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name (Corleone), accompanied by a version of the
sweeping theme tune arranged for mandolin. This is a
rural idyll where boy and girl can meet and fall in love
without complications – all the conventional narratives
of heterosexual romance are employed without a hint
of irony.
Coppola’s nostalgic glance at Italian-American
masculinities makes it difficult to read any critique of
conventional masculinities in the film. The main reason
we love godfathers Brando and Pacino is that they are
such perfect examples of gentlemanly tyranny: they are
so powerful and yet so self-contained. However, the
image of the eroticised male object is a prevalent one in
The Godfather and other Italian-American screen narratives,
and this image is potentially a disturbing one to
conventional gender relations.
Throughout the 1970s, the Italian-American screen
male was increasingly represented as body, as an object
of desire for all audiences. The Godfather always
encourages us to love its men but insists that they
remain solid men of action, their screen existence lived
out with plenty of grand gestures. The thing about The
Godfather is that it takes itself very seriously indeed;
the key to its seduction lies in its epic feel, its supreme
orderliness, its world in which everyone has their place.
I’m seduced by this world, too, but I’m glad that other
Italian-American screen men strutted their stuff and
shook up its order: Pacino as bisexual Sonny in Dog
Day Afternoon, in whom those exaggerated ‘Italian’
gestures become slightly campy; Nicholas Cage in
Moonstruck, giving a brilliantly over-the-top portrayal
of a sweaty/swarthy/sensitive Italian beefcake; and, my
personal favourite, John Travolta in Saturday Night
Fever, whose excessive emotions are triggered not in
response to his family honour but by the state of his
hair: as his family squabbles over spaghetti, Tony worries
about his coiffure (“will you just watch the hair?
You know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it.
He hits my hair”).
Tony preens himself openly, posing in the mirror
whilst wriggling to the Bee Gees. Like the men in The
Godfather, he prepares his body for action, but he does
so for dancing, not for fighting. His only possible phallic
weapon is his professional-looking long-nozzled
hairdrier, and his ‘killing’ arena is the 2001 Odyssey
discotheque, where he slays them with his grooving.
In a sense, The Godfather paved the way through
the crowded night club for Tony; after the heights of
Italian-American macho it reached, the only way to
go was down the disco, the only thing to do with the
display of those hard bodies was to choreograph their
movements to music. Saturday Night Fever brought
the nostalgic Corleone masculinities into the future
of the 2001 Odyssey where Italian-American-ness
finally had a chance to strut without leaving a trail of
bodies in its wake. �
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