Evening Standard du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 22

EVENING STANDARD THURSDAY AUGUST 24 1072 COLOUR Godfather Violence is a family business FAR LEFT: last game Bnido onnge peel between his teeth plays the bogeyman for his grandson LEFT: The violent death of the eldest son 1 'f- Vlir j3r 4 FILM: The Godfather (Cert 175 mins) Paramount Universal Empire ABC I DIRECTOR: Francis Ford Coppola STARS: Marlon Brando Al Pacino I SUPPOSE blood" Is the chief element In The Godfather Not only the amount of it you see on the screen But the blood ties between the members of the Mafia end the blood that the family spills in defence of its unity in the protection of its power to lay down the larw the Mafia law in American society Often the two go rivefflngly together with a vividness that conveys an unforgettable sense of shock The film begins and ends with two holy rituals a wedding and a baptism that are interleaved with violence And this conflict between the sacred and the profane runs right through director Francis Ford dynastic story of the fall of Don Vito Corleone The Godfather (Marlon Brando) and the rise of his son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) Outside in the blinding sun- by Alexander Walker And because it Is a the violence in the film takes on a peculiar justification It the prodding titillating come and enjoy jit kind It is dispensed w-Jh awesome impersonality as you might say to people who expect it nothing personal in becomes the gruesome prelude to a liquidation but it's only stating the truth This is business efficiency in action Such an ethos enabled The Godfather to include a multitude of violent episodes The garrotting of a henchman while his gun hand is pinioned to a bar counter by a stiletto the vendetta that blows holes in Sonny James the short-temdored Sftfl ftk broV daylight the revenge that Michael takes on a crooked police chief (Sterling Hayden) ana his Mafia paymaster over the coffee in a trattoria the strangling of a brother-in-law mercifully masked from us by the car windscreen until his agonised reflex shatters the laminated glass Yes I suppose it is heightened even glamorised the police harassment of the Mafia Is conspicuously absent in the film whereas in real life the Mafia chiefs live lives of constraint and watchfulness from the herbs of four Volcano Even though you must be tired of reading about triumph as the Godfather how the king has regained his throne it really is that an extraordinary performance introduced in the first shot with his back to us Gradually the circling camera reveals a transplanted volcano volcano grown cold over the years but one that retains its brooding power The eyes are nearly sightless look through not at a person the head sits like a meteorite on the shoulders the voice Is a quiet wheeze It takes five minutes to get your bearings on this conception: then it's hypnotic Oddly enough he seem inwardly wicked Simply a man made by his times as the monster ww made by Frankenstein In his magnificently down-beat death scene when he court and agrees to perform acts of vengeance for supplicant fellow-Italians who find the American law offers them no redress for the private wrongs done their honour or their businesses Thus the film drives home the first of its cynical truths: that in this day and age when the machinery of the Law often delays Justice it is attractive to turn to an organisation like the Mafia which metes out revenge a of wild as Bacon called it in return for total obedience And at the end of the film Michael the new attends the christening of his while his henchmen move out among the members of a rival Mafia gang and slay (hem in one of the most chilling blood-baths shown on the cinema screen The vow to renounce Satan alternates crudely but stunningly with the delivery of an soul to its Maker by the quick pressure of a trigger finger This sense of ritual is what permeates The Godfather and gives a sense of dynastic structure to the plot a feeling of epic continuance to what could hare been Just a random series of gangster atrocities Running nearly three hours without an interval it sets down roots in society It shows organised crime to be the passport to the American Dream which the immigrant Sicilian Godfather wrote out for himself In one central sequence when son Michael has to flee to Sicily to escape a gang an Immigrant In the film sums up vividly through his courtship of an Italian girl the code of honour revenge and instant justice which was carried on the emigrant boats to America Only a film as long and essentially as serious as this one could have afforded such a vital analysis of the morality of the Mafia It explains the inexorable ic with which Michael the lege-educated boy is drawn Into the family business of crime grandson ability suggests the frailty of evil But Brando Isn't the whole film If he delivers the goods then Al Pacino as his heir in the Mafia is the bonus It is Pacino's coldly effective style which makes plausible the transition of the boy from a member of the family to the new head of it coldly proclaiming that it's as as he moves the head-' uarters west from New York to casino empires of Las Vegas With Its attention to period-even the colour looks like the and its sureness in every detail The Godfather shows that there Is still life in the massive production engineering which made Hollywood studios the wonder of the entertainment world in their great days continents macerated in oaken vats Pour yourself a generous measure add chunks of ice slice of orange and top it up with a shoosh of soda Then very slowly and deliberately empty the glass Magnificat!.