Marlon Brando in The Godfather
IU Cinema Director Dr. Alicia Kozma shares her history with the Godfather trilogy and her recommendations for when to watch the films.
As long as I can remember, the Godfather films have been a part of my life. Growing up in an Italian American family in New York, the films were just part of the ether. I knew the line “I know it was you, Fredo, you broke my heart” before I had even seen Godfather Part II, let along the first film. I knew that the causeway where Sonny was shot was supposed to be the highway between the city and Jones Beach, that the pinnacle of acting as a craft was assumed to live somewhere between Brando in The Godfather and Pacino in Godfather Part II, and somehow it was just assumed knowledge that when you spoke about The Godfather films, you weren’t including the third entry into the trilogy (it’s not actually as terrible as it’s made out to be, and I do suggest watching it — or watching it again). It was, as far as I knew as a kid, the peak of what cinema was.
Once I finally saw the first two films, I agreed (confirmation bias be damned). Well before they became a staple on AMC, every year on Christmas day, a local New York television station — WPIX Channel 11 — would play the trilogy on a 24-hour loop. It was one Christmas day when I was 11 or 12 that I finally saw the first two films, with commercial breaks and all. It would be another year or so until I saw the third film; when it came on, my dad would switch the channel to the 24-hour Twilight Zone marathon. I vividly remember sitting in our den on our brown and red plaid patterned mid-1980s couch, engrossed in what was happening, understanding absolutely nothing I was seeing, but loving every second. In the sequence in The Godfather where Michael is picked up by Sollozzo, my dad would explain to me that they were first driving over the George Washington Bridge — “The same bridge I had been on!” I’d think. And that when Michael shoots Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey at Louis’ Restaurant in the Bronx, my dad would tell me that he had been there when it was still open, and they really did have the old-fashioned toilets with pull handles on the tanks. When Sonny hunts down Carlo for abusing his sister and runs into a group of kids cooling off in the water from an open fire hydrant in the street, he’d tell me about how when he was a kid in Queens, he and his brothers would do the same thing. When I asked about the Cuban revolution on New Year’s — something I really didn’t have any context for yet — he just said, “It’s because of communism.” This explained precisely nothing, but it was Reagan’s America, the Cold War was raging, and communism just equaled bad. Eventually, my mom would come into the den and tell us to stop watching movies on Christmas, set my brother and I on some very important but very boring Christmas chores, and the whole ritual — with the same stories — would start again next year.
Based on this, my kid brain assumed two things were facts: 1) The Godfather films were the realest movies there were. Who was I to argue with my dad, who was an NYPD homicide detective, had been to these places, who had seen the gun toilet?! And 2) The Godfather trilogy was, canonically, Christmas movies. Who was I to argue with TV, which was equally as sacrosanct as my dad?! Facts are facts.
I’ve since learned that both parents and movies are wrong about a lot of things, but I still hold steadfast to the fact that The Godfather movies are Christmas movies. In fact, I contend that they are appropriate viewing for most holidays.
At their core, what makes The Godfather and The Godfather Part II so enduringly compelling is that they are stories about America, what it means to be successful in America, and what it means to be a family in America. Fundamentally, these films are a tense mix of a recrimination of the American Dream as a dangerous mythology that valorizes individualism over collectivism while encouraging unchecked capitalist competition at the expense of the common good AND a love story to the unbreakable bonds of the nuclear family. And what is more American than that? These things alone make these films the perfect companion viewing to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July. But there are myriad other holidays (all of which are, indeed, very real) that these films compliment, including:
New Year’s Eve
Veterans Day
National Teacher Appreciation Day
National Sibling Day
Arbor Day
National Sunkist Citrus Day
The Feast of San Gennaro
National Dessert Day
National Chair Day
National Immigrants Day
Winter Solstice
National Massage Therapy Awareness Week
The Statue of Liberty’s “Birthday”
The list goes on! So settle in — and I do mean settle, these are not brief films — grab your favorite holiday snacks, and discover more ways, and more days, to celebrate these iconic films.
The Godfather Part II will be screened at IU Cinema on December 12 as the concluding film in the series Sequelibrium.
Dr. Alicia Kozma is the director of Indiana University Cinema. She researches, writes about, and teaches film. Learn more at www.aliciakozma.com.