Mario Puzo’s novel, the basis for a film trilogy of the same name, was published on March 10th 1969. What it got right—and wrong—about the mafia

VITTORIO CASAMONICA went out in style. The body of the 65-year-old mobster rode in a horse-drawn carriage through Rome to the church where his funeral service was held. Petals cascaded from a helicopter overhead. Outside the ceremony, a band played Nino Rota’s sumptuous film score from “The Godfather”.

Casamonica’s grandiose departure in 2015 bore witness to the enduring influence of a monumental, three-part cinematic enterprise and the book from which it sprang, published 50 years ago on March 10th 1969. Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” is reputed to be the fastest-selling book in history. By early 1971 7m copies had been printed.

In many respects, it deserved its success. “The Godfather” is more than competently written. Puzo aspired to literary greatness and only conjured up Vito Corleone and his family’s adventures and misadventures to escape debt. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” (which Puzo may have adapted from a line in Balzac), the Don’s cynical quip, has become a figure of speech. Some scenes—such as the planting of a racehorse’s severed head on the bed of a Hollywood producer who did refuse the Don—have passed into folklore.

The author got a lot of things right: the subtlety of communication between Sicilians in particular and Italians in general; the incorporation, often reluctant, of mobsters from other ethnic backgrounds into the American Mafia; and, above all, Cosa Nostra’s usurpation of responsibilities that belong to the state, including the dispensing of justice. Puzo was almost suspiciously prescient in his choice of surname for the family at the centre of his saga. In 1969 Corleone was one among many mafia-ridden towns in the Sicilian interior. No one then could have predicted that the local clan, the corleonesi, would become the dominant force in Sicilian Cosa Nostra or that their chief, the psychopathic Salvatore “Totò” Riina, would emerge as its undisputed “boss of all bosses”.

“The Godfather” also gets things wrong, though. It sustains the myth that Cosa Nostra “families” are based on actual ones and that succession is hereditary. It perpetuates a belief that the American Mafia’s old-time bosses had qualms about dealing in narcotics. That is the biggest concern about its lasting influence on perceptions of organised crime: “The Godfather” portrays gangsters the way gangsters like to be regarded, as fundamentally honourable types who offer genuine services and seek no more than to be respected for their contributions to society. In “Mafia Life”, a study of organised crime published in 2017, Federico Varese gave examples of bosses seeking to emulate the film. Louie Milito of the New York Gambino “family”, who died in 1988, watched the movie 6,000 times according to his wife. John Gotti, who approved Milito’s murder, learned lines from the film, changed his wardrobe and started behaving like Michael Corleone (as portrayed by Al Pacino).

All too many of the Corleones’ victims are loathsome. The recipient of the horse’s head is not just a bully, but a paedophile (in the book, though not in the film). There is all too little emphasis on the appalling realities of extortion and loan-sharking, and how the mafia keeps the poor poor. It can be argued that in the book and in the first movie, Puzo managed to strike an acceptable balance. But its sequel is a whitewash: the young Vito Corleone transformed seemingly overnight from a loving husband into a homicidal, yet still essentially decent, Don.

That is not how youngsters become Mafiosi in real life. They are co-opted from among the most brutal of their peers and then subjected to a process of systematic, additional brutalisation until they are ready to kill to order. Puzo’s version is seductive, but insidious.