The Godfather

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0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.4 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres. It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets girl. Boy brings girl to his sister’s wedding. Boy and girl slowly become entangled in an ever-​tightening web of vengeance, family, and violence, emblematic of the crumbling American dream. When our guest today offered to come on to discuss the pinnacle of American cinema, we could not refuse. Joining us to discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s, The Godfather, are Cato Institute Senior Vice President for Policy, Gene Healy.

0:00:37.9 Gene Healy: Hi.

0:00:38.6 Landry Ayres: And former Cato-​ite, Diego Zuluaga.

0:00:41.0 Diego Zuluaga: Hi there.

0:00:42.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Today we’re gonna focus mainly on the first film. But I’m sure the whole series will come up at some point, and even though the second film is explicitly more about an immigration story, the first film, we can’t really separate or dis-​tangle from the immigration topic as it focuses almost entirely on immigrants and their subsequent generations, and their families and how they interact with each other. So I think it might be a good place to start and talk about what does this film do to the classic American dream story? And how it relates to like the larger immigration narrative, especially in this time period in the US?

0:01:19.9 Gene Healy: Well, I think it’s an immigrant story right from the beginning, with the scene with the undertaker, Amerigo Bonasera, which I think means America good night. It’s not all that subtle. And right from the start, you have… You’re introduced to Don Corleone through the story of the undertaker, whose daughter has been sexually assaulted, and he went to the police like a good American, and he wanted justice but he didn’t get justice. And now he’s paying his respects to the Godfather, in search of justice. And certainly, it’s an immigrant story throughout. In the beginning of II, when young Vito Corleone is quarantined for smallpox, and his room looks out directly at the Statue of Liberty, these themes run throughout all three films.

0:02:23.8 Diego Zuluaga: I agree with Gene. I think in some ways, it’s a quintessentially American rags to riches story, where you have Vito Corleone arriving in the States with nothing as a child, and we then realized that he’s become a very prosperous man, if not necessarily in the conventional way. Bonasera, of course, opens the film by saying, “I believe in America. America made my fortune.” And to some extent, it’s quite visibly the case that these people have become much better off, improved their condition, and that of their families as a result of moving to America. Of course, the irony behind all of this is that Bonasera is coming to the Godfather to seek justice in a very un-​American way, because the American courts have failed him.

0:03:08.9 Diego Zuluaga: And the Godfather is dispensing justice and operating his own little straight structure, quite apart from the American system. And I think this comes across in the book, maybe a little more than in the film, but the Godfather is certainly very cynical about the American system and what America means for his family and what he owes America. So there’s a contradiction there, in that you see the immigrant’s prosperity as you often see in the American story. But also a completely different kind of evolution from arrival in America that is unconventional, and in some ways amoral. Or even immoral.

0:03:47.9 Landry Ayres: And what does Vito Corleone, the Godfather, really do with that frustration with the American system? Because you can see that while he’s enacting things with violence and coercion in similar ways that the state does, he is also creating effective change that the state cannot. So how does that square with him trying to negotiate that power and creating order as such? Does he sort of come to embody the state? What is that relationship like?

0:04:27.7 Gene Healy: Well, the first few things that happened in The Godfather, the first few services that Don Corleone performs are sort of state services, right? Justice/​vengeance for the undertaker, whose daughter has been assaulted. Then the second visit he gets early on in Godfather I is from the boss of Enzo, the baker, to straighten out an immigration problem. So you’re introduced to the La Cosa Nostra as a para-​state organization that is performing basic government functions, for an insular immigrant community. Certainly that’s not all the mafia did, but that’s how we’re introduced to it in Godfather I.

0:05:24.2 Diego Zuluaga: The message from the beginning, romanticizes the role of the mafia, compared to the American state. Because Bonasera’s Italian, his daughter is Italian. She’s been assaulted by what seems to be described as WASPs, sort of Anglo-​Saxon, more prosperous, more established men from well-​connected families. And that’s what gets them out of a tougher sentence, because Bonasera’s worry is that they’ve been sentenced to, I think two years in prison, but the sentence has been suspended. And he’s outraged that there is no justice delivered to… On behalf of his daughter. And so he says, “Oh justice will be given to us by Don Corleone.” That’s the opening thing. And so the Godfather from the beginning is presented as a very fair man, someone who does everything for his family, only reacts to other people’s attacks against them. Everything is for business, nothing is personal. There is no free vindictive-​ness in his actions.

0:06:26.4 Diego Zuluaga: And it is doing, sort of supplementing the state, sometimes in a fair way. And of course, this all starts at a wedding where as the father of the bride, he cannot refuse any demands made of him. So even there, there’s a code of honor and a sense that there are norms being followed and respected that gives us, I think a probably rose-​tinted view of how these guys operated in practice.

