KEEPING IT IN THE FA MILY

It comes gift-wrapped, packaged and promoted, the product that like the alchemist's stone turned base metal into gold, or more precisely, the crip. pling deficits of Paramount Pictures, into handsome multi-million profits.

I mean "The Godfather, currently on show at not one West End cinema, but fourthe movie of Mario Puzo's multi-million best selling book. It has grossed more at the box office than 'Gone with the Wind', and, as any movie mogul will tell you, that's some grossing.

It comes as an everyday story of Mafia folk, except that no one is supposed to mention the word Mafia or Cosa Nostra, under the instructions of Joseph Colombo, the founder of the Italian American Civil Rights League and, incidentally, the head of one of New York's five Mafia families who was gunned down but a few weeks ago on the streets of New York.

Instead the organization is known as the 'family' and at its head is Don Corleone, the ageing patriarch who dispenses justice with a nod of his grizzled head.

To him come the little people' of the Italian community, those who have been wronged, abused, suffered injustice at the hands of the pezzonovantes of the American establishment.

The Godfather has a way of making offers 'that cannot be refused'. Your daughter has been wronged, he'll fix it; you want a part in a Hollywood movie, he'll fix it; and all for the price, not of anything as vulgar and insulting as money, but of friendship, the promise at some tuture date should it be required.

For this he'll arrange maimings, beatings, or killings, or use his influence amongst his friends in the Senate, Department of Justice or police.

With all he is a traditional man, a believer in the sanctity of marriage, a lover of children, an adherer to common decency, and tender of decency The upholder, in fact, of all the bourgeois values.

When he is approached to provide finance and protection for the hard drug racket, it is his sense of caution and decency that compels him to decline the offer. Not that he has anything against a man earning his living, but he feels narcotics trafficking may put the backs up of the authorities and influential friends who support him.

It is this refusal that sets in motion a brutal round of gang warfare, in which the Don himself is gunned down and eventually his eldest son massacred.

His youngest son Michael, Ivy League and war hero, is drawn into the fray. It is Michael who takes on the responsibility of killing the Turk and a corrupt police officer. He flees to Sicily for a year while the heat is on.

In essence the substance of the film is the waning of the old man's physical powers and the ascendancy of the younger son to replace him. It is he who assumes the mantle of the Godfather in a final bloodbath before moving the family's business interests to Las Vegas. In this he earns his spurs, the respect of his lieutenants the right to the title.

The gangster has always been a key figure in Hollywood mythology. Throughout the 1930s and the depression these dynamic impresarios of crime and violence were the the American dream, get-upand-go, individual initiative, the way in which the poor boy cast off his rags and assumed riches, though the censor never allowed that ultimate fulfilment. It was always resolved by a gunning down, the final dying words and the general moral imperative that he who lives by the sword or the Tommy gun dies by it.

In reality crime paid handsomely, of course. The syndicate is both an expression of American capital, and an indispensable part of it. The more developed capitalism is, the more accute will be the penetration of crime and corruption.

The peculiar historical, cultural and ethnic development of American capital makes it extremely sensitive to the incursion of crime of the Mafia туре. The immigration of national minorities who came to America in search of a new life, driven by poverty from their native countries, looking for the streets to be paved with gold but finding instead poverty, the ghetto, and discrimination, provided the soil in which protective societies could flourish.

The Mafia with its loyalty oaths, its silence, its blood ties, its code of vengeance and secrecy, is a pre-feudal social organization adapted to the needs of modern capitalism. That is the essential feature of it. It is capitalism drawn to its logical and violent limits. It is monopoly capital where competition is physically exterminated.

The growth from the 'protection' of the minority ghetto and the preservation, and above all violent, guarantee of markets into large-scale rackets and syndicates mirrors the laws of development of 'legitimate' capital itself.

Today American and at such times the corruption of the system must begin to reveal itself. Hence the interest in the exposés of the Mafia. All the rottenness is coming to the surface.

Yet as it does so, attempts are made to explain it away in bankrupt moral terms. And the film of 'The Godfather' does precisely that.

The brilliance of the performances of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino actually add to the glamour of the myth and not the reality of the Mafia. The old contradiction between the attraction of the gangster, who strides across the wide screen like a modern-day Achilles or Hercules in homburg hat and cadillac, vaunting his dignity, bravery and prowess, and the repulsion inspired by Christian bourgeois hypocrisy, is unresolved in these terms.

The counterposing of the family warfare is the bankrupt liberal's moralizing fingerwagging. Further, it reduces violence on the screen to a spectacle, depersonalized, messy, gruesome, yes, but rendered totally abstract. This moralizing that exploits sensation at the same time.

The extent of the family's business interests, the economic basis of the power of the Godfather, the growth of it over the decades, is swept aside. The question is reduced to the level of devils and angels, good men and bad men. As Michael says: 'My father is no different from any other powerful man' and we are into the defunct cliché of power corrupts. By keeping it in the family' the film consciously ducks every issue.

In spite of the pre-publicity ballyhoo, the film remains a brilliant public relations job for the Mafia itself-and as such a cover for American capital its most degenerate crisis.

Monday