The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francis Ford Coppola · a film · 1972 · 175 minutes
Mode
Gangster film made family tragedy and succession drama; a dynastic chronicle told with a thriller’s tension
Mythos
The succession of the king — the wounded father, the hot-blooded firstborn killed, the youngest son who refused the crown and takes it; the heir in exile who comes home to the house
Phase
A line from a wedding in 1945 to a baptism, the father shot near the start and dying near the end, the son’s year in Sicily lifted out of the middle and set beside the war in New York
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 175 minutes; Gordon Willis’s photography, Nino Rota’s score; shot largely on location in New York and in Sicily
Register
A bright wedding and a dark study in the first hour, and the dark wins; grave and formal, warm in the family scenes and silent in the killings
Scale
One family and five families, a city and an island; one year of war and a decade of consequence
Governing Proposition
An ageing New York crime lord refuses a drug deal, is shot for it, and in the war that follows the son he kept out of the business, a decorated Marine who was meant for the Senate, kills two men in a restaurant and takes his father’s place. The film gives this as a succession, not a rise: a father’s power passes to a son who did not want it and is better at it. Its wager is that the family and the business can be shown as one thing from the first scene, so that a man’s love for his father and his slaughter of his rivals are one motion, and that an audience will consent to the motion before it understands what it has consented to.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in darkness with a face. An undertaker, Amerigo Bonasera, played by Salvatore Corsitto, tells how his daughter was beaten by two young men and how the court let them go, and asks for justice. The camera draws back from him slowly until the shoulder of the man he is speaking to enters the frame. It is Don Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando, with a cat in his lap, and his answer is a rebuke: Bonasera has never wanted his friendship, and comes only now, on the day of the Don’s daughter’s wedding, to ask for murder. He grants a lesser justice, and names the price: a favour, later. Gordon Willis lights the study from above, so that the Don’s eyes are in shadow and the audience must read a face it cannot see into. The method of the film is in its first scene.
Outside, in the sun, Connie Corleone, played by Talia Shire, is married to Carlo Rizzi, and the film cuts between the dark room and the bright garden. Luca Brasi, played by Lenny Montana, rehearses his speech of thanks. Sonny, played by James Caan, is upstairs with a bridesmaid. Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall, the adopted son and lawyer, manages the line of petitioners. Johnny Fontane, the singer, played by Al Martino, comes to ask for a film part, and the Don slaps him for weeping. And Michael, played by Al Pacino, in his Marine’s uniform, sits with Kay Adams, played by Diane Keaton, and tells her how his father once freed Fontane from a contract. He tells her that this is his family, and not him. The screenplay, by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola from Puzo’s novel of 1969, has seated every person the plot will need.
Hagen flies to Hollywood to see the producer Jack Woltz, played by John Marley. Woltz refuses, and in the morning wakes in his bed to the severed head of his racehorse. The pan from his face to the blood under the sheets is slow. The film has shown its family’s reach across a continent and the manner of its reasoning, and it has not yet shown an act of its business done by a member of the family with his own hands.
Movement II
Virgil Sollozzo, played by Al Lettieri, comes to the study with a proposition backed by the Tattaglia family: drugs, with the Corleone politicians and judges as protection. The Don refuses; the judges and politicians would not stand for it, and the family would lose them. Sonny speaks out of turn, showing interest, and the Don rebukes him afterwards for letting an outsider know what he thinks. Before Christmas Luca Brasi is sent to sound out the Tattaglias, and at their bar his hand is pinned to the counter with a knife and he is garrotted from behind. Hagen is taken off the street by Sollozzo’s men.
The Don buys oranges from a stand outside his office, and two men come at him with guns. He is hit five times and falls across the car among the spilt fruit, while Fredo, played by John Cazale, his driver that day, fumbles his gun, fires nothing, and sits on the kerb weeping. The Don is not dead. The family goes to war around his hospital bed, and Sonny has Bruno Tattaglia killed. Michael visits the hospital at night and finds the corridors empty and the guards sent away. He and a nurse wheel his father’s bed into another room, and he tells the Don, barely conscious, that he is with him now.
On the steps outside Michael meets Enzo, a baker who has come to pay his respects, and has him stand beside him with his hand in his coat, two men pretending to be guards. A car slows, looks, and passes. Afterwards Enzo’s hands shake so that he cannot light his cigarette, and Michael’s are steady as he lights it for him. He looks at them. Pacino plays it without expression, and it is the first time the film shows the son find out what he is. Captain McCluskey, played by Sterling Hayden, arrives in Sollozzo’s pay and breaks Michael’s jaw. At the compound, swollen and quiet, Michael proposes that Sollozzo and the policeman be killed, and that he be the one to do it, because no one would suspect him. Sonny laughs at him. Hagen says that no family has ever killed a police captain. Michael’s argument is a businessman’s: it is not personal.
