By Victor Greto and Jeffrey K. Gibson
The first two The Godfather movies (1972 and 1974’s Part II, directed and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola), as well as co-screenwriter Mario Puzo’s original 1969 novel, follow the basic narrative arc of Shakespeare’s 1596-1599 Henriad tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V). Both chronicle a dramatic dynastic succession from a father who criminally usurped a power structure open to bullying and indiscriminate abuse to a reluctant son’s eventual acceptance and surpassing of both the control and extent of his father’s power.
It also chronicles the emptiness of the glory of the sons’ achievements, the subsuming of their humanity toward a self-important goal of either family or state.
While part of Shakespeare’s intent may have been to show both the glory and redemptive reign of Prince Hal-Henry V through his personal overcoming of his father’s brutal usurpation of the legitimate Richard II toward a brief reconciliation, Puzo-Coppola’s parallel version claims to be a refracted tale of American business: the transmutation of a European patron-client system into the mass-media maelstrom of mid-20th-century American democracy.
Their vision was to perhaps show the basic contradictions between dynastic capitalism and a democracy theoretically based on equality, as well as the contrast between the reality of a family business based upon personal relationships and not upon any pretense toward business-like neutrality.
“It’s business, not personal,” is as dramatic an irony as “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” And it’s also as ironic as Henry V’s retort to the bitter soldier Williams that, “Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own” (Henry V, IV.1.171-172), after we have heard Prince Hal’s father’s cynical nudge to create a war to turn the nobility of England’s attention from their illegitimate dynasty to English patriotism – “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,/ May waste the memory of the former days.” (II Henry IV, 5.1.211-213).
We do not claim The Godfather is an adaptation or contemporary transformation of Shakespeare’s Henriad, such as West Side Story’s transformation of Romeo and Juliet, or in O’s retelling of Othello. Nevertheless, the clear correspondences of character and theme invite comparison, which has led us to ponder alternative interpretive possibilities for both Shakespeare’s plays and Coppola’s films.
For instance, viewing these alongside one another, we concentrate more upon the role of adolescent rebellion in The Godfather, we reevaluate the character and reign of Henry V.
“I HAVE A TRUANT BEEN TO CHIVALRY” (V.I.94): Adolescent Rebellion
I Henry IV balances two plots of rebellion: 1) the historical backdrop of the Percy rebellion in the north and west (the political challenge of Henry IV’s rule); and 2) the human comedy of Prince Hal’s “riotous youth” spent cavorting with low-born and disgraced men and women while neglecting his duties as the heir apparent. His father laments, “Whilst I […]/See riot and dishonor stain the brow/Of my young Harry” (I.I.83 – 85).
In contrast, Michael Corleone’s rebellion is presented more subtly, with very little of it portrayed on-screen, yet it is crucial for establishing a foundation for who he will be as head of the family.
Although these “rebellious” episodes are more prevalent in Puzo’s novel, a few examples do appear in the films: 1) his determination to enlist in World War II in the final flashback in Part II; 2) his (literal) screwing around in Manhattan with his cosmopolitan girlfriend; and 3) his late arrival and attire at his sister’s wedding.
Through the lens of adolescent rebellion, his military dress uniform is quite the provocative gesture: Michael is clothed in “America,” both signifying his assimilation into mainstream American society and reminding his father that he risked his life for something other than family. (Vito’s objections are more explicit in the novel, as well as in the script and outtakes in the final edit of the movie.)
If we look deeper into Shakespeare’s use of Falstaff and the tavern world in both Henry IV plays, we also may find similarities with the Corleones’ understanding of America and its mass media.
For example, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s description of Falstaff and his world is akin to a description of the American as salesman, as the finished product of a newly-inaugurated mass media, of an America of promise that has fallen to its lowest common denominator. Falstaff, Greenblatt argues, is “a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted. The drunkenness that in both cases seems linked to gaiety, improvisational wit, and noble recklessness is unnervingly disclosed at the same time to be part of a strategy of cunning, calculation, and ruthless exploitation of others. Invariably, a failed strategy: the grand schemes, the imagined riches, the fantasies about the limitless future – all come to nothing, withering away in an adult son’s contempt for the symbolic father who has failed him” (Will in the World, p. 70). Falstaff is America.
One may even see Henry V’s disavowal of Falstaff and his world etched in Michael Corleone’s lonely and graying visage at the end of Godfather II:
“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” Henry says as he tells Falstaff to go away. “I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,/ So surfeit-swelled, so old, so profane;/ But being awake, I do despise my dream.” (II Henry IV, 5.4.49-52)
At least on the surface, however, Shakespeare portrays this as both inevitable and correct, while Coppola’s cinematic image is, if not darker, lonelier: he sees Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather Part II as a Nixon-like figure, a man who has killed off all of his enemies, even his older brother, and divorced his wife – triumphant but alone.
