Mario Puzo's original novel
The film series
The Godfather (1972)
- The name "the Godfather" has a symbolic ring to it. Just the word itself, comprising "God" and "Father," seems to say a lot: It conveys power, the sense of a patriarch or maybe of a wrathful deity. In Christian tradition, godparents are the people who will assume legal guardianship of their godchildren in case the actual parents die. (It's largely an honorary function, nowadays.) In the movie, "The Godfather" is more a guardian of both his literal and symbolic godchildren's interests: He protects them by going around the law, demanding their eternal loyalty. All they have to do is agree to return the favor — by means illegal or legal. There is something oddly god-like about this relationship, since it bears a similarity to the way an ancient Roman deity might reward his or her devotees in exchange for a sacrifice. The Godfather is a kind of puppet-master too — trying to pull strings that other people are holding (this is depicted in the logo for the film's title, where a hand pulls marionette strings attached to the words). Interestingly, no one in the mafia called the head Don of a family "Godfather" until after Puzo did it in his book. The head of a mafia family was just called the "boss of the bosses," or capo di tutti capi in Italian.
- The horse head scene is a very iconic moment. Jack Woltz wakes up with a horse head in his bed, showing him that the Corleones mean business. Apparently, this forces Woltz to give Johnny Fontane (a Frank Sinatra expy) a part in a movie that will make him a star, despite his personal distaste for Fontane. In the years since the first film debuted, putting a horse's head in someone's bed has become a widely known symbol of sorts — shorthand for making someone an offer they can't refuse, or forcing them to give you something they don't want to give you.
- After the Tattaglia family assassinates Luca Brasi, the Corleones' feared hit man, they send a message to the Corleones: a fish wrapped in Brasi's bulletproof vest. The message is clear: He "sleeps with the fishes," meaning that his corpse is weighed down at the bottom of a river (maybe the East River, a historically great place to dump dead bodies). It's pretty effective as a symbolism term.
- Oranges are another large factor within in film, as they show up whether someone's about to die. When Vito gets shot in the street, he's buying oranges, which scatter on the ground as he falls. When he dies at the very end, its while peeling an orange and putting the rind in his mouth to make funny faces at his grandson. Before the horse head shows up in Jack Woltz's bed, we see an orange at the table where he eats dinner with Tom Hagen. Oranges show up at the meeting with the five families, near the mob bosses who will later be murdered.
- At the beginning of Part I, Sal Tessio, who later betrays the Corleone family and is whacked for it, is seen grabbing a large orange at a party table.
- At the end of the movie, Michael is literally becoming the godfather to Connie's child while also becoming the Godfather to the Corleone family, sealing his position with blood. There's a heavy irony in the scene, as Michael stands in church saying that he "renounces Satan and all his works" while a massacre that he ordered progresses in the world outside. It demonstrates the wide chasm between appearance and reality: This churchly dude, renouncing Satan, is actually semi-secretly embracing the world's evil. This is the scene of Michael's final transformation: He's becoming the thing that he's been trying to be, the Don, the ruler, and it turns out that this is a pretty violent, pretty awful position to hold. He's being baptized, in a way, but it's an evil, anti-spiritual baptism. He's establishing his new identity through murder. Sure, he's developed some worthy traits — he's cool, competent, and capable of putting business above taking things personally. But those positive traits are put in the service of violence and destruction. Michael is losing his soul, which is, strangely, his triumph. He's made a strong effort toward becoming damned, becoming the leader of a criminal empire, and he's finally made it. There's something admittedly impressive about him as a villain, since it took so much work. He's not just following his impulses like a serial killer: He's disciplined. A present-day parallel is Walter White's transformation in the drug kingpin Heisenberg on Breaking Bad.
- At the end of the movie, Connie accuses Michael of having her husband, Carlo, murdered. He straightfacedly denies it, even though it's entirely true. He repeats the same lie to his wife Kay, as well. Michael is capable of lying to his loved ones for the sake of his criminal business interests — which is totally cold, but the inevitable result of his journey. Kay watches as Michael's capos (underling bosses) gather in his office. One of them closes the door, and then the movie ends. This signifies Michael's transformation into ruthless crime lord, sealing Kay outside of his inner world. He's not the golden, studious war hero with whom she was originally in love. He's gone into a different realm, and the closing door symbolizes that he's fully entered into that new world of wickedness. It's a transformation that required a lot of work, but it's placed him, in the end, in a strange and potentially isolated position.
The Godfather Part II (1974)
- Windows are what the characters in the film look through to see what is both either physically close or oddly far away. When young Vito first witnesses America on the trans-Atlantic liner, he sees the Statue of Liberty through a port window. Likewise, when he first sets up his business, his desk faces a window to the street, giving him a kind of access to his neighborhood. Of course, for Michael, windows play a little differently. Gunfire showers through his bedroom window, almost killing him and Kay early in the film, and at the end, he watches Fredo's murder on the lake from a cool distance through a bay window. If for Vito, windows mean hope and community, for Michael they're portals giving a glimpse of fate.
- The rug that young Vito helps young Clemenza steal takes on the symbolic properties of the Rubicon that the future Godfather crosses. Vito has been committed to a noble pride of staying out of the gutter of crime—doubtlessly because he witnessed the heartlessness of Sicilian organized crime up close and first hand. The stealing of the rug changes everything. From that point, Vito commences a quest to realize the American Dream outside the routes of legitimacy which have been denied him.
- And Vito brings the stolen rug home to his family, where his infant son Santino rolls around and plays on it. Sonny, as the firstborn, eventually takes on the role of Don, and dies a horrible death.
- We're given a lengthy portrayal of an Italian-language Vaudeville act that the young Vito watches with his friend. It's a story of infidelity and betrayal of a man by his wife—our first glimpse of the misfortune that will befall our central head of the house a generation later, Michael Corleone. This scene, as is this case with much of Vito's story, imbues the immigrant experience with a sense of looming tragedy, but that tragedy is ultimately one that will afflict the next generation of Vito's family.
- All of our powerful Italian mobsters are depicted with oranges in this film, and we can use them to trace plays of power. whereas the first film, oranges were mainly linked with death. Before Don Fanucci is killed, he takes an orange from a fruit stand, just as he takes so much from the people in the neighborhood who must pay him fealty. By contrast, we watch Vito humbly accept a gift of oranges from a street vendor when he has risen to a powerful position as a local mob boss. His demeanor accepting the gift suggests to us that this is a guy who's in it for the right reasons. When we see Michael with an orange towards the end of the film, he's eating it alone and ruefully, in the middle of a bout of loneliness and revenge. Perhaps it's significant that we see Fanucci and Michael eating their oranges, but not Vito.
- Coppola uses a brief scene to create an incisive allegory of the toxic role of American business in world politics. We're given a long tracking shot of a series of American heads of corporations and utility companies, all welcomed to Cuba by President Fulgencio Batista, a dictator installed and supported by the US government. At the end of his inventory of businessmen, he also welcomes Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth. These are all of the people who look to profit off of a Cuba under dictatorship, and Coppola sets us up to witness a collapse of this sickly Versailles-style complicity by showing us the ostentatious entertaining that all of these men enjoy, right up until the revolutionaries force Batista to step down on New Year's Eve.
