The Meaning of Recognition by Clive James

work their Thing by intimidating each other from the top of the hierarchy down, and maintain the cash-flow of their
Thing by intimidating everybody else. When the soldiers toe the line and the civilians keep up their payments, life can go on peacefully from episode to episode. But if, God forbid, one of the
subordinate wise guys should get ambitious, or some innocent citizen should get the idea that there is a real law beyond the one that the wise guys impose, hell briefly but effectively breaks
loose. It hardly ever does, because every member of the crew, whether a made man or not, has proved in his youth that he will go on kicking and hitting until the victim expires. Murder is the nuke.
It spends most of its time not needing to be used. The rubato of the show’s physical action depends on this. In that respect,
The Sopranos
is unsanitized; and it was in that same
respect that the
Godfather
movies were always as clean as a whistle.
    Even the most fervent
Godfather
fan will agree that in the third movie the magic fell apart. It was a rush-job, and it showed: showed most fatally in the script. The lighting looked
right, with all the mandatory sepia
sfumatura
that had been so revolutionary in the first movie. Fudges in the direction were mainly incidental. Coppola must have been working against the
clock when Michael, suffering insulin shock during his visit to the Italian monastery, called for orange juice and candy. A factotum bearing a tray of orange juice and candy rushed straight into
frame, as if a tray of orange juice and candy were always kept ready in an Italian monastery in case a visiting American regime-chief with diabetes should happen to drop by. Other directorial flat
spots were inevitable. The orchestrated multiple killing to holy music had been invented triumphantly in
The Godfather
. Used again in
Godfather II
, the depraved epiphany had
already been dished out once too often. In
Godfather III
the same trick is disguised by having the sacred music happening in the Palermo opera house during a performance of
Cavalleria
Rusticana
, but it’s transparently, and undramatically, the same trick. Directors have often repeated what they themselves invented, but the price is high, because it reminds us that the
direction is being valued above the action, and perhaps always was.
    What a director can’t afford at all is to be unsure of where the script is going. What is Michael doing being
sincere
about going legitimate? But sentimentality had set in a lot
earlier than that. It had been there from the beginning of the saga, which notionally occurs in a flashback in the second movie: but the same fudge rules the first one as well. When Vito Corleone,
played by Robert De Niro in the flashback, kills Fanucci the extortionist, Vito doesn’t set up a reign of extortion of his own. You would think that he flourishes solely from the olive oil
business. He dispenses justice, not injustice. From the beginning of
The Godfather
, in which Vito is played by Marlon Brando, Vito is a figure of benign wisdom, busy saving the helpless
Italian civilians from the indifference of ordinary American law. It’s a comforting notion, but as phoney as the bumps in Brando’s jaw-line: like them, it is made possible only by the
plentiful introduction of cotton wool. The Corleone family, we are assured, makes its money from gambling and prostitution: the accepted human vices. At a critical moment for the plot, Vito even
rules out drug-trafficking as ‘a dirty business’, as if the rest of his business was clean. Protection rackets are scarcely mentioned.
    In his soon to be published
Cosa Nostra
, John Dickie points towards a different picture. Though meant as a serious contribution to modern Italian history, it can safely be predicted
that Dickie’s book will be a media sensation, not least because it has a dozen potential movies in it. (Two of them,
Salvatore Giuliano
and
Le Mani sulla Città
, have
already been made,