Movement III
Clemenza, played by Richard Castellano, teaches Michael the gun that will be left for him, taped behind the cistern in the restaurant’s toilet: two shots to the head each, drop the gun, walk out. On the same day Clemenza’s own business is done. Paulie, the Don’s bodyguard who was sick on the morning of the shooting, drives him out past the reeds under the Statue of Liberty and is shot in the front seat while Clemenza relieves himself in the grass, and Clemenza tells the gunman to leave the gun and bring the cannoli. His wife had asked for them.
Sollozzo and McCluskey take Michael to Louis Restaurant in the Bronx. Sollozzo talks in Sicilian, untranslated, and Michael asks to go to the toilet. He finds the gun. He comes back and sits, and the sound of an elevated train rises on the track until it fills the room while nothing moves on his face. He stands and shoots Sollozzo in the forehead and McCluskey in the throat and the head. He drops the gun as he was told, and walks out. A montage of newspaper headlines carries the war that follows, and the Don is brought home in an ambulance to be told, with everyone else leaving the room, that it was Michael.
Michael is sent to Sicily, to the town of Corleone, and walks the hills with two shepherds, Calo and Fabrizio, carrying shotguns. He sees a girl in a procession of village women, Apollonia, played by Simonetta Stefanelli, and is struck, as the shepherds say, by the thunderbolt. He asks her father’s permission to court her, in the old form, and marries her in the village church. The Sicilian passages are shot in sun and open country against the dark rooms of New York. They are a pastoral, placed where the audience most needs relief, between one killing and the next. They are also the old country showing where the family’s forms come from and what they cost: the town is nearly empty of young men, killed in vendettas, and Michael walks through his own origin as a foreigner with bodyguards.
Movement IV
In New York Carlo beats Connie, and Sonny, who has already beaten Carlo in the street with a garbage-can lid, drives out alone to find him when she telephones again. At the toll booth on the causeway the attendant drops out of sight and the cars close in. Sonny is shot by many guns and kicked where he lies. The killing was arranged by the Barzini family, with Carlo as the bait. The Don, back on his feet, goes to Bonasera’s funeral parlour to collect the favour owed since the wedding, and asks the undertaker to use all his art so that Sonny’s mother can see her son.
In Sicily, Michael learns of his brother’s death. The next morning his bodyguard Fabrizio walks away from the house as Apollonia gets into the car to drive it as a surprise, and the car explodes. Michael has seen Fabrizio go, and understood a moment too late. The two deaths are set side by side across an ocean, and the film does not comment. The Don calls a meeting of the heads of the Five Families, in a boardroom under a portrait, and makes peace. He accepts the drug trade in return for his son’s safe return. He watches Barzini, played by Richard Conte, speak for Tattaglia, and understands who has been behind the war.
A year later Michael finds Kay in New Hampshire and asks her to marry him, telling her that the family will be legitimate within five years and that he needs her. He becomes head of the family in all but title. In Las Vegas he offers to buy out Moe Greene, who refuses, and warns Fredo never again to take sides against the family. In the garden among the tomato plants the Don tells his son what he had wanted for him, a senator, a governor, the one who held the strings, and that there was not time. He warns him that whoever comes to arrange a meeting with Barzini is the traitor. Then, playing with his grandson with a piece of orange peel in his mouth for teeth, he falls among the plants and dies, and the boy runs away through the garden. It is the one natural death in the film.
Movement V
At the funeral Tessio, played by Abe Vigoda, the capo the family trusted longest, brings the offer of a meeting with Barzini. Michael sees it. He has agreed to stand as godfather to Connie and Carlo’s son, and the baptism is set for the same day as his business. The sequence intercuts the sacrament with its preparation and then with the killings. The priest asks whether the child renounces Satan and all his works, and Michael answers for him that he does; and in Las Vegas Moe Greene is shot through the eye of his glasses on a massage table, Stracci in an elevator, Cuneo in a revolving door, Tattaglia in bed, Barzini on the courthouse steps by Al Neri in a policeman’s uniform. Organ music runs under it all. The editing, by William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, holds the two lines so that the words of the rite answer the gunfire.
