The Godfather at 50: Life lessons you can’t refuse

The Godfather at 50: Life lessons you can’t refuse
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There’s a scene in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, where Meg Ryan asks her online friend, played by Tom Hanks, for advice on saving her bookstore. They have an agreement not to mention specifics, so Hanks replies, “Minus specifics, it’s hard to help. Except to say ‘Go to the mattresses’”. A mystified Ryan responds, “What does that mean?”

“It’s from The Godfather,” says Hanks. “It means you have to go to war!” Mildly exasperated, Ryan says, “What is it with men and The Godfather?” Hanks pauses in exaggerated disbelief. Then he types, making Brando’s Don Corleone gestures as he types, “The Godfather is the I Ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question…And the answer to your question is ‘Go to the mattresses.’ You’re at war. It’s not personal. It’s business…”

You’ve Got Mail came out in 1998, more than a quarter of a century after Coppola’s blockbuster 1972 film, and nearly three decades after Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel. And yet, almost everyone who watched the movie understood the reference “Go to the mattresses”.

The films in the trilogy – at least the first two – are classics, but they were masterfully adapted from a novel that stayed on bestseller lists for 70 weeks and sold more than 20 million copies. Most of the movies’ most famous quotes come directly from Puzo’s novel. “Go to the mattresses.” “It’s nothing personal… It’s strictly business.” “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Even its epigraph became famous: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”, attributed to the novelist Balzac, the misquote now better-known than the longer original.

So what is The Godfather? Is it a story of immigrants, making it in a strange and often hostile land? Is it a Shakespearean tale, a 20th century retelling of the king and his three sons? A Horatio Alger story of success? A tale of crime and violence and betrayal? An intergenerational story of family? The fact that it manages to combine all of these, along with action-packed, page-turning prose, could explain why the book succeeds so well.

Even today, half a century after its release, the plot holds up. There are, of course, elements that haven’t aged well. The plotline of Lucy Mancini and her “medical condition” is one. The almost complete absence of female characters may explain the gender divide referred to in You’ve Got Mail.

The Corleone family is the ultimate patriarchy. Vito Corleone is the father figure not just to his family but to his entire community. Coming out in the decade of second-wave feminism and sexual revolution, the book and film were unapologetically reactionary. And maybe that was part of their success as well.

There’s another aspect to The Godfather’s influence as well – its second life as a management treatise, a modern-day version of The Art of War or Arthashastra. If you are of a masochistic bent, you can search LinkedIn for Management Lessons from The Godfather and turn up pages of results. There are similar articles on websites as diverse as Psychology Today and Business Insider.

In 2009, John Hulsman and Wess Mitchell, respected foreign-policy analysts, wrote a book called The Godfather Doctrine, in which they argued that “the aging and wounded don is emblematic of cold-war American power on the decline in a new world where [America’s] enemies play by unfamiliar rules, and [that] the don’s heirs uncannily exemplify the three leading schools of American foreign policy”.

Who knows? Maybe people will still be talking about The Godfather five centuries from now (if our species survives that long), the way they talk about Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince today.

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