There are spectacles that occupy an evening, and there are spectacles that fix themselves upon the very soul of a man’s imagination forever after. The Godfather belongs, without dispute, to the latter dreadful company. It is a chronicle of a family so given over to ceremony and vengeance that the two become, by the picture’s end, one and the same thing — a singular weave of blood rendered with the solemnity of scripture.
Of the Family and Its Melancholy Dominion
The tale concerns the house of that dread family, presided over by an aged chief whose whispered counsel carries more terror than any raised voice. What astonishes is how domestic the proceedings feel — weddings, gatherings for the naming of children, the passing of fruit across a table — even as the family’s true business is death. The Godfather understands, with an author’s deep art, that the most dreadful machine of cruelty may be dressed in the plainest robes of family devotion.
The alteration of the youngest son from unwilling witness to cold heir of his father’s dark estate is accomplished with such patience that one scarcely marks the exact hour the soul departs him. By the closing scene, a door closes upon a wife’s countenance, and we comprehend that an entire world has been shut away from the light. Few endeavours in the art of relating a tale have rendered a moral descent so quietly, so without dramatic tumult, and so utterly convincing.
Of Countenance and Design
The performances call up a gravity that borders upon the sacred voice of old. The aged chief’s voice, low and deliberate, seems to issue from some deep and ancient chamber of authority; every syllable he utters carries the weight of a solemn address delivered over the dead. The son’s alteration is conveyed less by speech than by the gradual dimming of light behind his eyes — an extraordinary work of countenance, wrought almost entirely in silence.
The photography, too, deserves melancholy praise: rooms lit as though by dying flame, faces lost in shadow, the golden gloom of interiors suggesting a world already given over to its own history. Nothing here is loud or excessive; all is subdued, sad, magnificent in its discipline. One feels less a witness than a griever admitted, by strange privilege, to view the remains of a vanished code of honor.
Of Its Singular Hold Upon the Spirit
What remains longest in memory is not the killing — though it arrives with sudden, awful skill of hand — but the strange tenderness that attends it. A man is seized by the throat in an automobile even as tender music plays. A wedding dance unfolds mere hours before a treachery, long prepared, is set in motion.
This commingling of the tender and the deadly produces a dread unlike any other chronicle of its kind. It is this alchemy, more than any single scene, that raises The Godfather beyond mere idle sport into something approaching tragic literature.
The picture asks nothing less of its beholder than sustained attention across its considerable length, yet never once does it grow tedious. Each scene rises upon the last like a debt gathering its interest, until the final settlement arrives with the certainty of a doom fulfilled.
I confess I know of few works, in any manner of telling, that join tenderness and horror so completely. The Godfather does not merely show a family’s descent into damnation — it makes the beholder a partner in admiring the descent’s terrible beauty. It is a masterpiece of dreadful and admirable design, deserving every honor bestowed upon it and a good many that language has not yet invented.