GROSS/63 1972, part three - is The Godfather conservative?

More to the point: is it a melodrama?

We’ve arrived, after over two years of writing this thing (over sixty movies) and much prevarication from me - at the moment when I ask you to support GROSS by paying for a subscription. If you’re already paying, of course - you generous people - then you’ll see the whole of this post. If not, then I’d ask you to choose one of the subscription options. My heart is in my mouth. Let’s see how this goes!

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THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, director JOHN MACKENZIE; cast BOB HOSKINS, HELEN MIRREN; production BLACK LION FILMS/HANDMADE FILMS, 1980, 214 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

This is the third part of my three-part consideration of The Godfather, although it’s actually turned into an essay about whether The Godfather is a melodrama and about the great 1980 London gangster film The Long Good Friday, which definitely isn’t. Read part one, Is The Godfather Shakespearean? and part two, Is The Godfather decadent? And now, I’m happy to say, I’ve got The Godfather out of my system. Next: The Exorcist!

Film studies academic Linda Williams claims that the American gangster movie is actually a sub-category of melodrama. Gangsters in the central strand of the form - the Hollywood mafia movie - from The Public Enemy to Goodfellas via The Godfather to The Sopranos (so this extends into TV) all essentially dramatise the loss of the gangster’s innocence - “the staging of his innocence and his victimhood.”

It’s a plausible claim and I think it might help us to make sense of a kind of softness - often a quite gentle physicality; the yearning - even pleading - presence that we often see in the cruelest Hollywood gangster - from the unsettling pleasure in transgression that Cagney’s Tom Powers takes to the subtle, aestheticised brutality of Pacino’s Michael Corleone.

Applying this idea to The Godfather will make your head spin, though, because you’ll have to accept that in this melodrama the standard, moustache-twirling villain - the character who brings misery and arbitrary fear to the story - is not the capo or any of his family or his enforcers. In fact Don Corleone here is, in classical terms, the victim - the one whose innocence was stolen and which must be recovered through the epic action of the movie (although, of course, it can never actually be recovered, can only ever be sought, hopelessly).

But what’s satisfying about this idea - about the idea of locating the gangsters in the melodrama tradition - is that it helps us understand the ideology of the form. It helps us place the gangster movies on a conservative timeline: the timeline of sacrifice, suffering borne with grace and relief that can only ever come through the familial, the personal and the interior.