The Mafia by Roberto Dainotto

Author:Roberto Dainotto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

‘I Believe in America’

SOLLOZZO: I don’t like violence, Tom. I’m a business man.

– The Godfather, dir. Francis Ford Coppola

‘I believe in America.’ With these words, pronounced over a dark screen, The Godfather begins. It is a tribute and an allusion to those movies – Little Caesar and Scarface above all – that made the gangster film the genre capable of narrating the Italian-American way of participating in the myth of the American Dream. Alluding to the same genre is the heavily inflected accent of the character pronouncing those words. The face of Amerigo Bonasera fades in – Amerigo like the explorer Vespucci who gave his name to the New Continent, and ‘buonasera’ as in ‘goodnight’.

From the shadow, the imposing mass of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone emerges – first his hands, and then his mouth, famously filled with wads of Kleenex. He frowns, as if bored. In this first series of shots and counter-shots, the camera searches the expressions, sometimes fearful and sometimes satisfied, of the petitioners who have come to offer ‘friendship’ in exchange for a slice of that America in which they believe.

Francis Ford Coppola could not devise a better stylistic solution to render explicit, from its very outset, the ideological stake of the film: throughout the 1970s, Coppola is the American director that more assiduously than anyone has dispelled mercilessly the myth of the ‘American Dream’.16

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.