AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE 1970s, THE GODFATHER TRILOGY AND TAXI DRIVER

Moviegoers had little reason to expect much from The Godfather when it was released in 1972. The film was based on a popular though not best-selling novel, made by a relatively inexperienced director, and performed by mostly unknown actors except Marlon Brando, who was considered well past his prime—all in all, not exactly the classic Hollywood formula for success. Defying the odds, The Godfather went on to become one of the most popular movies of all time. It gave birth to two sequels, the first of which is a masterpiece in its own right, spawned countless clones, launched the film careers of several significant actors, and changed forever what an audience would expect when it entered a theater.

Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather trilogy, was one of many young directors who came to prominence in the 1970s and challenged the old Hollywood system. In the documentary, A decade under the influence, Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese tell the story of American Cinema of the 1970s by exploring the era’s business, social and artistic context. The business context was that the studios were dying. Almost since its inception, the American film industry had been characterized by the profit making Hollywood studio system which controlled production from start to finish and retained all profits for itself. Television was a major cause for the fall of the studio system. In the late sixties, on the brink of the recession, the studios discovered the youth market in the success of films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and they tried to exploit this market by recruiting a rising generation of writers, producers and directors fresh from film schools. This “film generation” or the “Hollywood brats”, as they were called, brought fresh and cost effective talent to an industry undergoing financial crisis and structural changes. For a few years, they enjoyed great creative freedom from the studios. Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn and Robert Altman were amongst those who created a socially conscious cinema born out of the apprehensive American world view with continuing inner-city poverty and rising urban crime rates, the Watergate hearings broadcast on television, and the Vietnam War still fresh in the national memory. These men were young Americans who had studied European filmmakers at film school, and they were also the first generation of filmmakers to have grown up watching television. Their movies feature close attention to technical detail, while demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge of film and television history. At the same time, their films were not just art house pictures but huge box office successes, funded by Hollywood. But when the astonishing success of Jaws in 1975 turned the industry single mindedly towards the pursuit of a ‘blockbuster’ , the America ‘auteur’ cinema lost its self to the era of the consciously constructed ‘super grosser’ . The Hollywood studios had changed beyond all recognition by the time Coppola came to make his final film in the trilogy. They were run by corporate executives more

familiar with balance sheets than with narrative techniques, and, as a consequence Coppola was under pressure to make a film which would appeal to the most profitable audience.

Hired by Paramount, Coppola worked together with Mario Puzo, the author of the bestseller The Godfather, in creating the screenplay for the film. Coppola chose to amplify specific plotlines, in particular, the issues of power, character, culture and family. In Puzo’s words, “The Godfather is about more than the Mafia, it is about conflicts in American culture. It’s about a powerful man who builds a dynasty through crime but wants his own son to be a senator, a governor. It is about the very nature of power.”

The Godfather is an insightful sociological study of violence, power, honour and obligation, corruption, justice and crime in America. Part I of The Godfather Trilogy centers on the Corleone crime “family” in New York City in the mid 1940s, dominated at first by aging godfather/patriarch “Don” Vito Corleone. A turn-of-the-century Silician immigrant, he is the head of one of the five Italian-American “families” that operates a crime syndicate. The ‘honorable’ crime “family,” working outside the system, serves as a metaphor for the way business (the pursuit of the American dream) is conducted in capitalistic, profit-making corporations and governmental circles.

The Godfather is also the story of father and sons, and of an old world and the new, and of succession to power. The Godfather Part II interweaves two related stories- that of the coming of age of Vito Corleone in the early part of the century (1901-1918) and the struggles of his son Michael in his expansion and defense of Mafia business in Las Vegas, Havana and DC in the late 1950s. The film tells the story of corruption of power and the personal price that Michael must pay for exercising that power. The Godfather Part III opens eight years after Part II ended. Michael has moved to New York, is divorced from Kay and separated from his children. It deals with the theme of redemption as Michael tries hard to legitimize his entire business and win his children back.

As the first film opens, it is the last Saturday in August, 1945 - the Japanese have just surrendered. In the opening scene of the film, the camera slowly pulls back from the face of a man who is in Corleone’s dark home office, where the Don holds court. He carries on with the crime family business during his daughter’s wedding reception that is being held in the bright, sunshiny outdoor veranda of his mansion. The man desperately pleads for a favour - proper vengeful “justice” (rather than American justice) for the threatened near-rape and brutal beating suffered by his daughter (whom he raised “in the American fashion”) by her non-Italian boyfriend and his friend. In the underlit office, American justice has failed. The ‘don’ wields enormous power as he determines the dispensation of real justice - who will be punished and who will be favored.