0:06:55.4 Gene Healy: Yeah, I think Diego is exactly right. This is an extremely romanticized vision of organized crime, that the Corleone family at least are the noble Romans, the mafia see as noble Romans, Corleone means Lion Heart. And the activity they’re introduced with is quasi legitimate activity, and throughout, Don Corleone is really the good Don. You see him in II, really only killed two people. Fanucci, the black hand who’s preying on the immigrant community, and who’s gonna miss that guy? And he goes back to Sicily and kills the mafia Don that had killed his father. So there’s this story that he rises to power sort of on the wings of justice and provides a service to the community. And there may be some truth to that, but it is only part of the picture. This incidentally is a libertarian podcast, Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian was a huge fan of The Godfather movies. [chuckle]

0:08:22.7 Gene Healy: And he wrote a number of reviews of… He wrote reviews of I, II and III, and a huge mob movie fan. And one of the things he appreciated about it, about the Godfather cycle, was how it romanticized the mob. He wrote about how organized crime is essentially anarcho-​capitalist, that The Godfather was dispensing justice. And later in life, he wrote a review of Goodfellas, Rothbard absolutely hated Goodfellas. He said they’re… In contrast to The Godfather, the characters in Goodfellas are depicted as psychotic, repellent punks who engage in violence at the drop of the hat, and this made Goodfellas inferior to The Godfather movies. Well, they’re both great movies, but the thing about it was, The Godfather is based on utterly romanticized fiction. Mario Puzo grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, didn’t know any mobsters. Goodfellas is based on a true life account from a mob associate, Henry Hill. So one of them is actually based on a mob memoir, that’s the one that shows a cidia, more violent side of organized crime, that’s the one Rothbard hated. The one that he liked was Puzo’s and Coppola’s version where the mob are essentially noble Romans dispensing justice. Interesting sort of blind spot there, I think.

0:10:09.4 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s funny you mention that ’cause while I was watching, and I saw this quite some time ago. My re-​watch had probably been like five or 10 years since I’ve seen it, but I was wondering, “How accurate does the movie depict organized crime?” Obviously, it’s a romanticized version, but there have to be like some elements that are relatively, let’s say, based on types of crimes that might have happened or based on true events. And I was kind of wondering how closely tied some of this stuff was to real life?

0:10:44.5 Diego Zuluaga: I think it’s a great question because at the time that The Godfather is set, which is immediately after World War II, running up into 1951, this was a particularly quiet and prosperous period for the mob in the sense that the wars and the violence of the 1930s had passed, prohibition was no longer, and there was huge business in the post-​war business with all the price controls and everything else going on. There was a huge business in the illegal, but relatively legitimate activities of trafficking in goods that might be price controlled, that might be in short supply, or helping people with paperwork, helping people find a job after they came back as GIs, things of that nature. Of course, the New York mob in particular had just had the Commission structure set up. This is where the five families come from, this was something arranged by Lucky Luciano, the Godfather of godfathers, in order to keep the peace between the families.

0:11:42.1 Diego Zuluaga: And they basically divvied up the territory of the five New York Boroughs to make sure that everyone got their fair share, it was basically a cartel. And in some ways it was effective at preserving the peace. And this was also a time when law enforcement wasn’t quite yet so focused on the mob. So you have the Kefauver hearings, which are the sort of first federal effort at investigating the extent of organized crime. This was focused on Interstate Commerce at the time. You have that happen in the early ’50s, but that’s the first glimpse we really catch of some of the individuals involved. And it’s not really until much later, I would say the ’70s and ’80s when with the eavesdropping that the government did, the FBI and so on, when you get the genuine persecution. And of course, by this time they had got involved in dealing drugs and various other things that were seen as much more threatening to a wider society. So during this time, the mob was sort of a purveyor of minor vices, and in some ways slightly romantic because of the colorful bombastic characters that were involved, with their shiny suits and so on. So I think some of that scene setting has to do with this, with the fact that it was neither Al Capone’s mob nor was it John Gotti’s. It was a different period.

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0:12:57.1 Landry Ayres: Briefly, Gene had mentioned gangster movies in general, not just The Godfather or Goodfellas, but there is a distinction between, say, like Italian gangster movies and the Irish gangster movies, and how they both operated in reality. So what does the character of Tom do to complicate that and sort of showcase that divide between these two?

0:13:27.3 Gene Healy: Before the time period that The Godfather is set in, in fact, by the early ’30s, the Italian mob, it really just wiped the floor with the Irish mob. If you’ve ever watched Boardwalk Empire, there’s actually pretty decent… Lucky Luciano is a character, some of the Irish gangsters Owney Madden, I believe is a character, and that depicts that period during Prohibition where there was an Irish mob to speak of, there was competition between the Italian and Irish mob, and there was actually cross-​pollination, Luciano worked with Meyer Lansky and Arnold Rothstein, Jewish gangsters and Irish gangsters. And by the time of the Luciano establishes the commission, the Italians really dominate the rackets, most of the Irish were driven out. You may know the saint Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago in 1929 is Al Capone having Bugs Moran assassinated, the fight, turf wars over bootlegging.

