I was 10 years old, still recovering from the horrible fire that gutted our house in Balintawak when I had my first encounter with the Corleones. We had just moved into an apartment building in Caloocan City when I first heard Nino Rotta’s eternal Godfather theme which would be forever etched in my mind.
Fast forward to 1980. I was a college freshman at UST and already a bona fide movie fanatic. I had an imaginary date with Al Pacino, whom I first met and fell in love with in Dog Day Afternoon. Our rendezvous point was the old Odeon Theater to see a re-issue of The Godfather.
It was my first actual encounter with the one movie that I had been dying to see since I discovered the magic of movies. After nearly three hours of pure Godfather nirvana, my perspective in life would be forever altered. The Godfather gave me bliss even as it jolted me with an in-your-face brute force that ended the view of the world as I knew it. Then, there was my beloved Al as Michael Corleone, who wreaked further havoc on my emotions and gave me several sleepless nights imagining about worldly pleasures. The Godfather was my baptism of fire, my deeply personal rite of passage from schoolgirl naivete to child-woman maturity.
While some from my generation perhaps consider the wholesome The Sound of Music that celebrated traditional family values as their all-time favorite, mine is an unwholesome, violent film that at one time, had been demonized for glamorizing the Mafia and the mob. The Corleones, headed by their patriarch, the quintessential mob lord Don Vito (played with dignified restraint by Marlon Brando albeit by then only a shadow of the Brando I adored in On the Waterfront) will never be mistaken for the Von Trapps.
The Corleones do not climb mountains while singing Do, Re, Mi or My Favorite Things. Instead, they prance around with their typical Sicilian Mafia swagger, bodyguards in tow, silencing their enemies with the power of their tommy-guns. For me, the greatest film sequence ever was the film’s baptism scene interspersed with an orgy of murder. This sequence depicted the ultimate irony: Michael as godfather to his nephew simultaneously professing to denounce evil and all its manifestations as his henchmen execute his order to eliminate the leaders of the Corleone’s rival families. It was simply a head-on collision between good and evil.
Since then, it has become a sort of annual ritual for me to revisit my first Godfather encounter. I have now seen this Francis Ford Coppola opus, named by the American Film Institute as the third greatest movie of all time, behind Citizen Kane and Casablanca, countless times. I have memorized by heart virtually every scene – from the opening wedding sequence that introduced all the characters and their foibles; the hospital scene between father and his prodigal son; Michael’s restaurant meeting with the men who orchestrated his father’s failed assassination; Michael’s Sicily sojourn which first exposed me to nudity on the big screen; Don Vito’s death scene; the massacre of the Corleone rivals; the final scene – the door slowly closing as a forlorn Diane Keaton watches her husband finally taking his place as the new Don Corleone.
More than 30 years after it was released in 1972, its moral dilemma remains more relevant than ever. By choosing the Mafioso way of life he desperately tried to resist, Michael Corleone would irrevocably surrender any chance for moral redemption. His choice inevitably sealed his fate. He will always be haunted and tormented by the ghosts of his sins.
He can elude the law because of his power and material wealth but he can never escape the inevitable day of reckoning. All these years of my endless Godfather sojourn, the film’s moral conflict still resonates ever more eloquently even more than 20 years after it gave me a blissfully rude awakening.