, played so magnificently by Brando, is a benevolent overlord. The Corleones live a life of great luxury, and the means of acquiring this wealth are for the most part a mystery. Viewers are not shown the reality of how the Mafia operates; there are no scenes where the late payment of a gambling debt results in a savage beating or where a murder victim’s orphaned children search fruitlessly for their father’s body.
The mob war which erupts in the first film arises from the Godfather’s reluctance to become involved in trafficking narcotics. In reality, leading Italian-American Mafiosi were heavily involved in the drug trade by this era. A central aspect of The Godfather trilogy is the wish of Don Corleone and later Michael to truly be accepted by the pezzonovante (big shots) who dominated American society, a desire which sat uneasily beside their own sentimental attachment to Sicily. Again and again, the viewer is taken back to where it all began and where the saga sadly concludes.
This kind of identity crisis is common in immigration discourse. Though many Italian-Americans did return to their homeland, the shock of the poverty and hunger of the Mezzogiorno made readjustment painful (lavish family feasts featuring meat and pasta were a new development in America, only made possible by American prosperity).
In pondering the cultural obsession with the Mafia, the role of religion must also be considered. Contrary to some preconceptions, the Italians who emigrated to America were not pious. In Banfield’s 1950s study, he noted that only around one in ten locals attended Mass on Sunday, with most of the attendees being female. Mangione and Morreale cite a study from 1918 showing that less than a third of Italians in New York were practising Catholics. For many Italians and Italian-Americans, Catholicism was cultural and often just provided a means of marking major life events such as birth and marriage, as it did for the Corleones. There is something darker here, too. Banfield describes how many of the people he encountered in Basilicata had a conception of God as “a hostile, aggressive force which must be propitiated.” In modern times, Roberto Saviano paints a similar picture of the Camorra clans in and around Naples, where workers in drug laboratories will bless themselves “to propitiate Christ and receive earnings and tranquillity.”
Characters in The Godfather behave in a similar fashion, especially in the novel. After a lifetime of crime, Don Corleone tells his dying accomplice that he need not fear hell, as so many masses and prayers will be said for his salvation. The Corleone men do not attend church—in the novel, one of the gangsters warns another that a rival criminal is “as tricky as a priest”—but their women certainly do.
The Don’s wife explains her daily Mass attendance as a quest to ensure her husband avoids God’s punishment, and the novel ends with Kay Corleone embarking on a daily effort to say “the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael.”
Mangione and Morreale put forward another interesting theory about the film’s widespread appeal, suggesting that the intense focus on family ties struck a chord with viewers at a time of social upheaval in which family breakdown was becoming common. So many immoral decisions motivated by self-interest are justified with reference to the needs of those close to us. In this sense, we are all ‘amoral familialists’ just like the Corleones, and we can all relate to them.
Long after the power of the Italian-American and Italian Mafia receded, these stories still captivate us. This is likely because, in our darker moments, we wish for the patronage of a Godfather or to be such a patriarch. In that opening scene, we see ourselves in the undertaker Bonasera, looking for extra-judicial vengeance, or more likely still, we see ourselves in Don Corleone, with the power to dispense it.
Recognising this and safeguarding our societies against the development of social conditions which would enable the rise of such men is crucial to warding off the atavistic temptations offered by a reversion to old-world savagery.