0:14:51.0 Gene Healy: But by the post-​war era, by really ’31, ’32, the Italian mob is dominant, the Irish mob is really the police and Tammany Hall, but the rackets are dominated by the Italians, as Diego says, this is relatively a period of peace, I think there’s… There are very few major mob figures assassinated from this long period and from the ’30s to the ’50s, the Albert Anastasia in ’57, but it’s a period of peace and prosperity for the Italian mob, and I think one strength that the Italian mob had was Omertà and ethnic loyalty, the Irish gangs were much more fluid, more like high school cliques, there was this formal regime structure that was put into place with made men and chains of command, and I think that structure, which they talk about, especially in II… It was one of the advantages that the Italian mob had.

0:16:10.4 Diego Zuluaga: Landry, in terms of your question about Tom Hagen. I would say that one of the paradoxes of Tom is that in some ways, he’s an adopted son of the Godfather, he was brought in from the street by Sonny Corleone, the older brother as a charitable act, he stayed with him and then he becomes consigliere. He’s an excellent consigliere in some ways… Because he’s very smart, he’s very shrewd, he’s cold, he can certainly get things done, and even though they don’t trust him, Michael Corleone, when he becomes the Don he no longer has him as the first line kind of advisor. It’s his lawyer. And I think some of that has to do with the ethnic loyalty that Gene was just referring to there was a sense that Hagen couldn’t do things because he’s not a blood relative that others would do for others, he doesn’t… He maybe doesn’t have the stomach either for it, but clearly Michael thinks that someone else and they’re all Italians after him is better placed to do the job that needs to be done as consigliere.

0:17:14.3 Gene Healy: In real life somebody like Hagen probably wouldn’t have had the authority… He couldn’t have been a made man, and probably that’s why it’s strange when he’s put in charge in II when after the assassination attempt and the… Hagen becomes acting Don I think that in real life, that would have been a very odd thing to see. In Goodfellas, the De Niro character cannot be made man because he’s half Irish.

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0:17:53.3 Natalie Dowzicky: There’s this common theme that I saw on a few older reviews of the movie even, that were about capitalism and how this movie, it may be a critique of capitalism, if you look at it in a certain lens, can anyone flush that out? Do we think this movie is critiquing capitalism or what do we think?

0:18:14.1 Gene Healy: There’s definitely an element there, the epigraph to the Puzo book is from Balzac. Behind every great fortune, there is a crime. And Coppola himself first wasn’t interested in the novel, the novel, he said it was kind of a sensationalist pot-​boiler, and if you’ve ever read it it’s a tremendously entertaining novel, but that’s definitely true. Coppola wasn’t all that interested in it at first, but then when he looked at it again and he had to take the job because he was in dire straits financially, he describes it as… The novel as a metaphor for American capitalism, and you definitely see that throughout all three movies, it becomes less and less subtle by the time you get to III, but there is Hyman Roth says, we’re bigger than US Steel, there’s in I, the repeated refrain that, “This isn’t personal, it’s just business.” There’s definitely an undercurrent of… In the same way that there’s politicians and gangsters, there’s that theme. We’re not that different. We’re kind of in the same line of work.

0:19:40.0 Gene Healy: There’s a similar theme running throughout about American business, and I think it sometimes particularly in II, in certain scenes, the scene, when they’re in pre-​revolutionary Cuba and they’re going around the room, and here’s the big wig from United Telephone and Telegraph, and then here’s our associate, Michael Corleone, representing entertainment interests, there is this quest to become legitimate and as Michael Corleone becomes more and more legitimate and tries to make that happen, he tends to see that everything is as corrupt as it was when the Corleone family was simply a crime family.

0:20:36.4 Diego Zuluaga: And look at the business people who are depicted, probably the closest to an honest business person is Bonasera, who’s a petty undertaker, clearly not a very likeable guy, [chuckle] who has neglected his relationship with the Godfather until he needs something from him, and then he will kneel down and kiss his hand only because he needs the favor. He’s not particularly excited when the Godfather comes to see him to have the favor returned when his son has been killed, and so there is a sense that these business people are petty people, they’re no better than the others, they have no higher sense of where there is this sort of great man theory underlying some of the film where business people don’t fit in very well, and indeed the other ones that are shown, I can think of say Woltz, the producer, was also a successful guy, he is a very nasty character and he’s taking revenge against Johnny Fontane for something that happened years ago.

0:21:33.2 Diego Zuluaga: Not a very nice guy at all, and then think of Moe Greene, the casino guy who, despite being successful, completely underestimates the Corleone family and finds himself in a very bad position after not too long in Las Vegas, and so there is no particular reference from business that is positive or kind of exemplary in any of the three films, I wouldn’t say. Then again, no major institution is left untouched really by The Godfather, because even the Holy Catholic Church is [chuckle] mired in corruption almost as much as anyone else in the film.