Tessio is told that Michael sends his regards and that he will not be going to the meeting, and asks Hagen to let him off, for old times’ sake, knowing the answer. Carlo is told that he must answer for Sonny, confesses that Barzini approached him, and is promised exile; in the car Clemenza garrottes him from behind and his feet kick through the windscreen. Connie comes screaming into the house to accuse her brother of having her husband killed, and of planning it since the wedding. Kay asks Michael whether it is true. He tells her that this once she may ask him about his business, and then lies to her, and she believes him.
She goes out to make a drink. Through the doorway she sees the capos come to Michael and kiss his hand and call him by his father’s title, and Neri comes to the door and closes it on her. The film ends on her face. It began with a door closed on a wedding, the study’s darkness against the garden’s light, and it ends with the same door closing on the wife who was told that the family was not him. The succession is complete. The film has made the audience want it, and then shown it the face of the woman shut out.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and the subtractive test finds almost nothing to remove; three hours are compelled. The wedding seats every person the plot will need, and each of its small scenes is a later scene’s premise: Luca Brasi rehearsing his thanks is the man who will be garrotted; Bonasera’s favour is repaid in the undertaker’s parlour; Fontane’s trouble sends Hagen to Hollywood. Fredo fumbling his gun at the fruit stand lays down in one shot the brother the second film must deal with. Sicily looks like an interlude and is not: it gives Michael a wife to lose and a country to inherit. The give is small. The Hollywood episode is a demonstration of method the plot could spare, and the Las Vegas visit is a transfer scene for the sequel’s business.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: in America the family and the business are one thing, and the legitimacy the business seeks is a fiction the family tells itself. The Don tells Michael that he had wanted him to hold the strings, a senator or a governor; the film shows that the strings are the same whoever holds them. Sollozzo’s drugs are refused as a board refuses a product: the judges and politicians on the family’s books would not stand for it. Held below the top on two counts. The gangster as the shadow of American enterprise had been open in the genre since Hawks’s Scarface (1932). And the film keeps a romance of the father: Vito’s violence is shown as justice, so the truth is told through a man the film loves.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation recurs, and it is grave rather than warm: the wedding seen from the dark of the study; the horse’s head under Woltz’s sheets; the Don falling among the spilt oranges; Michael’s steady hands on the hospital steps beside Enzo’s shaking ones; the train’s roar rising under Michael’s face in Louis Restaurant; Apollonia in the Sicilian field; Sonny at the toll booth; the Don dying among the tomato plants; the baptism cut against five murders; the door closing. Rota’s waltz and love theme hold the film near height between them. Held at the figure because the register seldom leaves the grave and much of the film is procedure: the councils, the Hollywood episode and the Five Families are conducted without lift, and the height is cold in kind.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not alluded to. The structure is the succession of the king: the father wounded in the first act, the firstborn too hot to rule and killed in the fourth, the adopted son not of the blood, and the youngest, who had refused the crown, taking it. Michael’s year in Sicily is the heir’s exile. The sacraments bear the plot: a wedding opens the film, a baptism closes it, both the family’s business under the Church’s words. The particulars stay hard: a fruit stand, a toll booth, a tomato garden, a box of cannoli. Held a step from the top because the father’s sin is not visited on the son as a curse: inheritance is shown as a pattern rather than built as a curse.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood gangster film, a genre of rise and fall built on a single violent man, and the studio picture of the early 1970s. The departures: the gangster made a family tragedy, told from inside the family with no policeman’s point of view; a palette so dark that the studio objected to Willis’s underlit faces; a running time near three hours and a pace that sits in rooms; a star in Brando the studio resisted and a lead in Pacino it doubted. Coppola was at risk of dismissal through the shoot, and the stake was his career and Paramount’s money. Held near the gate by what it kept: the plot is Puzo’s bestseller, the genre’s pleasures are delivered in full, and the departure was received at once rather than resisted.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Willis’s top-light puts the Don’s eyes in shadow in the first scene, so that the audience must read a man it cannot see into, and the film teaches it to do so for three hours; by the baptism it reads Michael the same way, and the darkness that was menace has become intimacy. The slow dissolves and long held scenes make the viewer sit in the rooms where decisions are made, and the consent the family asks of its members is asked of the viewer too. The baptism intercut states the thesis in form alone. Held a step from the top because much of the film is in conventional scene grammar, where the form contains the content rather than knowing it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are fifty-four years of it. The film has been read as an immigrant epic, a critique of capitalism, a romance of patriarchy and a study of assimilation, and the readings have not cancelled one another. Return still yields on structure: the wedding’s small scenes each reappear as a later scene’s premise. It yields on gesture: Brando’s hand at his jaw, Pacino’s stillness turning from weakness to power without a visible change. The open questions are the film’s own: when Michael decides, whether Vito knows what he has made, what Kay knows at the end. Held at the figure because the serious literature largely agrees on what the film means, and because part of its return is the pleasure of a plot that resolves.