On Sunday I was down with a fever and ended up watching The Godfather again. By the time the credits rolled, almost three hours later, the fever had worn off.
Given a choice between a film I haven’t seen and one I have, I’ll usually pick the one I’ve seen. I’ve been an avid film watcher since college, and a few films I’ve seen more times than I can count. Some are romcoms, because I’m a sucker for those, but most of the repeats are my all-time favourites: The Godfather, The Matrix, Interstellar, Swades and a few more. There’s no fixed time for any of them. I love rewatching them because every time I find something new, and I appreciate the film a little more.
On Sunday, with The Godfather, it was the cat. In the opening scene, while Vito sits in his study listening to the undertaker, there’s a cat in his lap that he keeps stroking. I’d read on Reddit that the cat wasn’t in the script. It was a stray on the studio lot that Coppola dropped into Marlon Brando’s lap just before the take, and it purred so loudly that it got in the way of the dialogue, so Brando had to re-record some of his lines afterwards. I didn’t believe a cat could purr that loudly. I was wrong. This time I could hear it clearly, purring away under his lines.
I first heard of The Godfather from my father. We were watching Vaastav at home. In one scene, Sanjay Dutt’s character is called to a meeting to settle things, and a gun has been planted under the table for him. He picks it up and shoots the mobster across from him. I thought it was brilliant. My father didn’t look impressed at all, and I asked him whether he’d missed what just happened. He said he hadn’t. They’d copied it from The Godfather, he said, and they hadn’t even done it well. He’d seen The Godfather in a cinema when it was released, because back then there was no other way to see it. He’d watched it once, maybe twice, twenty-six or twenty-seven years before that night, and he still remembered that scene well enough to call it out. I still admire his memory for that.
It took me a few years to find out what he meant. In college I read the novel, which I’d found in the bookcase at home, a real treasure trove back then. Then I rented the film from a CD library in Sector 10. There were a lot of those in Bhilai then, shops that made copies of film CDs and rented them out, which was piracy, really. If I remember right, an English film cost ₹15 a day to rent and a Hindi film ₹10. This was before I discovered torrents, after which I’d just download a film or get it from a friend who had.
The first time I watched it, I found it slow. It tested my patience, and I spent most of it checking how it stacked up against the book. I love it now. I doubt I can say anything about The Godfather that hasn’t already been said, but every time I watch it, I’m amazed at how complete it is. I can’t find a flaw in it. The score, the weight of the dialogue, the performances, the cinematography, every scene is perfect. Each one could be a lesson in filmmaking, or at least it inspires me a lot. I find myself wondering how a shot was done, or why the camera starts to close in at a particular moment. Take the camera slowly closing in on Michael’s face in the restaurant until it’s only his eyes, just before he shoots the Turk and the cop, Sollozzo and McCluskey. Or the garden, where Michael and Vito sit next to each other in their last scene together, and Vito gives his son what turns out to be his last piece of advice.
These days it’s the only film that holds me from start to finish. The world has run out of attention, and that includes mine, and I can’t remember the last time before Sunday that I watched a whole film at home in one sitting. Those first twenty-odd minutes at Connie’s wedding are, for me, the greatest opening in film. The only one I’d put near it is Hans Landa at the farmhouse at the start of Inglourious Basterds.
That opening is also where Vito is at his best: Marlon Brando in a black tux, in a dark study with a cat in his lap, granting favours while the wedding goes on outside. Whenever anyone says Godfather, that’s the picture. Nobody imagines Al Pacino. I like both Vito and Michael, but if I had to pick one, it would be Vito. He was a just man and a man of honour, revered as much as he was feared, and you can see it in the loyalty he commanded, even from a brute like Luca Brasi. Michael is a shrewd businessman more than a mobster like his father.
Vito and Michael also have most of the lines people still quote: Vito’s “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” Michael’s “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business,” and Vito’s “Look how they massacred my boy,” over Sonny’s body. My favourite belongs to neither of them. It’s Clemenza’s, after Paulie has been shot in the car: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”
The film is better than the novel in almost every way, and my one gripe is Luca Brasi. In the book you’re left in no doubt about how ruthless he is. In the film you barely get a glimpse of it. You see him nervously rehearsing his speech at the wedding before he goes in to see Vito, and the next time he matters, he’s being garrotted in a bar. For a man whose loyalty says so much about Vito, he dies a mediocre death.
I’ve seen Part II as well, because someone told me it was even better than the first. I still have an axe to grind with that guy. Part II is good, but the first one is iconic.
My father saw The Godfather once, maybe twice, and still remembered one scene twenty-six years later. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched it, and on Sunday it still had something I’d never noticed. If you’ve only seen it once, watch it again.