0:22:11.0 Gene Healy: Yeah, and there’s hardly a religious ceremony in the three films that isn’t accompanied by… Half the time they’re showing a sacrament and there’s a murder spree going on at the same time, from the baptism at the end of I, a similar scene in III, it seems like blood and corruption and violence are intertwined with politics, religion, and business.

0:22:41.0 Landry Ayres: One thing that you brought up, Gene, and sort of what Diego said about this sort of being tied into all of these institutions, and this pretty cynical view of institutions and the world, Gene, you had mentioned the difference between the sort of Irish mob and the Italians and how the Italians had taken over and the Irish at a certain point had become police officers, and Tammany Hall, there was… It might have not been that way to the Godfather who played the police and judges and politicians like chess pieces, like he would anyone else, but at the same time, he was saying, “I wanna put Michael… He might not be Don Corleone, he could be senator or President Corleone.” There is a view of ascendancy or upward mobility out of the sort of organized crime element, but there’s also the belief that really politicians and the Corleones and those in the mob are not that different at all. And Michael specifically says this to Kay in the first film, he says that there’s really not so much different between the two of them, and she brings up the idea that they coerce everyone with violence.

0:24:10.2 Landry Ayres: And he rejects that, and says that that’s not actually that different at all, so I think it’s a pretty Libertarian take to bring up the coercion inherent in politics, and I was curious about how while we might think that philosophically, in practice how similar or different are the Corleones and the mafia from people in politics?

0:24:40.3 Gene Healy: Well, I think The Godfather cycle, particularly with regard to the Corleone family, is a highly romanticized view of organized crime, but you get highly romanticized views of politics in things like the West Wing, for example. It’s no more accurate. Yes, the exchange in I, when Michael has come back from Sicily and he surprises Kay, who’s a school teacher now, and they have that terrific exchange where he says, “My Father is no different than any other powerful man, a senator or President, anybody that has people he’s responsible for,” and Kay says, “Oh, now you’re being naive, Michael. Those men, senators and presidents, don’t have people killed,” and he looks at her with that cold stare and says, “Oh, really? Who’s being naïve, Kay?” [chuckle] What’s funny is, I had to go back and check the dates, but this is… It’s before Watergate, it’s actually… The Godfather was released even before the Watergate burglary, it’s before there have been some revelations of criminality in the executive branch in the early ’70s, but it’s really afterwards…

0:26:07.1 Gene Healy: It’s the… It’s the mid-​70s. The Church Committee hearings, where you learn about things like the Kennedy Administration working with the mafia to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. And you learn about so much corruption at high levels, assassination programs run by the CIA. Usually, terribly ineffective, but the attempts were made. And it really is part of this… What’s going on in a lot of movies in the ’70s is recognition that… That… Romanticized view of the government is not justified by the fact. I think that runs throughout all three movies. And there’s… I also enjoyed the… At the beginning of II, Senator Geary, where he’s trying to shake Michael down for a pay off for a casino license. And Michael says, “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy senator.” Which would be a great line to have the opportunity to use, if you’re ever under heavy questioning at a Senate hearing.

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0:27:41.1 Gene Healy: But yeah. It’s… I would say that I think the cynical view of government that the films present is more justified, than perhaps the romanticized view of organized crime and the Corleone family that it depicts. Because I think that is really not historically accurate. Certainly, the La Cosa Nostra did some… Provide some services. Did engage in some… In commerce. And that was suppressed by the State and had some, what we might as Libertarians call, legitimate functions, but that by no means, is that the whole story.

0:28:36.6 Diego Zuluaga: I think that’s right. In many ways, it operated like a very primitive and inefficient State. Because the protection money that was extorted from business owners in Italian communities in America, was a very significant percentage of what they made. The figures it’s sort of 20%, 30%. These are… We as Libertarians would criticize that level of taxation. And this is on top of any other taxation that these people paid, legitimately on their earnings. Not to mention, that if you look at Sicily where, in fiction and in reality, the New York mafia families originated from Sicily, is one of… Was one… Until very recently, a very backward part of Italy.

0:29:19.6 Diego Zuluaga: Struggled to develop. And was only very partially under the purview of the Italian State. There was a constant struggle between the, Age Old Administration of mafia overlords and other strong men, locally, with the Central Roman Administration. Sometimes, it may have been for the better. In the case of fighting back Mussolini, particularly during World War II. It seems the mob helped the American army get into Sicily during the southern invasion. And in that case, you probably could say that the mob was marginally better than what was in charge in… In Italy elsewhere.

