Dec 17: Dave Griffith, The Godfather at 50

 

The Godfather at 50

David Griffith

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I had my ACL done, as they say, last January. I’m at the age–50 years old this Monday, the 15th–where people want to know who did it, not as in the culprit (it was my own damn fault, if you must know—we were down a goal with 30 seconds left and I made the executive decision to pull the goalie (me) and rush down to the other end of the in-door field and try to knock home a ball that was caroming around in the box), but as in the surgeon. I couldn’t tell you his name–the drugs were simply that good–and I don’t really remember anything else other than the heated blanket they gave me while waiting for the first round of anesthesia to wash over me. A blanket has never felt like such a kindness. It put me in the mind of my mother tucking me into bed at night. Not even a year later, and I’m back playing soccer, but this time for the first time in my life, taking it easy out there. Think Ss instead of Zs my brother told me.

As a mid-December baby, I think of my birthday in the same mind as the season: dirty snow and blow mold Santas, final exams and the bitter taste of coffee, but there are two singular rituals that reassure me, help me to feel loved in that clannish way that we all desire. The first is my mother’s phone call which she timed every year to coincide with my birth: the phone would ring in the 6 o’clock hour and she would say with a cry in her voice, that voice that would overtake her when thinking fondly about her children, it was about this time 21 years ago that I went into labor; it was about this time 25 years ago; it was about this time 30 years ago. I was 35 when she died.

Waking on birthday mornings since, I imagine a phone ringing so thoroughly that I can feel the vibration of the landline phone next to the bed and feel the space opening up when I put the receiver to my ear, a vast, dark and windy interstellar space across which we now speak sometimes. That is the one grace.

The second memory, again a recurring thing, a ritual, is the annual watching of all three Godfather films in the basement of my friend Joe’s house. A ritual that began in 7th grade and continued through high school. Joe’s birthday is the 14th and so we decided at some point to combine our celebrations. There were five of us in sleeping bags: Joe, Kyle, Steve, Michael, and later Kostaki (he went to a different middle school). The Godfather (1972) was screened. At the intermission, the end of the first tape, we would eat large plates of spaghetti topped with the Coppola family’s red sauce. Joe’s mother had found the recipe in the newspaper.

The scene in the film the recipe is cribbed from comes after the assassination attempt on Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), which he survives thanks to Michael’s (Al Pacino) heroics (more on this in a moment). The Don is recuperating in a small hospital in the City while the rest of the family, including Michael, has retreated to the family compound, which is surrounded by armed men bracing for an all-out gang war. Michael is sitting alone in the garden on a stone bench, the collar of his wool coat pulled up so that it almost covers his ears, when he is called to the phone. He enters the house and crosses to the phone located on the wall in the kitchen next to the stove where the rotund Clemenza, long-time friend of the Don and underboss in the Corleone family, is cooking, dumping cans of whole tomatoes into a pot.

It’s Kay (Diane Keaton), Michael’s plain and Protestant girlfriend on the phone:

“How’s your father?”
“He’s good. He’s gonna make it,”

She is eager to see him. They have plans for later.

“I love you,” she says softly.

“Huh?” he says. You can only barely hear her voice, deep inside the phone.

“I love you,” she says again, this time loudly, maybe even a little annoyed.

“Yeah, I know,” Michael says, embarrassed, avoidant.

“Tell me you love me.”
“I can’t talk.”
“Can’t you say it?”

He pauses and looks up at Clemenza, out of frame: “I’ll see you tonight.”

He hangs up the phone and immediately Clemenza begins mocking him: “Hey, Mikey, why don’t you tell the nice girl you love her? I love you with alla-my heart! he croons. If I don’t see-aya soon, Ima gonna diiie.

Then he quickly pivots, down to business: “Come over here, learn something. You might have to cook for twenty guys some day.” He rattles off the ingredients: garlic, olive oil, two cans of tomatoes and tomato paste, sausage and meatballs, a little wine and a little sugar. This, or a close facsimile, is what we ate every December between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Then there was cake and maybe a little ping pong. Then the second of the two VHS tapes would be inserted. “You guys ready?” Joe would say, before pushing the cassette into the mouth of the player. As we got older, I think girls were involved, but they didn’t stay much past part two.

I have written previously about The Godfather, specifically the scene in which Sonny (James Caan) savagely beats his brother-in-law Carlo (Gianni Russo) after Carlo beats his sister Connie (Talia Shire), and how that was one of my earliest encounters with the violence of love.

But I am thinking now in my 50th year, as I prepare to make this iconic meal with my children, about Michael. Michael, who is so young and beautiful and idealistic at the wedding that begins the trilogy, but who we encounter at the end of his life as a bitter shadow. It is a transformation that begins just before Christmas, in a small hospital where Michael’s father has been taken to recuperate.

