GROSS/63 1972, part one - is The Godfather Shakespearean?

Hollywood is tragedy's final home.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

THE GODFATHER, director FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA; cast MARLON BRANDO, AL PACINO, JAMES CAAN, RICHARD CATELLANO, ROBERT DUVALL, DIANE KEATON; production PARAMOUNT, 1972, 175 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

Every one of Shakespeare’s tragedies ends with a pile of corpses. Everybody’s dead. The rule is if you’re not dead it’s because you’re an inconsequential character. Sorry. These days we’re pretty comfortable with this. We’ve convinced ourselves there’s something cathartic or even improving about all this slaughter. That it has a moral weight. And we’re fully adjusted to a diet of fists and shotguns, straight razors and woodchippers; to the translation of violence into entertainment, to the equation that links vitality and action with violence and aggression, in the movies and elsewhere.

For most of the history of Shakespeare’s tragedies people hated all the death. Audiences and impresarios and critics found the body-count to be apalling, in bad taste, grotesque. Shakespeare was admired and his work constantly staged, reworked and republished but people thought the tragedies were a bit dark; weird even. This explains the huge number of rewrites, abridgements and Bowdlerisations. Until the 20th Century some of these plays were thought to be essentially unperformable. How could you put on a play like King Lear for a polite audience - an audience of ordinary, properly-adjusted, God-fearing human beings - when almost every important character winds up dead? Lear himself, his daughters Cordelia, Goneril and Regan; Edmund, Gloucester, the Fool and the Duke of Cornwall. The most senior survivor is the son-in-law who kept his head down. Sons-in-law don’t fare so well in The Godfather.

Samuel Johnson, who published an eight-volume edition of the plays in 1765, wrote: “…I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

But we know that Shakespeare, in filling stages with bodies (and casualties), was inventing modern drama and, to a degree, re-inventing tragedy for modern people. We think of tragedy as something eternal and universal but it’s really a narrow path, up through Western tradition, from Greece, through ancient Rome, through the rowdy theatres of early modern London where Shakespeare and his trashier friends and competitors made their living and finally to the universalising tragedy mill of Hollywood.

Tragedy is native to the movies. The movies are tragedy’s final home. Hollywood in particular is the place where tragedy has come to be refined and reified. Made solid and present to us all, everywhere. Tragedy, in its oldest, Greek form, was essentially an official art-form. State and stage were connected so theatre was necessarily political. Tragedy was political discourse - a way to resolve disagreements and assert the correct worldview - the ‘dominant ideology’ as we’d now say.

Of course, The Godfather’s pile of corpses is even bigger than Lear’s. We see or learn of twenty killings (including the horse). The story’s pivot - and the moment squeaky-clean younger brother Michael (Al Pacino) assumes power, ascends to fully tragic status - comes at a crisis meeting of the inner family. To everyone’s surprise the kid, just back from the war, proposes killing an untouchable: a New York police officer. “Where does it say you can’t kill a police captain?” It’s a good question. Where does it say you can’t kill anyone? Certainly not in tragedy’s rulebook, where killing is essentially obligatory, and the more untouchable the better.

I mean this is where it gets really Shakespearean: the lily-white college boy, carefully singled-out by his father for a life on the outside; lovingly laundered, at great expense, into a legitimate business career and educated in the Ivy League, reverts to type - cannot escape his predestined role. And he doesn’t just approve a terrible transgression - the murder of an archetypal authority figure, an agent of the state - but steps up to do it himself.

And the spiral of killing that Michael initiates in this moment accelerates and tightens. His approach makes the old, tradition-bound methods of the Sicillian generation look like a girl scout cake sale. Across almost three hours mercy is denied to many. By the end Michael’s had some of those closest to him - soldiers, made men, business partners, dons from his father’s generation - killed. It makes your head spin. And we feel sure that if the movie hadn’t ended at 2h57m the spiral would have tightened further. Surely consigliere Tom (Robert Duvall), tragic sister Connie (Talia Shire) and errant wife Kay (Diane Keaton) wouldn’t have escaped Michael’s implacable wrath had he been allowed another reel.

In fact, the sequel, which picks up exactly where this movie ends and is often described as essentially the second half of the same work of art, short-circuits the slaughter, at least for a minute. Coppola loops back to the beginning of the story, as if resetting, as if beginning again, hopefully. No such luck. Soon the killing begins again, closing in further. Eventually we look out, with Michael, over the lake where his brother Fredo’s body now lies - weighted appropriately - in the silt.