0:29:54.4 Diego Zuluaga: But I don’t think it was a particularly well-​performing substitute function for the State that the mob performed. It was arbitrary. It was very much subject to the whim of the person at the top. There are plenty of stories of crazy people who ended up at the top. Albert Anastasia, who got killed in the barber shop of the Plaza Hotel, is an example of that. He got killed because he had gone too crazy. And even the other members of the commission thought he was out of control. So the way by which these people came to authority, wasn’t one that necessarily let the most talented or the best to get on top. Then again, none is politics as we know from high and others.

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0:30:35.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Throughout the film, there’s this interesting dynamic between safe and clean businesses like gambling or other types of organized crime that the Corleone family is in, as opposed to drugs? And I’m kind of wondering why the Corleones wanted to avoid getting into that business? Why this specific hard-​line? I guess.

0:31:02.8 Gene Healy: My understanding is that… That it’s… It’s really not accurate. The mob is instrumental in heroin trafficking a large scale in the United States in the ’50s, there’s an agreement… Palermo Agreement with the Sicilian mob, where… I don’t know if it’s Vito Genovese, I think makes it. The five families are very… Are heavily involved in importing heroin into the United States at a large scale. There’s a French Connection later. And so, whatever reluctance or lip service that was paid by a few mafiosi at various times about, not getting into the drug trade. The fact is, the mob was heavily involved in the drug trade. Part of this depiction of Corleone as the good mobster, you never really see him… Well, there’s one exception, which I think… Mostly you see the Corleones… Like I said, he kills Fanucci. He was preying on the people. He’s… He’s working out union problems. He’s fixing immigration. But in Godfather II, the way that they set up Senator Geary and gets Senator Geary in their pocket. Now, it’s never explicit, but I think it’s pretty clear that… You remember he…

0:32:45.7 Gene Healy: Geary wakes up at a brothel owned by Fredo, run by Fredo. And there’s a prostitute who’s been murdered. I think it’s pretty clear that the Corleone family had her killed in order to have leverage over this senator, and that’s as heinous an act as anything you see from Barzini or the bad mobsters in the films. So even within The Godfather cycle itself with its romanticized depiction of the good Don, the Corleone family is certainly… They’re engaged in murder, and murder of innocents at various times.

0:33:35.8 Diego Zuluaga: And of course, Don Corleone’s views are a little bit generational and old-​fashioned, at least that’s the way they’re depicted. It’s a bit like the owner of the new store, who refuses to sell pornographic magazines because he has an objection to it, and then the heirs to the business decide to expand the range that they sell because that’s where business is going anyway. The commission meeting that we see, which by the way, the exterior of the building where they meet, which is shown in the film, is the New York Federal Reserve. Make of that what you will, but what’s discussed at the meeting is that they will use their political connections to try and make the drug trade legitimate, or at least make it viable, and less of a target of law enforcement. In fact, there was an intervention by one of the lesser mobsters, where he gets up and says, “I want to make this business legitimate. I don’t want my people selling it to children.” And he in fact makes a very racist comment to the effect of, in my area, we’re just focusing on selling this stuff to black people.

0:34:35.6 Diego Zuluaga: And that, I think, reflects also an attitude of the time, which was so long as you sold to certain groups that we didn’t care about as much, it was fine. The question was that were you selling to white teenagers. That that was the major concern. It wasn’t the act of doing it or the activity that was so objectionable.

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0:35:01.5 Gene Healy: We talked a lot about the politics and history of all this, but maybe we could talk a little bit about The Godfather as a film. It had been, I don’t know, maybe five, six years… I tend to watch these every half a decade or so, over Thanksgiving or something. But it had been at least five years since I had seen Godfather I, and it was mesmerizing right from the beginning. I mean just… Efficient, fast-​moving, setting scenes, bringing into an entirely different environment so quickly and so efficiently. There’s really no wonder that it is a timeless classic.

0:35:56.9 Natalie Dowzicky: That and the cast they put together. Like… [chuckle]

0:35:58.0 Gene Healy: Well did you… Did you ever see the… There are some casting notes that Coppola had. There were people that they wanted to… The studio wanted to force on him, but there’s a… You can find on the Internet, casting notes he took, where things could have gone in a really bad direction. At one point, Laurence Olivier was considered for Don Corleone.

0:36:27.4 Natalie Dowzicky: What?

0:36:27.9 Gene Healy: Martin Sheen or Dustin Hoffman for Michael.

0:36:32.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I can see Dustin Hoffman. I could see that.

0:36:34.2 Landry Ayres: I think that’s just because Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino kind of look alike. [chuckle]

0:36:38.7 Natalie Dowzicky: They do. A young Al Pacino, yeah.

0:36:41.6 Gene Healy: I have to say that this is by far the best I’ve ever seen Pacino. I think in his later years, Pacino… No offense to Diego, who sort of is a Pacino lookalike, [chuckle] but Pacino sort of seems in later years to be doing a version of an actor, imitating Pacino, almost a self-​caricature. Whereas in I and II, he’s not crazy Pacino, he’s this cold, calculating, brutal, ruthless man. I think it’s extremely effective.