It is this scene that I want to spend time with. After Michael hangs up the phone in the kitchen and gets a quick tutorial on how to make red sauce, he leaves for the City to have dinner with Kay and then to visit his father in the hospital. Dinner is tense. Kay has clearly had her hair done for the occasion. Michael is morose, preoccupied. He balls up his napkin and stares into his plate. When he gets up to go and we realize he has been sitting on the edge of a hotel bed. Kay asks if she can go with him. He declines, “...I don’t want you to get involved.” “When will I see you again?” she asks. “Go back to New Hampshire, and I’ll call you at your parent’s house.” She asks again, “When will I see you again?” “I don’t know,” he says, and leaves.

There is something in Michael, or the way that Pacino plays Michael, that I am just now beginning to understand. Something inside him is furiously closed off.

The very next shot is an establishing shot of the small hospital where his father is recovering. It is striking for its super-saturated darkness, a hallmark of cinematographer Gordon Willis, who would become known in the industry as the “Prince of Darkness,” for his skill shooting in low light conditions, creating Renaissance-like chiaroscuro effects.

In this shot the only light comes from the highly polished black car that drops Michael off and the multi-colored Christmas bulbs outlining the arched entrance, and two small shrubs, one outside the iron gates and the other at the bottom of the steep steps up to the entrance. When the car pulls away we see Michael. He is still for a moment, assessing the situation. He was expecting police detectives, a show of force to deter additional attempts on his father, but instead the place appears deserted. He looks to his left, then back again at the dark empty stoop and weak Christmas lights. We notice that a whole run of lights to the right of the door are dead, and few others blink in a sad, unpredictable pattern. The next seven minutes feels like a poem or a dream, or a poem about a dream. Michael is about to cross a threshold.

Michael enters a long corridor. His footsteps echo off the dingy tiled floor. Everything in the shot, from the wooden bench and metal gurnee along the foregrounded left wall to the staircase at the far end behind Michael, is in focus. The walls are smeared two tones of institutional oxidized blue–high gloss finish for easy cleaning. He approaches the check-in desk, which is trimmed in thin red and silver candy cane tinsel. He looks in and finds it empty except for a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it illuminated by a goose-neck desk lamp, a bulletin board on which are pinned schedules and holy cards, and along the back wall a counter occupied by a metal tray on which sits a glass cylinder filled with gauze and a brown bottle of iodine with the unmistakable black rubber dropper.

He turns and heads towards us, towards the camera. He is walking faster now, his footfalls echoing and growing louder in the hall, as does his concern and resolve–no one is here; where are the guards? The camera stays stationary so that Michael passes within inches of the lens. It is only now that Nino Rota’s ponderous score (Rota, the long-time Fellini collaborator)–a droning piano and strings begins to make emotional sense, and just then something else, something underneath rises to the surface. It is also a droning, something masked before by the piano and the footsteps, but now as Michael passes us we understand that he hears it, too, and is looking for the source. He turns and we look over his shoulder into a nurse’s station, perhaps, where there is a Christmas tree and a record player. This is the source. The record is skipping, and has been for some time: “to-night, to-night, to-night, to-night, to-night, to-night…”

Godfather reddit denizens swear the skipping song is “The Way You Look Tonight,” but not the popular 1964 version by the mob-connected Sinatra, but the original sung by Fred Astaire in the 1936 musical “Swing Time.” I have not gone so far as to recreate the skipping record effect using the free DJ app on my phone, but recently I have been tempted. I have been tempted, I think because I want to understand everything about how this scene was created. It is so perfect, but not too. It toes the line of contrivance but never quite spills over into out and out manipulation. I am thinking here of Godard’s famous quote: “The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.”

As Astaire dementedly croons “to-night, to-night, to-night, to-night…” Michael surveys the office. He looks down and sees a half-eaten cheese sandwich splayed on a piece of wax paper, the thick slices of orangey cheddar pop, a pale pickle spear is strangely notable, as is an ashtray in the shape of a club according to Hoyle. (Freeze-framed viewings of the scene reveal a paper cup of soup and a couple slices of marbled coffee cake.) All of this is taken in by Michael in a matter of seconds: evidence of an interrupted or abandoned dinner. A close-up of Michael’s face shows his recognition and he begins to run, his long coat flying up behind him.

The music changes now, too. Rota’s “The Halls of Fear” emerges, a funeral march with a pounding drum, which we will hear again during the opening scene of The Godfather II, played by a funeral band as the casket of a young Don Corleone’s father is carried to its resting place.