In an essay called ‘The Representation of Justice in The Godfather’ by Vera Dika, the analysis of the Italian criminal as a kind of a stereotype serves as a comment on American culture. She points out that originally, the necessity of the Mafia code lay in the need for the protection of the poor against the injustice of the landlords. In the film, the Mafia returns to the traditional code to protect against injustice and provide protection. Much of the emphasis in the first film is on the chivalrous code of the Godfather. This treatment diminishes his associations with crime. Merged with the ethics of the family, the violence is often justified as a defense of the family and its values. Also by setting the story in the immigrant past and by overlaying it with historical details and the nostalgia of the ‘roots’, The Godfather becomes a substitute for the immediate reality of a contemporary society changed by the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal. The implicit comparison between past and present is evoked by the cross cutting between scenes which depict the rise of the first, immigrant Godfather and that of his son, Michael. This gives rise to a mood of overwhelming nostalgia for an America that has been lost and the American dream that has been betrayed. The golden hued New York scenes depicting the life of the old Don with its moments of hope, generosity and warmth are a total contrast to the America his son inhibits, his loss of human feelings mirrored in the bleak Nevada estate, the isolated, policed compounds instead of the teeming New York streets. The image of the masculine power portrayed in the film is a substitute for the loss of the family, the nation and the integrity of the individual in the Vietnam era. At a time when the moral authority of the State was undermined, it presented the family as a surrogate State - the source of the Corleones’ stability, security and sense of purpose.

This could be one reason why The Godfather was also criticized for ‘glorifying’ the Mafia- because it portrayed captivating personalities behind the gunshots and the strangulations. But in the film’s explorations of the Corleone family, behind the laughter, the bonding and the dynamic personalities, many human encounters in The Godfather are portraits of treachery. At the Don’s funeral, when Michael learns that Tessio is the family traitor who has arranged the attempt on Michael’s life, Hagen leans to Michael and says- “I always thought it would be Clemenza, not Tessio.” It is a potent statement about criminal disloyalty that Tessio, who has been with the family for more than twenty five years would arrange the death of a man whom he has seen from birth. What makes it even more chilling is the fact that Michael and Hagen are so immersed in this life of criminal deception that this treachery doesn’t surprise either of them.

The ‘family’ in The Godfather has also been seen as a metaphor for the social order which thrives on the rampant capitalism dominant in American society of the 1970s. According to David A. Cook in Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, “the criminal business empire evolves as corporate America moves from free market capitalism to oligopoly, monopoly and finally, hegemonic global imperialism”. In The Godfather Part II, the equation of legitimate and illegitimate business is made quite clear when the Corleones’ partners in the Cuban gambling industry are shown to be a combination of American organizations. A leading Mafia expert had predicted that “organized crime will put a man in the White House some day.” The Godfather trilogy stops just short of confirming this.

The cause for Michael’s moral disintegration is inseparable from his struggle for social dominance through elimination of his competitors or any other agent ( like his brother Fredo) who cooperates with them. Starting from a point where Michael stands as outsider to this world, he finally becomes a mirror of the violence of organized crime and in his fall lies Coppola’s most overt criticism of American society. Godfather Part III continues this critical outlook by expanding the scope of Michael’s business to the ‘legitimate’ world of international high finance. Michael’s efforts to atone for his sins can only be made through the Church, which is itself wrought with fraud and murder. In a world that is further corrupted by modern business, there is no redemption for Michael. His son refuses to work with him and instead chooses to make a career in music and his daughter becomes the target for an attack intended for him. These are the contradictions inherent in the requirements for modern day big business. By staging a drama that shows the price paid for such huge success, the film stands as a comment on the American way of life.

