Possibly one of the most mediocre novels ever to be turned into a masterpiece of a film, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was nevertheless a bestseller that captured the public’s imagination, largely due to Puzo’s ingenious idea to fuse recently exposed details about the American mafia in nonfiction books like The Valachi Papers and Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father with the trashy roman à clef novels of Jaqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. It’s not great literature, and even Puzo himself, (like director Francis Ford Coppola), was not especially happy about his name being synonymous with mafia epics over the more serious, personal works that he took pride in. But it’s easy to see why the book lent itself to a screen adaptation. The characters are well-drawn, with the family dynamic being loosely patterned on The Brothers Karamazov. Without Coppola’s involvement in the film, it would likely have been a more routine Hollywood affair like Airport or Love Story. Speaking as someone who has seen the movie a hundred times and read the novel once, I can only say that the latter seems incredibly soapy, artless and puerile in comparison. Coppola was generous in sharing credit with Puzo for the adaptation, even insisting on the phrase “Mario Puzo’s” above the title on screen, but it’s apparent that Coppola is primarily responsible for everything great about the film, including Brando, the music of Nino Rota, Gordon Willis’ cinematography, and the huge cast of newcomers that he discovered. It was Coppola who outmaneuvered Paramount chief Robert Evans’ relentless interference. Evans, who wanted another Love Story, pushed for Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal to play Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino, and generally needled, harassed and second-guessed Coppola the whole way. When the time came for a sequel, one of Coppola’s requirements was that Evans be kept away from him; (pretty much the last time Coppola would have the clout to make such a demand). The point is that I believe Coppola retroactively made the Puzo novel seem better than it was. For every “make him an offer he can’t refuse,” there are endless paragraphs that dwell on the sordid details of minor characters’ lives, like Lucy the bridesmaid who doesn’t know what to do about her abnormally spacious vagina. The writing is ridiculously misogynistic. Dwelling ad nauseum on Johnny Fontaine’s entire sexual history or on Sonny Corleone’s massive phallus and animal libido, Puzo’s prose comes off like the work of a terribly insecure and unattractive man with minimal experience with women trying to sound like he knows everything about them. Worst of all, probably, is the fact that Puzo allows no space in this 450-page novel for reflection or to critique the milieu he depicts. He describes the behavior of all these reprehensible people in almost a journalistic way, with a dearth of feeling about it all, which got translated faithfully into the film, which in turn led to the impression that both Puzo and Coppola were glamorizing the mafia. This is why Coppola made sure that the sequel was unambiguous in showing Michael, (despite being an impressive Machiavellian strategist), as a soulless shell of a human being due to the evil he had wrought, all thinly justified with a pretense of concern for “family.” The finale of film The Godfather, Part II shows Michael completely alone, having killed, exiled or alienated all of his loved ones. Puzo’s novel contains no moments even remotely comparable in depth, poetry and pure decisiveness in its treatment of themes. This, combined with the absence of any style or beauty in Puzo’s writing, makes The Godfather pretty underwhelming, in my opinion.
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