0:37:24.3 Diego Zuluaga: And the evolution of his character, even just through the first film, from when he arrives at the wedding as a veteran from the war, looking cheerful and happy and innocent and in love with this American woman, who’s anything but Italian in everything that, in every way possible. And by the end of the film is still the same person, looking very much the same. He hasn’t aged all that much, but has completely altered in terms of his values, his perception of how things are achieved, and what’s good and what’s bad, and what his duty in life is and so on. And far from not wanting to have anything to do with his family, he is now at the head of it. I think Pacino does that amazingly, and I think some of it has to do with the screenwriting as well, of course, but the acting is just sensational.

0:38:16.0 Landry Ayres: I also think his performances over time are really, really impeccable. You even get to Part II, which people really don’t like for a variety of reasons, many of which are justified. But I think towards the end, the sort of story that people want them to be and kind of idolized The Godfather films as being about changes. It’s really… It’s very much a sort of Greek tragedy, third act, where everything falls apart. You’ve got this ascendancy to power, and then these terrible acts continuing on. And then the third film is just like really sad, when you think about it. He’s sitting by himself, sort of mourning and grieving all of these things that he’s done over the course of his life and seeing his family react to it over all of the years.

0:39:12.4 Landry Ayres: And while it’s still not the great films that I think that the first two are, there was a sort of idolizing that people had for the first two films that they didn’t totally get the sort of tragic element, I think. They just saw the ascendancy to power and they were like, “Yeah, this is great. The mob’s awesome.” It’s romanticized, you know you’ve got… In The Sopranos, you’ve got Tony Soprano and all his friends watching The Godfather all of the time, and sort of idolizing it as this thing, and then when you get to III, you are kinda like, “Oh, this isn’t what I wanted. This is terrible. [chuckle] I feel horrible after all of this”, but I think it is poignant and purposeful in the way that it does that, but I think having it be the third film in a series… It sort of… It becomes really, really hard to package and sell that.

0:40:10.7 Gene Healy: I had a hard time… This is the first time that I tried watching the director’s cut, and you think maybe there will be something to this that you didn’t see when III came out, and I just… I could not make it all the way through III, this time.

0:40:32.0 Landry Ayres: Rarely is a director’s cut worth it.

0:40:34.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I was just gonna say that too.

0:40:36.0 Landry Ayres: I’m like they have editors and people for a reason, people get paid to say, “No.”

[laughter]

0:40:41.4 Gene Healy: Right. The script, just there is a… You know, you can buy The Godfather notebook. But somebody got me this once for Christmas, and I never really looked at it before, but I looked at it a little before this you know it was Coppola’s book for… He’s actually cut out pages of The Puzo novel, and he’s got notes on the side about what he wants to achieve in each scene, and it’s really interesting to see how he put this together and how effective it was, and then you get to III and there is such a tell don’t show element about the script, that’s not there in the first two, whereas things were a little more subtle in the first two, by the time you get to III, it’s like they’ve got notes for what they want the theme of the scene to be, so they just put them right into dialogue.

0:41:44.6 Gene Healy: Like at one point, there was that theme about politics being like crime that we talked about, that’s in I and II, by the time they get to III, there is a scene just around where I left off where Michael just says in Italian, “Politics is just like crime,” and you’re like, “Well, that’s,” you know… [chuckle] Let me figure these things out for myself, don’t give me the cliff notes right in the screenplay. So it really is a significant drop off in quality from I and II.

0:42:22.6 Diego Zuluaga: One thing that I find The Godfather series does very successfully, which is why it enchanted even the mobsters themselves and why The Sopranos are shown to watch it, but there is also, I think from the tapes that the FBI got off of mafia guys, they talked about it all the time, apparently. So it was a common place thing, is that it completely misses other than when they have that war after the murder of McCluskey and the other Sicilian guy, Sollozzo, where they have to go to safe houses and wait there and you have a few short scenes where you have them sleeping and eating all the time and playing the piano in their wife beater shirts and everything else.

0:43:02.2 Diego Zuluaga: It doesn’t really ever show mob life as being nerve-​racking and boring, a really dreadful combination of they might kill me any moment, they might arrest me any moment, and then at the same time, I cannot move, I have to stay here and I have to wait. And you see the footage of real life mobsters and you really see the effects of that, ’cause they’re chain smokers, they’re really fat, they are always driving around, they’re very sort of extremely anxious on top of probably being psychopaths because why would you get into that line of business otherwise these days. But all of that is missed in The Godfather, and so it is aspirational in the same way that probably someone in a CIA cubicle somewhere, just listening to boring tapes all day, watching spy movies, might think… Might be uplifted and think that what they are doing is much more important than it feels in a daily basis.