History is transmuted into myth as it becomes a springboard for general comments involving human destiny, good and evil and the tragedy of power. This view of history, as a battleground for moral issues, is also in tune with the melodramatic sensibility of the film. There is a heightened theatricality which operates on several levels. Apart from the presence of towering villains, like Michael Corleone, powerful emotions, violent actions and tremendous contrasts such as those offered by the baptism scene in The Godfather Part II, the three films also contain performances or theatrical sequences which reflect upon the films themselves. In The Godfather Part II, Vito Corleone goes to see an Italian melodrama where he has his first glimpse of the neighbourhood boss who he will have to kill to begin his own career. Michael Corleone learns that his brother has betrayed him during a theatrical/erotic extravaganza in Havana. In addition to the theatrical sequences, important moments are often staged theatrically. Vito Corleone’s first murder is punctuated by ceremonial music from the streets below. In The Godfather Part III, the conspiracy to murder Michael Corleone is carried out within the precincts of an opera house where Michael’s son is performing. The emphasis upon theatricality is heightened by the mis-en-scene. So while the wedding scene in The Godfather has narrative functions ( introduction to major characters ) and social functions (ethnicity of the Corleone family), it is its filmic qualities ( the sunlit wedding contrasting with the dark interiors) that creates a subtext reinforcing the film’s major themes.

“ The year’s first really satisfying, big commercial American film…a movie that describes a sorrowful American dream as a slam bang, sentimental gangster drama.” – The Times.

The crime genre, or the gangster film, is a long standing form of American film making. By defining and stretching the urban boundaries of what is lawful, this genre comments on the possibilities of living a life outside the American law. It is based upon a principal opposition- the opposition between the gangster and the law, the result of which is violence. This violence is the signature gesture of the gangster film.

In classical Hollywood cinema, before the Vietnam War changed people’s way of looking at things, the law was legitimate and governed the perspective on the story. Later, the values attached to the conflict between the two parties were reversed. In Bonnie and Clyde, for example, the outlaw position of the protagonist was treated with more sympathy than the violence directed against them by the law. In the evolution of the Vietnam era crime genre, The Godfather films occupy a distinctive place. The Godfather movies differ enormously from the preceding genres of gangster film. The 1930’s movies provide their audience with a stronger sense of narrative closure, often being little more than morality tales where criminals would invariably get their just deserts. In the late Forties and Fifties the Film Noir representations of criminal organizations are usually shrouded in mystery and have an almost metaphysical existence. The Godfather films take this one step further. Nick Browne, editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy, talks about how in these films, the conflict between the law and the gangster is completely dissolved by locating the police and the legal apparatus on the periphery of the action and showing them as either ineffective or corrupt. In The Godfather , for example, Captain McClusky, the cop who is responsible for seeing to the safety of the hospitalized Vito Corleone, is actually in league with the rivals and has sent the security away. Later, his murder by Michael is more the murder of a man associated with the enemy rather than that of a cop. Neither is legitimate civil authority any more a part of the conflict. In The Godfather Part II, when Michael has to appear before the Senate, it is an easy job for him to silence the main witness they have against him by flying in his brother from Sicily. The opposition between the law and the gangster has been replaced by the conflict that exists between criminal gangs.

The law of the civil order is substituted by the law of the preservation of the family whose head is the Godfather. The story of Michael leads to the problem of paternal succession, to the problem of power and finally, to the quest for redemption, which is the common strain running through all the three Godfather films, even though the last one was made in 1990 in a completely different world scenario.

Even violence in the America of the 1970s had come to hold a completely different meaning. Traditionally, the central violent action of classical Hollywood involved the police or other such legally or morally authorized men doing their job. Killing was permissible in the name of the social order. The violence of The Godfather films does not belong to that permissible zone. It belongs wholly to the underworld. They adopt a view of criminal organizations belonging to late twentieth century corporate America, where sometimes murder is seen as merely as an alternative business strategy. For example referring to threats and coercion as ‘making an offer they can’t refuse’. A killing takes place either for reasons of business (“It’s not personal, it’s business.”) or as punishment for betrayal. Violence is seen as necessary to the basic fabric of the world within which the Mafia live. It is graphic at times, but its intention is never gratification of the individual. The close-up shots of Sonny’s bloody death tell of the viciousness of gang wars. On the contrary, the killing of Fredo shown in a long shot as he recites ‘Hail Mary’ carries a sense of a moral transgression, a sin more than a crime. The final judgment for this kind of violence does not lie with any civil authority but with a higher order. Religious or social ceremonies form the backdrop for many such acts of violence and in The Godfather part III, the church replaces civil law as the ultimate arbiter of justice. It is through a loss of social relationships that judgment is ultimately visited on Michael as he dies alone in an Italian villa.