Michael’s explanation to Kay (during his marriage proposal) in the novel (echoed in the movie) about his father’s power and his need to help his family is key:
“My father is a businessman trying to provide for his wife and children and those friends he might need someday in a time of trouble. He doesn’t accept the rules of the society we live in because those rules would have condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force and character….He refuses to live by rules set up by others, rules which condemn him to a defeated life. But his ultimate aim is to enter that society with a certain power since society doesn’t really protect its members who do not have their individual power. In the meantime he operates on a code of ethics he considers far superior to the legal structures of society.” (Puzo, 349-350)
Michael’s own beliefs, he tells his bride-to-be, are primarily anti-social and anti-democratic.
“I don’t trust society to protect us,” he tells her. “I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a bloc of people to vote for them.”
He tells Kay, in both book and movie, that his father’s time and way of doing things is over and that the family must inevitably join “legitimate” society, “But when they do I’d like us to join it with plenty of our own power; that is, money and ownership of other valuables….I took care of myself, individual. Governments really don’t do much for their people, that’s what it comes down to, but that’s not it really. All I can say, I have to help my father, I have to be on his side.” (Puzo, 350)
This may be linked to European nobility’s rise to power through brute force, and then its creation of aristocratic norms and a caste system to make it all socially normative.
It’s also profoundly cynical, for the core belief is that legitimacy is almost by nature tenuous because you put yourself under forces greater than yourself.
Michael’s understanding of power is as pragmatically driven as Prince Hal’s, but his sense of who he is, especially since the hospital scene, is as a member of his family.
The Black Hand’s Fanucci reminds one of Richard II. Both seem to be opportunistic, arbitrary and lack honor. They also are shortsightedly selfish. All Fanucci seems to concentrate on is “dipping his beak,” grabbing this and that for his daughters, perhaps because he is merely a cog in the machinery of the Black Hand, a network of “protection” organized by early Italian-American criminals in several large American cities during the late 19th century.
In contrast, Shakespeare’s Richard II holds legitimacy. But he also seems to rule arbitrarily, whether when he unceremoniously stops the match between Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, and Thomas Mowbray, whom Henry accuses of treason; or when Richard absorbs John of Gaunt’s lands without appreciation of the man Shakespeare portrays him to be. Gaunt’s paean to England may be echoed in Vito’s focus upon his family to which he maintains devoted loyalty throughout his life and career.
It’s the paradigm of the family that gives Vito’s usurpation meaning, as one also may see in the Henriad, as Henry IV attempts to rein in his son and hand him the prize he wrested from Richard II.
Richard II’s and Fanucci’s deaths are alike in that they are the deaths of the powers-that-be, and lead to the coronations of their murderers; but their deaths also give birth to a pair of tenuous new set of powers-that-be, which only can be maintained through violence and fear and the perception of family legitimacy.
How, then, do they ensure the dynastic consistency during the transition of power from father to son, and how do they maintain their position under constant threat of usurpation?
Manipulation, deception and brute force.
The idea that killing people and maintaining power through brute force is just business or politics is a fiction that Michael Corleone and Prince Hal embrace toward the end of their respective flirtations with American legitimacy and the tavern life.
This is starkly different under a deeper reading of both Prince Hal and Michael.
It’s indicated in the book, where Puzo has Michael say: “It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God.”
Saying things are business and not personal is saying what a pezzonovante might say, a form of showmanship, media politics, an abdication of personal responsibility.
This happens much more powerfully with Henry V’s exchange with the soldier Williams (Henry V, 4.1ff): Henry’s pezzonovante fiction involves making one’s duty a dichotomy, to the king and to oneself, basing it not on the grim fact of putting people in harm’s way for a cause, no matter the reason, but putting people in harm’s way if the reason is held to be sincere by the king, regardless of results.
Williams falls for the metaphysical question.
“But if the cause be not good,” Williams tells the king, “the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.”
Henry’s response is about the fiction of the war’s righteousness – which readers and viewers of Henry IV Part II know to be a sleight of hand.
“Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained: and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.”
Michael’s course of action and eventual downfall begins, as with Prince Hal, in his decision to be with his father (shown in Michael’s take-charge attitude at the hospital – paralleled by Prince Hal as he takes the crown, literally and figuratively, from his dying father) and morally deteriorates after he decides to cold-bloodedly kill Sollozzo and Capt. McCluskey. For Prince Hal, this lay in his decision to take the cynical advice of his father and pursue foreign wars to justify legitimacy, as well as in his decision to hang his old companion Bardolph (Henry V, 3.6.94ff) during his created wars in Normandy.
Michael’s cold and matter-of-fact recitation of the circumstances of killing both Sollozzo and McCluskey astound his listeners, to the point where Sonny tries to shake him out of it, telling him what one must have to do such a thing close up.
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business,” Michael says, and they all believe his cold-blooded intent, if not his reasons.
© 2013 Victor Greto & Jeffrey K. Gibson