Michael runs to the second floor and finds his father’s room. No one is sitting at the card table just outside the door, where guards had been posted. The funeral dirge slows to a stop and resolves as Michael pushes open the door. For a few moments, as Michael looks at his father laying intubated in the bed, it feels that Vito Corleone is the only patient in this forlorn infirmary. Something about the yellow light coming from the lamp; something about the small statue of the Blessed Virgin to the right of the bedside, in shadow; something about Astaire's hypnotic crooning–to-night, to-night, ton-night, to-night–makes it feel like we've entered a dreamscape, like a great whoosh of Fellini-esque wind will blow in and Michael will startle awake, still in the hotel, in bed with Kay.

But this is not a dream, and instead we are startled by the night nurse, “What are you doing here?” she whispers sharply.

At the risk of narrating the entirety of this scene that runs for several more minutes, I will skip the moving of Don Corleone’s bed to another room, so as to throw off the would-be assassins coming to finish the job. I will skip the arrival of a shadowy figure in a long coat and hat, carrying a bouquet, whose echoing footfalls precede him up the stairwell, alerting Michael. I will skip this because his arrival creates a delicious sort of dread suspense, one that only film can do justice. As the echoing footfalls grow closer the camera cuts from the nurse and Michael rushing to push the hospital bed into another room, then to Michael peering in the direction of the noise, then to the empty card table outside the now empty hospital room, then back to Michael, then to the empty hall where Michael and the nurse have just been. It is a series of images of empty spaces filled by the sound of footsteps, that’s all. And yet, how amazing. How amazing that a series of still images passing before us accompanied by the sound of footsteps can move us to care.

Michael confronts the man, “Who are you?” “I am Enzo, the baker,” he says with a strong accent. Michael tries to send him away, telling him there’s going to be trouble. Enzo insists on staying: “If there is trouble I stay here to help you–for your fodder, for your fodder.”

We know Enzo, though we have never seen him until now. In the opening scene of the film, we meet Enzo’s father-in-law-to-be, Nazorine. Nazorine has baked an enormous cake for the wedding, and he comes to Don Corleone to ask that Enzo, a young emigre in his employ, be allowed to stay in America so he might marry his daughter. The Don offhandly grants his request. Now, Enzo, the beneficiary of this favor, stands before Michael, eager to pay tribute.

In my memory of the film, built on (at least) thirty-seven viewings–once a year since I was thirteen–what happens next is that Michael and Enzo go out to the front entrance of the hospital and pretend to be mobsters. Michael snatches the bouquet of flowers from Enzo and throws it over the side of the stoop. He pulls the collar of Enzo’s wool coat up around his ears, like Michael, and shows him how to put his hand inside his coat, like he’s concealing a gun.

I own a long, dark wool coat like Enzo’s, a London Fog given to me by my father decades ago. He wore it briefly in the 80s before passing it along to me. When I first began wearing it in grad school I found rice in the pockets from a wedding he had attended. It is one of my prized possessions. Recently, it occurred to me that I would someday like to give it to my son, so I had the lining repaired, a button replaced, a torn pocket darned. But instead of putting it in the back of the closet sheathed in a dry cleaning bag, I’ve been wearing it more, and when I do I always pull up the collar, and when I do I briefly think of Michael and Enzo on the steps of the hospital framed by the pitiful Christmas lights bracing for a carful of goombahs. It’s a ridiculous thought, but in the gesture I am beginning to see something beyond affectation.

I am lucky to have a living father. My mother passed fifteen years ago and that still (some days) feels like a dream, like any given December 15th I could receive a phone call from her and it would not be strange.

The calls from my dad are no less appreciated, but they are of a different quality. “Now, how old are you?” he has taken to saying, and I tell him, and he says, “How is that possible?”

I think about what has made my life possible. All the things that had to happen. And that’s why only now, at 50, I am beginning to understand the scene that I skipped:

Michael sends Enzo outside ahead of him–”I’ll be out in a minute”--and goes back into his father’s room. “Just lie here, pop. I’m here. I’ll take care of you,” he says, and then kisses his father’s hand.

When I think of what that something is between art and life, that in-between that Godard speaks of, I think it must be moments like this one, where Michael is capable of doing things and saying things previously unimaginable. Actions, gestures, that suddenly erupt unexpectedly, unpracticed, without pretense and change the course of our lives. Michael has now set a course that will take him down a dark and dangerous path, one that will lead to much tragedy.

What does it mean that The Godfather is forever a reminder of my birthday, of deep, lasting, and loving friendships? It means more than I can say in one essay.

But having written myself into this corner early in the morning of my 50th year, I find myself looking to the young Enzo. When the car full of goombahs finally arrives as predicted, he stands there, collar up to his ears, hand inside his coat, scared, but putting up a tough front. There is a pregnant pause as the would-be assassins size up the situation before speeding off. Enzo, visibly shaken, reaches inside his coat and pulls out a cigarette, but his hands are shaking so bad that he can’t light it. Michael helps him with the lighter, snaps it shut and puts it back in his pocket.


Just then the police arrive. Michael is seized by both arms, but Enzo escapes stage right into the night.

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Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.