What we know about Shakespeare the artist and the hard-working tragedian is that his work was a constant argument with authority; routinely disputing the authenticity or the legitimacy of the monarch, the state, the church, the aristocracy. Also that after he was gone and his work was circulating in a very different world - first one in which a monarch really was overthrown and killed and then one where the very idea had been zapped, deleted from thought - that the tragedies were mostly neutered, translated into much tamer dramas offering no challenge to the rulers.

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Then there’s Luca Brasi. A minor character with an out-of-proportion presence, something like a literal ogre (played by actual mob bodyguard Lenny Montana). Brasi is a character brought through from the novel, where he’s given much more to do and more brutally. But we know him to be a monster anyway. Kay, when she sees Brasi for the first time, at Connie’s wedding feast, detects his potential for havoc from across the room, calls him ‘that scary man’. His presence is more archetypal than even the most feral of the better-groomed men around him. It’s as if he’s just stepped out of one of Shakespeare’s woods, swinging a glinting axe. Coppola dumped so much of Puzo’s novel but knew he’d need to keep this figure, someone who would stand out beyond the far end of the long line of available tragic heroes; someone who could bracket the story’s violence, suggest a limit.

Coppola knows he needs Brasi because, in the gangster genre, he has access to none of the ordinary heroic archetypes: all those men with a code in a world gone bad (Marlowe, Deckard, the Equalizer…). Here the heroes have no code - or at least only the ultra-pragmatic, zero-sum code of self-interest, power and cruelty. Ultimately even those who look like they might own a moral compass let us down. Tom Hagen’s loyalty, Kay’s Waspy guilelessness, even Vito’s old-world conscience - all curdle into cruelty, self interest and moral flexibility. There are no good cops, no embarrassed and repentent crims, no reluctant siblings, no one untouched by the Corleone family’s involute wickedness.

Hollywood and tragedy need each other. Tragedy essentially no longer has a home outside Hollywood and it’s certainly the only place that tragedy can still reach a mass audience. And although we are rarely asked to consider the death of a monarch, in the movies the king has been replaced by the individual - sovereign, regnant. Or sometimes it’s a corporation, an army corps, a SWAT team, a trading floor, but the function is the same: to complicate, imbricate or criticise but usually to justify, to embed and perpetuate the bleak truth of American capitalism. And we just love this stuff.

Of course the miracle of The Godfather is that, working with this most awful material - a cast of deplorable characters every single one of whom gets worse, not better, across the course of the film - Coppola is able to make such a big, generous, forgiving work of art. And more to the point, that he was able to do this and all the other things: the crystaline teen dramas, the war film to end all war films, several pretty good obligation flicks that had to be made after the Zoetrope collapse, The Conversation (which really stands alone) and - don’t hate me - One From the Heart, which honestly might be my favourite.

So, yes, we must allow that The Godfather is irremediably Shakespearean. But we’ll also have to allow that its creator is too. In Frances Ford Coppola’s body of work we’ll find a whole set of correspondences to the work of William Shakespeare that are worth noting. Not the least being that they are both considered at once lofty and popular; light and dark; large and small; vastly ambitious and blithely parochial. The coming-of-age dramas, the tumultuous histories, the airy sex comedies and the most gruesome tragedies.

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• If you, a contemporary human being, were to rewrite The Godfather, as Nahum Tate did King Lear, during the restoration, what changes would you make to the film? Would you insert more violence, dial it up to a more fevered, 21st-Century tempo? Or remove it and replace it with something more positive, more affirming of Italian-American identity?

• The grotesque is more cruel than tragedy. Michael becomes grotesque. Brasi was grotesque from the beginning.

• Terry Eagleton wrote two books about tragedy. In the second, from 2009, he discards a whole history of definition of the term, saying that ‘no definition of tragedy more elaborate than “very sad” has ever worked’.

• This isn’t the first time I’m cited Emma Smith’s brilliant and accessible book about Shakespeare’s plays and it’s unlikely to be the last.

• The Godfather is on Amazon Prime (so is Part II and Part II). There’s a Blu-Ray.

• These essays, plus reviews of other films, like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Crown Prince in Old Heidelberg and Moby Dick, are all on my Letterboxd.

• If this list is to be believed, the next movie in the sequence will be The Exorcist, although we’ve got two more Godfather essays first: is the Godfather decadent? and: is the Godfather conservative?