The social world of The Godfather films is that of co-operative but competitive criminal families which need some kind of a sanction from the legitimate world. The first two films bring together two ideas- the struggle for the control of the postwar Italian American world and that of generational succession, of passing control from the father as the head to the right son. The films’ central theme focuses on the family including the role and significance of the blood family, and in the context of the gangster format, the structure and significance of the business family. The narrative explores both Vito’s and more significantly Michael’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to protect and maintain the integrity of their families. The family is strictly controlled by patriarchal ideologies where the men are called upon to protect and take responsibility for the family and the women occupy a space apart. The fortified compound is a physical emblem of this ideology. Coppola’s use of “set-piece mis-en-scène” helps to establish the family structure as well as the relationship between the Corleone family and its wider family business. The opening sequence of The Godfather deftly establishes the key elements of characterisation, context and plot – all within a family occasion. Traditional Italian music sets the ethnic context. Michael and his fiancée Kay are introduced as outsiders; but critically, Vito is established as above all a family man whose abiding concern is to keep the whole family together- he refuses to have the group picture taken until Michael has arrived. He is also established as the patriarch – his authority over both his family and his Family is absolute. A similar family gathering set-piece opens The Godfather Part II. Its contrast with the wedding scene – the traditional Italian musicians replaced by an anonymous band that turns an Italian folk-song into a nursery rhyme, offers ironic comment on what has happened to the family in the intervening period.

The films’ apparent endorsement of a traditional and conservative view of the family is also established by their exploration of the roles of women and their place within family decision-making structures. Until Connie intervenes to sanction an assassination after Michael is taken ill in The Godfather Part III, women’s presence in any decision-making exercise is restricted to serving refreshments. With the exception of Kay, the women in the films are subservient domestics. The brutal murder of a prostitute in The Godfather Part II provides a graphic account of the violent commodification of women.

The church features significantly in the film’s imagery as a second traditional authority pillar which is also a traditional icon of the gangster genre. Throughout, the church appears to offer a route to redemption, contrasted with the ruthless violence of the gangsters’ business operations. For example, Michael in the baptism sequence that closes the first film and a parallel sequence in The Godfather Part III where Michael is invested with a Papal medal.

But even within the films’ embrace of these essentially conservative themes there is an ambiguity that reflects the ambivalence of the immigrant, torn between the pursuit of recognition by his adopted culture, and the maintenance and defense of traditional customs and values. This reflects one of the key underlying tensions within the films, which Dika argues, ‘…take as a central theme the order and power of traditional Italian ways in confrontation with the corroding effects of America.’ But this perception that America’s effects can be corrosive – Don Vito refuses to become involved in the drugs trade for broadly this reason – does not inhibit the family’s desire for acceptance within their adopted community, corrosive or otherwise. Vito tells Michael that he dreams one day his son could become ‘Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone’, while much of Michael’s efforts are directed explicitly towards accommodation, receiving ‘respect’ from the rest of America as well as his own people exemplified in his drive to legitimatize the business, the charitable work through the Vito Corleone Foundation, the papal medal. A similar ambiguity suffuses the Family’s attitude to the law more generally: codes of fierce loyalty and obedience within the family co-exist with a complete disdain and disregard for ‘official’ structures, which are there to be ignored, corrupted or purchased. This dual morality – absolute ruthlessness to enemies, absolute devotion to friends – is brilliantly expressed in the baptism sequence at the end of The Godfather. The montage is an apt reflection of the tension between assimilation and tradition.

As the films’ narrative unfolds each of the symbols of authority systematically disintegrate. The pursuit of family stability is illusory, rendered impossible because of the treachery and cruelty with which it is surrounded. Similarly, the moral authority of the church is eroded as the narrative unfurls. The institutions of the church are revealed as corrupt and ultimately Michael’s plans to legitimize his business through investments with the Vatican are defeated by criminality and corruption within the church.

Kay’s relationship to Michael shows how his expectations and values are challenged by Kaye’s contemporary, non-Sicilian, feminist view of conjugal roles and relationships. Moreover as the family disintegrates, and with it Michael’s authority, the behaviour of the women changes: Kaye resumes a position of equality with Michael in their relationship with their children, while Connie, in a assumption of responsibility that would have been unthinkable to her mother, effectively assumes the role of Don during Michael’s illness.

If The Godfather trilogy redefined the gangster genre and the traditional take on violence, Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver shows a path to violence that is separate from community and from any rational reasoning and need. It is only the explosion of an individual attempting to escape from the alienation that surrounds and envelops him.

