Fifty years of The Godfather and the virtue of friendship

“I believe in America,” says the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera to Don Vito Corleone, in the first words of the film version of The Godfather, released March 24, 1972. “America has made my fortune,” he continues. “I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom, but I taught her never to dishonour her family.” In the 1969 Mario Puzo novel on which the film is based, the conversation with Bonasera comes later in the opening scene, set at the wedding of the Don’s only daughter. By placing it at the opening of the film, director Francis Ford Coppola immediately sets the tension of the moral framework of the movie: the clash of loyalties between American commercial individualism, on the one hand, and the natural community of family and friends, on the other.  

Bonasera’s daughter (raised “in the American fashion”), had been brutally assaulted by her boyfriend, “not an Italian,” and another boy. After they pled guilty to the assault, the court gave the boys a three-year prison sentence, but immediately suspended the sentence. “They went free that very day!”, exclaimed Bonasera. “Then I said to my wife, ‘for justice, we must go to Don Corleone’”.  

Don Corleone chastises the undertaker: “Why did you go the police? Why didn’t you come to me?” Bonasera confesses, “I didn’t want to get into trouble.” In other words, Corleone responds, “You found paradise in America. . . . The police protected you . . . . And you didn’t need a friend of me”. (The screenplay differs somewhat from the novel, in which the Don says more pointedly, “You never armed yourself with true friends.”) And even now, Corleone complains, Bonasera isn’t offering or seeking “true friendship,” but only seeking to purchase a service. “You ask me to do murder for money,” the Don grumbles. Still not getting the point, Bonasera responds, “How much shall I pay you?”  

Bonasera, the good American, has been so assimilated into the individualist story of American capitalism, that he reduces every human interaction to a commercial exchange. Human relationships are arms-length contracts, he thinks. They are not formed for the virtue of friendships and natural social interactions. Rather, human relationships are nothing more than a series of self-interested financial and commercial transactions.

Of course, The Godfather is the story of an infamous crime family, for whom graft, extortion, rackets and, yes, murder are routine parts of the business. And Don Corleone’s son and successor, Michael, is more cold-bloodedly brutal than Vito. These are probably not characteristics that we should want to emulate. In the closed universe of the story, however (as is the case with other examples of the anti-hero genre), we can glean salutary moral lessons from various narrative arcs. In the emphasis on the natural order of family and community life, in contrast to the conventional world of American commercial justice, The Godfather contains a beneficial lesson about the virtue of authentic friendship.

Coppola emphasizes this lesson in the film script in a way that Puzo did not in the novel. In the novel, Don Corleone says to Bonasera, “[I]f you had come to me, my purse would have been yours. If you had come to me for justice” the boys would be suffering this day. In the corresponding lines from the film script, however, the Don says, “Had you come to me in friendship,” you would have already received the justice you seek. In that case, “if an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies.” Finally understanding the point, Bonasera meekly responds: “Be my friend, Godfather?”

In other words, Coppola situates the relationship between himself and the undertaker in mutual friendship rather than economic transaction. Rather than to sell a service to Bonasera, Don Corleone offers him vengeance as an expression of mutual friendship. And that friendship entails loyalty and comradeship that is not found in purely contractual interactions. Of course, again, the vengeance that the Don orders is not something to emulate. But the deeper theme of the organic ties of friendship is something that we can learn from. And it is consistent with the Catholic Christian understanding of the natural sociality of the human person and the priority of subsidiary communities over distant, impersonal bureaucratic institutions. Amerigo Bonasera put his faith in the conventions of cold, distant, detached commercial benefits, and he found them wanting. Vito Corleone taught him a lesson about the virtue of friendship. We need not endorse the Don’s violent solution to Bonasera’s problem to learn this lesson ourselves.