The Godfather and Michael Corleone’s Sicilian Dream

I believe in America. These are the first words uttered in Frances Ford Coppola’s venerated Godfather trilogy, spoken by Italian undertaker Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) over a black screen at the end of The Godfather’s opening credits. The way Coppola chooses to introduce us to Bonasera’s esteemed America is striking: In an unbroken two-minute shot, he justifies his tenacious belief in his new homeland by explaining to Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) that his American-raised daughter was raped and disfigured by her boyfriend and his friends. He begs Vito to murder her assailants. Make no mistake, America isn’t a country where people don’t do bad things. Rather, it is a violent country, one that eagerly inflicts harm on anyone who dares disrespect the sacred tenet of family.
The Godfather follows a business that has been around for generations and favors family over anything else. Vito Corleone has four children to pass his crime syndicate on to: Michael (Al Pacino), Sonny (James Caan), Fredo (John Cazale) and Connie (Talia Shire). And while Michael at first resists intimate involvement in the organization altogether, he is the only one of Vito’s children who is really cut out for it, as evinced by his steady hand in the face of threat and ability to maintain a poker face before he shoots two men in the head point blank.
As the only World War II veteran of his family, Michael’s heavily desensitized perspective on violence helps strengthen the Corleone business. Indeed, it only makes sense that a widespread apathetic attitude toward violence is conducive to mob mentality, but things get a little more complicated when taking into account the domestic shifts that accompanied the war.
The nuclear family—the cornerstone of Vito’s business, not to mention Bonasera’s admiration of America—underwent a number of critical transformations in the late 1940s. The drafting of the country’s working men, for example, drove women into the workforce—a cultural shift that awarded them more independence, which they understandably weren’t ready to surrender when their husbands and brothers returned home. This familial revolution doesn’t become totally apparent in The Godfather until, halfway through the film, Michael visits Italy. After murdering two members of a rival mob family to protect his father, he hides out in Vito’s homeland of Sicily until the investigation subsides. While there, Michael gets accustomed to an old-fashioned lifestyle—one that is strikingly different from what he is used to back in New York.
Shortly after arriving in Italy, Michael meets a beautiful local woman named Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli). The way their love story develops takes the shape of something that one might read in a Victorian novel: Michael meets Apollonia’s eye and, before they even exchange words, asks her father for permission to propose to her. Up through their wedding day, each tryst sees Apollonia’s large family trailing behind the new couple. If, from Coppola’s perspective, there is a single thread that ties 1940s Sicily together, it’s that it favors conventional family values and roles over everything else—a custom that The Godfather’s post-war America is rapidly losing.
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