0:43:51.9 Gene Healy: Yeah, it is hard to make a mob movie that doesn’t end up romanticizing the life in some way. So my dad’s once said something similar about war movies, every war movie, even an anti-​war movie, there’s gonna be something about it that an 18-​year-​old boy thinks like, well that would be really cool in some way, and I think there is a similar dynamic going on with the mob movies, even a movie as squalid and repellent, great movie, but what it depicts, squalid and repellent as Goodfellas. There is, you know, you grow up with friends of yours, you’re trading those lines.

0:44:41.1 Gene Healy: It probably wasn’t a glamorous and exciting line of work most of the time, it had its stresses and as somebody said, you probably… Nowadays, you’d be better off actually being in waste management than using waste management as a front, but there is… That the mob movie has displaced the western… And I think The Godfather cycle is instrumental in that. It’s really displaced the western as the American genre. You had in the ’50s of westerns, people taming the frontier, fighting Indians, the mob, the gangster picture. You know the country has been populated and it’s immigrant groups in a frontier that’s already settled. How do they interact with the larger society? That’s…

0:45:52.6 Gene Healy: We don’t have a lot of westerns anymore, but gangster pictures are like the quintessential American movie now. This has also been one of my pet theories for the popularity of Breaking Bad, which I think is not a terrible series, but I think is really overrated. My pet theory is that it is really the only entry in the gangster genre that involves non-​ethnic white people, Walter White. I think people are subconsciously drawn to that because here, you know, the Italians have their gangster pictures, Mexican-​Americans have their gangster picture, the Irish have their gangster pictures, but regular vanilla white Americans don’t really have any… They show up as like Senator Geary. I think people really got interested and maybe overrated Breaking Bad subconsciously for that reason, but like I said, that’s my pet…

0:47:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I could never get into it.

0:47:06.1 Gene Healy: To me, it was like… It had its moments, and then it became ridiculous when he’s assassinating people with wheelchair bombs and ricin and…

0:47:17.6 Landry Ayres: I’m sorry, Gene. I’m gonna… I stopped recording that last bit. It’s so weird that I don’t have any of that audio and no one will hear that piping hot take. [laughter] It’s so weird.

0:47:27.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Landry, do you like Breaking Bad?

0:47:30.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah, Breaking Bad’s great. It’s phenomenal. It’s really good.

0:47:34.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Landry’s gonna selectively put, take that out, it’s as if…

0:47:38.4 Landry Ayres: Just cut that. Don’t worry.

0:47:42.4 Gene Healy: It’s like MacGyver.

[music]

0:47:45.4 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home. This is locked in.

0:47:54.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Alright. So Diego, Gene, what other types of things have you been watching, playing, listening to, that you think our listeners might enjoy? They don’t have to be Godfather related, but if they are, bonus points. [chuckle] Go ahead, Gene.

0:48:08.4 Gene Healy: In terms of reading, I’ve been pretty boring. Lately, I’ve read a bunch of policy books, but one that is excellent and tangentially related to our topic is a book called “After Nationalism: Being American in an age of Division” by Samuel Goldman. It’s an extended essay on what it means to be an American, what it has mean, the different metaphors we’ve used for Americanism from the covenant, the puritans, to the melting pot, to the American Creed. And what Goldman suggests is that we have been divided as a people almost from the start, and in some ways that’s a feature and not a bug, and instead of looking for some kind of mythic national unity, we should learn how to get along in the areas where we need to get along. Another thing to recommend, although I haven’t picked this up in some time, but watching The Godfather cycle has got me interested in it is I mentioned earlier, Boardwalk Empire. Steve Buscemi, I think Martin Scorsese directs the first episode.

0:49:42.3 Gene Healy: And it’s Atlantic City and the larger history of underworld life during Prohibition. A lot of the characters that are instrumental in what became the five families, like Lucky Luciano, are characters in Boardwalk Empire. In part, it’s almost like a pre history of what you get when you turn to the mob in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. And like any long-​running series, it has its ups and downs, but I think it’s overall pretty great, and in fact, my wife and I named our dog after the lead character Nucky Thompson in the… [chuckle] So he’s Nucky.

0:50:36.9 Diego Zuluaga: I absolutely loved Boardwalk Empire myself, and it’s just fascinating to see all these historical characters so well-​interpreted and well-​dramatized by all evidence we’ve got. Really well done. I’ve recently picked up Mad Men again. There’s a sort of cult of the strong silent type, which is also a thing in The Sopranos, and to some extent, I think in The Godfather as well. This sort of unflappability of the quintessentially American male who goes about, you don’t care about his past, it’s all about looking to the future. And I mean, it’s the scene setting is just excellently… I find the acting also very good, the screen writing is great, but particularly what catches one’s eye is the cinematography and the aesthetics of the whole thing.