Like Michael Corleone, Travis Bickle is also a returned war veteran. He resembles a gangster in his being lonely and to some degree melancholy but his loneliness is not imposed on him by his situation but belongs to him intimately. No cause is shown for his actions and no explanations given, he is “God’s lonely man”.

Travis takes a job driving a cab because he cannot sleep. He is caught between two antithetical worlds: the world of the day and the world of the night. Moreover, he is

consciously aware of the conflict that rages within him. He attempts to explain his

sinister tendencies to Wizard (Peter Boyle): “I’ve got all these thoughts, you know bad

thoughts... I feel like I’m gonna do something bad”. Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver

embodies a restless urban alienation, a sense of trying to find moral certainty in a

world that no longer makes sense, and of troubled post-Vietnam violence pent-up and

ready to explode. Released in the year after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford’s life, Taxi Driver’s intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-‘70s audience.

Travis seems incapable of relating to anyone beyond superficial pleasantries or casual violence, and when he does attempt to reach out to others - to beautiful campaign manager Betsy, to philosophical cabbie Wizard or to teenage runaway-turned- prostitute Iris, he runs into a brick wall despite his best intentions, as he can’t fully comprehend others and they can’t fathom him. When Travis attempts to transform himself into an avenging angel who will “wash some of the real scum off the street,” his murder spree follows a terrible and inevitable logic: he is a bomb built to explode, much like the troubled times he lives in.

In The Godfather Part III, Michael must seek his redemption through the outside world of social institutions like the Church and the family, but in Taxi Driver’s explorations of the structure of sainthood, Travis Bickle, the saint in the street, converts the institutional forms of the Godfather films into a personal order with an almost monastic fervour. Embodying this ‘saint’, Travis moves beyond realistic norms and transfigures his marginality into a kind of transcendence. By the end of the Godfather films, Michael is also marginalized, but there is no transcendence available to him. His end must be dictated by the presence, absence or failure of social institutions.

Both Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese are American Italians but in their commitments to genre formats in plot and style, The Godfather films as well as Taxi Driver are rooted in American rather than the European tradition of filmmaking. Genre plots, characters and motifs play a huge role in The Godfather films and lighting and an expressionist use of colour is often the way the emotions of the characters and situations are conveyed in Taxi Driver. The expressionist anti-realistc elements in Taxi Driver such as the stylized lighting, the slow motion cinematography, coupled with the realism of the often free moving camera and the offhandedness and unpredicatable violence of Travis , creates a self contradictory structure which heightens the tension. This is in contrast to the contained, highly structured narrative of The Godfather films where the slow, self conscious and reflective speech of the Mafia replaces Travis’ expressive thrust of endless words.

Taxi Driver immortalizes New York City in the 1970s, a city vastly different from the New York we know today. The city’s filth is exaggerated in the film partly because it is seen through Travis Bickle’s skewed perspective, but during 1975, when the movie was filmed, New York was literally a filthy city. Taxi Driver presents a true-to-life portrait of what Manhattan once was. Times Square was filled with peep shows and prostitutes, and during the summer of 1975, when the film takes place, the country was in the middle of a presidential campaign where one of the main issues was moving beyond the Vietnam War, which had officially ended only in 1973.

Ultimately, the climate of both The Godfather films and Taxi Driver reflect, one through silence, the other through a thrust of words and crazy violence, that which haunted a post – Vietnam America which no longer believed in its future or even in the accepted view of its past. The rereading of America’s past which emerges from the film is bleak if the rise of the Corleone family is seen as a parable for the ruthless course of capitalist America. It is bleaker still if it has created a society where others constantly suspect Travis Bickle “to be a pimp, drug dealer or even a narcotics agent.” Michael’s evolution from gallant World War II veteran to cold blooded murderer can also be seen as a metaphor for America which went from its heroic role in World War II to the horror of Vietnam. Taxi Driver also attempts to give a voice to the distressed and frustrated returning Vietnam veteran. However, by having Travis return to the street, Taxi Driver offers no lasting solution, only sympathy. What is seen as self preservation in the beginning of The Godfather Part II ends in murderous paranoia as Michael slaughters even those who can no longer harm him.

The specter of Vietnam informs the sense that enemies can be anywhere and that no one can be trusted. The lone figure of Michael shrouded in darkness at the end of The Godfather Part II suggest the lonely. powerful yet isolated America. And however severely alienated Travis and Michael are from their respective societies, both are also paradoxically representative of those societies, and their private psychoses are therefore symptomatic of a more general social malaise.

SHAGUN
Nov 2006