This year they have fulfilled 50 years of the theatrical release of ‘The Godfather’ (‘The Godfather’), the most important reference of the convulsive American cinema of the 70s and, without a doubt, his last great epic.
Proclaimed by the controversial Hollywood Academy as the best film in a year filled with feature films of exceptional quality, which leave current cinema in its infancy (remember a handful of titles such as ‘La Huella’, ‘Cabaret’, ‘Defense’, ‘La Escape’, ‘Frenzy’, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’, ‘Mysterious Ships’, ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, ‘Solaris’, ‘The Adventures of Jeremiah Johnson’ or ‘What’s wrong, Doctor?’) , ‘The Godfather’ has managed to reaffirm itself as one of the best (best?) movies of all timeas demonstrated by the successive lists drawn up by specialized critics and the public.
Its commercial success led to two sequels: ‘The Godfather: Part II’ released just two years later and which, in the words of Rodrigo Cortés (you can hear it at 1:07:20) is a huge work “that shouldn’t work and does work” , and ‘The Godfather Part III’ released in 1990, almost two decades after the original (and recently re-released with a new cut). To this day, they make up the most respected trilogy of American cinema.
One of its most important elements was the unforgettable music started by broken boy. However, the choice of him was not as easy as it seems because it is well known how complicated it was to start the production of this project, something that also affected the soundtrack.
Broken, from Fellini to Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola (who apart from a brief collaboration with John Barry on two key titles, in his filmography he has always been choosing the composer he believed to be the most suitable for each project) was clear from the beginning that he needed an italian composer to convey the tragedy of that Sicilian family.
His obsession with the music of ‘Rocco y sus Hermanos’ led him to contact its composer, Nino Rota, internationally known for being the fetish musician of Federico Fellini and, therefore, creator of extraordinary melodies with a burlesque tone with traditional Italian roots.
In spite of everything, the choice of Rota was unusual in a moment of crisis in the values of American cinema itself. Let us remember that it is at this stage when new sounds are sought, such as the dissonant use of jazz by Don Ellis for ‘The French Connection’, the use of wah-wah guitars as a trademark for blaxplotation cinema (whose greatest exponent was Isaac Hayes with the celebrated ‘The Red Nights of Harlem’) or scores indebted to a great main theme (and commercial) capable of giving identity (and record sales) to the film and the soundtrack album such as ‘Summer of ’42’ or ‘Love Story’ .
The producer of the latter was the legendary Robert Evans, ultimately the boss in those years of Paramount Pictures and therefore the person in charge of the films produced by the studio. Evans did not see with good ears the choice of Broken:
“I’m a music fanatic, a complete nutcase. That’s led me to push the noses of a lot of people and even withhold movies until I’ve made sure they had the right soundtrack. In ‘Love Story’, I completely discarded Jimmy Webb’s score and I spent the whole summer in Europe working with Francis Lai on a new score. And if it hadn’t been for his theme song, the movie wouldn’t have worked. Francis Coppola and I had terrible arguments on ‘The Godfather’ ‘ I was determined to use music by Nino Rota in a lot of sequences where I wanted American music to sound.”
Evans was not happy with the choice of Rota, since his international projection was very limited. The producer even suggested Henry Mancini for the job, given the composer’s Italian roots and his success for melody that made him the most popular film musician of the 1960s.
The waltz from ‘The Godfather’
But Coppola, who was fighting against all kinds of pressure, managed to keep Rota in the project and went to Rome to meet with the composer and establish the sound and music of ‘The Godfather’, since the composer demanded not to have to travel to America to work on this film. About his collaboration, Rota himself says:
“To make the music for ‘The Godfather’, Coppola gave me a great idea (…) He told me to stick to the situations and make music that would always remember the origin of the main characters, who are southern or Sicilian. He told me , even, that it would be even better if that music was oriented towards southern melodies until it seemed almost Arabic: because that way it would remember with more nostalgia the very distant origin of those people who later converged in America (…) Coppola gave me another idea: I should underline with a a kind of waltz, as a leitmotiv, the continuous chain of crimes in the film. The circular movement of the waltz is like a chain of crimes: a closed circle, something that returns, reproduces itself and never ends. In fact, every time there is a shooting, or a death, or an injury, or so many dead and so many wounded, a waltz song is heard”.
The score was recorded in the United States and not in Italy as planned since the unions did not allow an American score to be recorded in the Mediterranean country.
The recording was done by Carlos Savinathe composer’s usual orchestrator, and when Rota received the soundtrack album, to his surprise he discovered that as the main theme of the film they had not chosen one of the main themes established with Coppola “but that theme that I had inserted to fill that sicilian sequence, which lasts six or seven minutes in a three-hour film. That was the theme that later harassed the whole world, making itself heard to saturation.”
Rota’s music takes care of sweeten the most violent episodes of the ploteither through the waltz (which is played for the first time at the end of the opening wedding sequence as Vito dances with his daughter Connie, thus allowing the audience to make the melody recognizable) or Michael’s melancholy theme, from a deep gravity that anticipates the darkness that will succumb to this character as the saga progresses.
This second theme takes center stage in two key scenes: when he goes to the hospital to watch over his father and later in the restaurant scene, after killing Sollozo and Lieutenant McCluskey and fleeing the scene of the crime. It is at this last moment when the theme sounds in the most strident way possible to promote, not the terrible actions portrayed in this sequence, but the conflict of the character, in fact the music breaks out when he leaves the restaurant.
Rota is not interested in narrating what we see with images, his job is to tell us what Michael Corleone feels. It is the perfect coda to a masterful sequence that until then has been set with silences, dialogues and sound effects, no music.
Finally, the already mentioned melody of Sicilian tones also sounds on the soundtrack to portray Michael’s stage on the Italian island and diegetic music (“source music”, that is, it sounds and is heard by the characters within the film itself). in charge of Carmine Coppola, father of the director and who makes a cameo playing the piece “This Loneliness” on the piano. His is also the music that the protagonists dance and sing during the wedding.
Unforgettable music… without Oscar
The success of the film had an impact on its soundtrack, reaching prestigious awards such as the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Grammy for best score. In fact, She was nominated for an Oscar but later her candidacy was rejected. in an embarrassing way, accusing her of plagiarism for the reuse of the theme from the film ‘Fortunella’.
An unfair situation that benefited John Addison with his score for ‘La Huella’ despite the fact that the ceremony ended up awarding the music of ‘Candilejas’, a soundtrack written… 20 years ago! Rota would win the Oscar for the music of ‘The Godfather, Part II’.
Despite the passage of time, the music of Nino Rota remained linked to the Corleone saga when it came to extolling the drama and the origins of the Corleone family and its sicilian theme has been framed as one of the most important in the history of the soundtrack. By the way, the original score has been released by LA LA LAND RECORDS in a limited edition of 5000 copies.
- Note: Nino Rota’s quotes come from ‘Nino Rota. The Image of Music’, by Jose María Latorre (Montesinos publishing house, 1989). As for Robert Evans, they have used ‘Infamous Players’, by Peter Bart (translation by Rocío Valero Lucas, TyB editorial, 2012), and ‘The Great Goodbye: Chinatown and the decline of old Hollywood)’, by Sam Wasson (translation by Óscar Palmer Yáñez, editorial Es Pop Ediciones, 2021).