"'Leave it with a gun, take my cannoli": in Mark Seal's book everything you need to know about the Godfather

Great films are born from the encounter between great personalities - directors, actors, screenwriters and producers - and are often the result of particularly exceptional astral conjunctions. Furthermore, the great films have a long, troubled gestation… in short, a compelling story to be discovered, a behind-the-scenes mix of reality, epic and legend. It is a speech that is fully valid for “ The Godfather” , a masterpiece by Francis Ford Coppola whose fifty years since its release in the cinema are celebrated this year. A masterpiece to which the American journalist Mark Seal has dedicated an essay as compelling as a novel: “'A pistol, leave it, take the cannoli” (Jimenez Edizioni, 2022, pp. 408).

The title, of course, takes up one of the famous lines from the film. A joke that brings together the narrative universe in which "The Godfather" moves, a film about the mafia par excellence where violence and oppression (the gun) and the cult of the family, traditions, parties to celebrate (cannoli) inevitably mix , precisely).

Already these few considerations help us to understand the complexity of the reading plans of a cinematographic masterpiece like the one made by Coppola, a film whose making was as dramatic, grotesquely amusing and poetic as the film itself.

Over the years, in fact, the most varied versions have accumulated on the many aspects of the impetuous creation of this milestone of cinema, sometimes contrasting, always compelling. There is much embroidered on the figure of Mario Puzo , the author of the novel from which the film was based, a writer unknown until the threshold of fifty years and with a past spent gambling and escaping gambling debts.

Much has been said about the choice of Paramount, one of the largest production companies in America but on the verge of bankruptcy at the end of the 1960s, to focus everything on a film in which few believed because in those years the Mafia movies had more or less all resolved in a flop. Many legends have been told about the reasons for choosing Coppola, a young director who was cheap and who accepted the film because he needed the money to save his debt-ridden production company. Finally, there is a vast literature on how the cast was chosen and how Coppola overcame Marlon Brando's reluctance, convincing him to accept the role of Vito Corleone, the godfather.

For this volume Mark Seal sifted through information and testimonies , had the opportunity to have long conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and collected some interviews with the film's protagonists, including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire and other. All to get to write the definitive history of one of the most representative masterpieces of American cinema.

What emerged from Seal's research tells us about a work that was a real odyssey . In addition to the complications of film production, the creators of the Godfather found themselves forced to deal with the real protagonist of the film (and its members in flesh and blood): the mafia .

During production, New York location permits were inexplicably revoked, producer Al Ruddy's car was found riddled with bullets, mafia-related men vied to join the cast, and some of them were assigned parts. in the movie. Behind the scenes of the Godfather a war broke out between two of America's greatest powers: the "sharks" of the Hollywood production and the soldiers of the mafia.

All this while the film was being made that "revitalized Hollywood, saved Paramount from bankruptcy, announced the advent of Francis Ford Coppola as one of the great directors of modern cinema, coined a new generation of stars, made the screenwriter rich, the director and the producer invented a genre destined for constant fortune in the following decades, right up to the present day.