The New Yorker Radio Hour - Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

As The New Yorker’s film critic from 1968 to around 1991, the influential Pauline Kael gave voice to her visceral reactions: she wrote as a moviegoer, not a cineaste. Fifty years ago, in the March 10, 1972, issue, she wrote about a new film by the hot-shot young director Francis Ford Coppola. “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art,” Kael wrote, “ ‘The Godfather’ is it.” She noted that Coppola took Mario Puzo’s potboiler of a novel, and the familiar outline of the gangster melodrama, and imbued them with “a new tragic realism,” which reflected a darker view of Americanism in the Watergate era.  Edie Falco performs an excerpted version of Kael’s review.  Some of Pauline Kael’s best work for The New Yorker is collected in “The Age of Movies,” published by the Library of America. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The critic Pauline Kale used to say that she lost it at the movies. And if that phrase sounds a little erotic, she meant it to be. As the New Yorker's film critic from 1968 to around 1991, she always gave voice to her most visceral reactions to the movies. There was nothing snobbish, nothing airy about her. movie going or her writing. And 50 years ago, in March of 1972, she wrote about a new film on the scene. It was called The Godfather. Here's Edie Falco, reading from Pauline Kale's review. If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, the Godfather is it. I believe in America. America has made my fortune.

my daughter in the American fashion. The movie starts from a trash novel that's generally considered gripping and compulsively readable, though, maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash, I found it unreadable. It features a Sinatra stereotype

and sex and slaughter, and little gobbets of truth and heartbreak. You gotta get them close like this. You blow their brains all over your nice cyber league suit. Come here. You're taking a very person. Tom, this is business, and this man has taken it very, very person.

It's gripping, maybe, in the same sense that Spiro Agnew's speeches were a few years back. Puzzo, who admits he was out to make money, wrote, below my gifts, as he put it, and one must agree. Francis Ford Coppola uses his gifts to reverse the process. He has salvaged Puzzo's energy and lent the narrative dignity. The abundance is from the book. The quality of feeling. is Copulas. It's not personal, sonny.

It's strictly business. The beginning is set late in the summer of 1945. The film's roots, however, are in the gangster films of the early 30s. Leave the gun. Take the canaulies. The plot is still about rival gangs murdering each other.

But now we see the system of patronage and terror in which killing is a way of dealing with the competition. What I want, what's most important to me is that I have a guarantee. No more attempts on my father's life. What guarantees can I give you, Mike? I am the hunted one. I missed my chair.

The men meet and conduct their business in deep, toned, shuttered rooms, lighted by lamps even in the daytime. The killing connived at in the darkness is the secret horror, and it surfaces in one bloody outburst after another. The recognition that the killing is an integral part of business policy takes us a long way from the fantasy outlaws of old movies. There is no one on the screen we can identify with unless we take a fancy to the pearly teeth of one shark in a pool of sharks.

Want you to rest well? In the month from now, this Hollywood big shot is going to give you what you want. It's too late. they start shooting in the week. I'm going to make them an offer he can refuse. The enormous cast is headed by Marlon Brando, is Don Vito Corleone. Don Vito could be played as a magnificent old warrior,

a noble killer, a handsome, bold patriarch. But Brando doesn't play for statuesque nobility. You talk about vengeance. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you? Am I boy to me? The light, cracked voice comes out of a twisted mouth and clenched teeth. I spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.

He has the battered face of a devious, combative old man and a pugnacious thrust to his jaw. His dawn is a primitive sacred monster. And the more powerful, because he suggests not the strapping sacred monster, monsters of movies, but actual ones. Those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside a frail frame. Those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces. If the movie gangster once did express, as Robert Warshaw suggested in the late 40s, that part of the American psyche, which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects Americanism itself,

that was the attitude of another era. In The Godfather, we see organized crime as an obscene symbolic extension of free enterprise and government policy, an extension of the worst in America. It's feudal ruthlessness. Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism. It's what we fear Americanism to be. It's our nightmare of the American system.

When Americanism was a form of cheerful, bland, official optimism, the gangster used to be destroyed at the end of the movie and our feelings resolved. Now the mood of the whole country has darkened, guiltily. Nothing is resolved at the end of the Godfather, because the family business goes on. The Godfather is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new,

tragic realism. That's Edie Falco, reading from Pauline Kale's review in our March 10th, 1972 issue. You can find Kale's whole piece on the film, and the pieces were quite a bit longer back in the day at New Yorker.com. Much of Pauline Kale's best work is collected in a volume called The Age of Movies from the Library of America. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us.

See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.