The Gangster as Tragic Hero

On guns, cannoli, and the dead eyes of Michael Corleone

Welcome to Culture Club, a feature where my editor David Swanson and I talk about what we’ve been reading, playing, artistically admiring, and—this week—watching. This is a feature for paid subscribers only, but enjoy this free preview and consider upgrading to paid!

For the past few weeks I’ve been dipping my toes into the massive cinematic universe that is the gangster movie, one that dates back to the earliest days of American film—pre-Hayes code, and even pre-sound. I feasted on “The Departed” and its Boston-Irish slant on murder, honor, and infiltration; took a detour to Paris for a young Alain Delon in the terse and gorgeous “Le Cercle Rouge”; fondly recalled previous forays into the oeuvre of Scorsese; being a Jersey girl at heart, I’ve watched and loved both “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire.” So, this week, in a culmination of all that gangster exploration, I finally settled on watching, for the first time from start to finish, the great ‘70s landmark that is the “Godfather” duology—Parts I and II.

The first installment has a certain elegance that even a film ignoramus like me could appreciate. It moves at a grave and sedate pace, self-seriousness oozing out of every pore, and seeing Al Pacino and Diane Keaton as so completely young is almost an alien experience for a 2020s moviegoer. (There are moments of levity—“leave the gun, take the cannoli” being the most famous—but altogether the whole thing moves like a royal galleon, insisting upon its own majesty.) 

Al Pacino’s tightly-coiled transformation into a shark-eyed sociopath is chilling, although it seems more a slow-motion descent, with little discernible movement, than true moral arc. The opening scenes are magnificent, but the uniformed “Joe College” version of Michael Corleone, purportedly the departure point that lends all his subsequent crimes their moral gravity, is a little blink-and-you’ll miss it, especially if you’re distracted by young Diane Keaton’s incredible hair. All in all the whole thing has made me leery of men in fedoras; they seem to always intend to kill you (or propose a marriage that is a kind of death in itself).

There’s been enough said about the Godfather’s cultural impact for me not to need to add much to that canon—whole segments are like watching a clip that’s been turned into a reaction meme, its power disassembled by constant mimesis. Still—the story is taut and self-contained, and if it doesn’t offer, to my mind, enough justification for our emotional entanglement with who gets hit and how and where, it at least has the ambition and the self-discipline to recognize the finite nature of its own arc. Which is … not necessarily the case when we get to the second movie, which takes us from Sicily to Cuba to the Lower East Side to Las Vegas without ever having determined a moral core.