0:51:33.2 Diego Zuluaga: I just really enjoy watching it. It’s one of those shows that you don’t get tired of. In terms of books, I’m just reading “The Remains of the Day”, which was turned into a film in the early ’90s with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, which about a butler working in one of the great manors, one of the great English estates, during the interwar period. And his Lord is basically a Nazi sympathizer who, with all the right motives, basically invites the Nazi leadership to his house to informal peace summits. And the underlying criticism is this old English idea that you could flesh out the greatest diplomatic treaties around a table in the country side while smoking cigars and we’re all gentlemen and we can come to an agreement surely.

0:52:22.8 Diego Zuluaga: And also this noblesse oblige of the English had won World War I and had humiliated the Germans, and so it was the gentleman’s thing to give them a hand now, but it’s all told from the perspective of the butler who was observing this and feels a duty toward his Lord at the same time as he’s living in a post-​war era. Now that’s the vantage from which he’s retelling it, and so has to grapple with the fact that it was all mistaken and it was all foolish.

0:52:48.7 Diego Zuluaga: Even that is a reference to real-​life events because the Lord I’m talking about is based on Lord Halifax who was a famous English peer of the interwar period, who was a Churchill foe. One of the people who thought peace with Germany was not only possible but at hand until the very last moment, so it’s one to read and or watch.

0:53:14.1 Landry Ayres: I just finished a novel. The Overstory by Richard Powers. Very, very interesting. Multiple perspectives, all of these people… The first third or so reads almost like completely separate short stories, but it’s all these people that in some way have trees that are very, very important to their lives. And it’s a lot of very, very pretty pros about trees and roots and branches and stuff like that. But then over the course of the rest of the novel, their stories all intersect and they become involved in ecology and environmental activism and things like that. Some interesting critiques of capitalism, not all of them that I completely buy, but I would say a pretty nuanced perspective and it is just beautifully written and does actually talk about the value of the environment and has an interesting idea of humans’ place in it.

0:54:16.3 Landry Ayres: So if that sounds interesting to you, you might enjoy The Overstory by Richard Powers. I also just started playing Bloodborne on my PlayStation, which is maddening and frustratingly challenging, but is a good time and is weird sort of love crafty and Victorian horror genre where there’s a blood plague that is sort of infesting the city and you have to go and kill monsters and do some sort of ritual. It makes no sense and I get angry playing it, which I don’t normally do while playing video games, but it is still very, very fun. So if you’ve played any of the Dark Souls games or Sekiro or Demon’s Souls, which just came out for the Play Station 5. I recommend that. Oh, and one more thing, I just watched for the first time a movie that a lot of people had been talking about last year, which is Knives Out by Rian Johnson. I finally saw it, I rented it on YouTube.

0:55:21.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Pretty good.

0:55:22.4 Landry Ayres: A ton of fun.

0:55:23.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:55:23.4 Landry Ayres: I really liked it. Fun, sort of great “Who done it?”. Great cast, clever dialogue. I recommend it, I say have fun. If you’re…

0:55:33.1 Gene Healy: Except for Daniel Craig trying to do a Southern accent. [laughter] That’s was the only bad part of that movie.

0:55:39.1 Landry Ayres: He doesn’t do a great southern accent, but I kind of like it because it’s leaning into the genre and how cheesy it is. And at one point, the character calls in like what? CSI, KFC or something, which is just really accurate and funny, so if you can get through it and kind of laugh at it then I think you’ll have a good time. But he really is like Foghorn Leghorn for sure, but I liked it. Yeah.

0:56:09.8 Natalie Dowzicky: For me I just… I’m still reading Firefly lane, which is that Netflix limited series. That’s more of like a I guess a… Just more of a drama-​type show that’s in multiple time periods, so that’s fun. And then I just watched the new movie on Netflix, is it Army of the Dead? It’s the new…

0:56:33.7 Landry Ayres: How was it? Yeah. The Zack Snyder one.

0:56:35.9 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s the new Zack Snyder one? I thought, Okay. So going in thinking, “Okay, I’m watching a zombie movie,” is definitely the way to go, you can’t expect much from a plot of a zombie movie, but I actually thought it was pretty good. [laughter] And usually I hate that kind of stuff, but I thought it was pretty good. And it’s on the longer side, I wanna say it’s like two hours and 40 minutes, but it was enjoyable, a lot of the… ‘Cause a lot of people watch zombie movies for the action, a lot of the action and the violence and that kind of stuff was all really well done. A little bit bizarre just because it’s like zombies have taken over Las Vegas, and then it kinda goes from there. But honestly, I think it’s worth to watch. I don’t know if it needed all of the hype that Netflix gave it, but it was definitely worth watching.

0:57:32.8 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke related content and to connect with us is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopNLockePod. That’s pop, the letter N, Locke with an E like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres. As a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.