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Released in 1972, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film remade the gangster picture as a family tragedy and a national epic, made the long, dark studio film a commercial form, and brought the Method into the centre of the industry. The reach is demonstrated and immediate. The crime family seen from inside became the genre’s default: Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) is a reply to it, The Sopranos (1999) a long-form descendant, and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) takes its shape. Willis’s underlit faces became a style of the decade. Held at the figure because part of the reach is shared with its own sequel, and because the genre it redirected it also closed: the family epic has since been remade more often than made anew.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The evidence is fifty-four years of unbroken standing, and it is evidence, not promise. The film has never left circulation or favour; it is handed down through generations of viewers who meet it before they know its genre, and its gestures and turns of phrase have passed into common speech. It has outlived the conditions that produced it, the new Hollywood of the early 1970s and the gangster cycle it began. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: half a century is a short record beside the elder arts, whose works have stood for centuries, and the axis credits what is shown and no more. The evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. The surface of a period studio picture is fixed to its time: Willis’s amber, Tavoularis’s rooms and the rear projection in Sicily read as the 1970s’ idea of 1945.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, load-bearing throughout. The screenplay, by Puzo and Coppola, compresses a long novel into a line of scenes each of which sets up another. Gordon Willis photographs in top-light and amber, the wedding blown out in sun against the study’s dark. Dean Tavoularis’s rooms make 1945 without display. Nino Rota’s waltz and love theme carry the film’s grief. The editing holds the baptism against five killings. Brando plays Vito from the jaw and the hands, in Dick Smith’s make-up on a man of forty-seven; Pacino plays Michael by stillness, and the stillness changes meaning without changing; Caan, Duvall, Cazale, Castellano and Keaton are each exact. The costs: the rear projection in Sicily, a Hollywood episode staged broadly, and Kay underwritten until the last shot.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Sicilian idyll, Michael courting Apollonia under her father’s eye, and the killing of Carlo in a car on the compound drive. One law governs both: inheritance. The old world gives Michael a wife by its forms and takes her by its feuds; the new world gives him his father’s chair and makes him kill his sister’s husband to keep it. The wedding and the baptism are the same law in sacrament. Every other scene obeys it: every favour is a debt, and every debt is collected. The one strain is the father’s romance, played in a warmer key than the son’s, so that a viewer can hold a heroic law and a tragic one; the last shot settles it. The rear projection breaks the surface, not the law.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: the family, seen from inside; business and capital, in the olive-oil front, the casinos and the drug trade refused; the state, in the judges and senators the Don keeps; the Church, in a wedding, a baptism and a funeral; immigration and the old country, in Sicily; consciousness, in Michael’s stillness. They are integrated: the baptism is family, sacrament and business in one cut. What holds the axis lowest is reach. The state is present as bribed men, not as a power in its own right, and history is a backdrop of 1945; the second film goes further into both, and this one does not. Labour and the natural order are absent, and the women are given rooms but little interior.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Inevitable, The Archetypal Deep, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.3, then The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 9.1. A three-hour structure in which the wedding seats every later scene, the succession of the king built in sacraments, a genre redirected for half a century, a making in light, music, cutting and performance that bears the whole weight, and a film that still yields on return and obeys one law from Sicily to the compound drive.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3 — the family, business, the state, the Church and the old country are held in one structure, but the state is present only as bribed men and history as a backdrop, and labour, the natural order and the women’s inner lives are absent; the second film goes further into the state and into history. Above it, The Swerve at 8.6, a departure made with a bestseller’s plot and the genre’s pleasures kept, and The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.7, where the register seldom leaves the grave and parts of the film are in conventional scene grammar.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by one tenth. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 107.4, an average of 8.95 that rounds to 9.0, the figure Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Godfather as released by Paramount in March 1972, in its theatrical cut of about 175 minutes, in colour, from the undertaker’s face in the dark to the door closing on Kay. No print, script or recording was consulted. The chronological re-edits for television, which fold this film into its sequel, are not the object; the 1972 film is judged on its own. Puzo’s novel of 1969 is not part of the work, and nothing from it is imported. The Godfather Part II (1974) is context, not part of the work scored. Dialogue is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the gross, the number of shooting days and the length of the Sicilian passages, are not given.