Yesterday I mentioned that The Godfather has been my favorite movie since it came out in 1972 and that as a 16 year old at the time of its release, I wasn’t allowed to go see it, however I did see it. Here’s the story.
Mr. Matalone was my second period teacher. The class was Western Civilizations. Mr. Matalone had been one of my favorite teachers for some time. He had been my social studies teacher in eighth grade then when I got to high school, he was there. What he said was gospel. So when he came into class one Monday morning and told us about having see The Godfather over the weekend, we all listened. He talked about the movie the entire period then again on Tuesday. He pretty much gave us a scene by scene narration of the movie. He went on to tell us about how historically accurate the movie was. It was also his opinion that it did a wonderful job of portraying the customs of a typical Italian family. Mr. Matalone was Italian. He compared the way the different family members related to each other and added that it was very typical of how his own family respected the parents and each other.
That morning we heard about the opening scenes of the movie, and about Connie and Carlo’s wedding and how very Italian the wedding scenes had been. He basically gave us an extensive critique of the film and then went on to give us a lot of background information on the Italian family and on the United States in the 40’s, which is the setting of the original movie. Mr. Matalone told us about Johnny Fontane (played by Al Martino) and how the character was patterned after Frank Sinatra with the swooning and syllabication of the song phrasing, and the way the public responded to him. He also told us of rumors surrounding Frank Sinatra that were portrayed in the movie as part of Johnny Fontane’s characterization.
We listened intently and asked a lot of questions. Mr. Matalone told us about how his own father had packed up his family and left literally in the middle of the night because he refused to pay protection money to mafiosi in their native Chicago. The family even changed their name from a very Italian surname to one that sounded more Irish than Italian when they moved cross country, in the middle of the night.
On that day, a lot of us decided we really wanted to see the movie. We were all pretty young, mostly fifteen and sixteen. Most of us did not drive yet and we were all pretty sure we weren’t going to get our parents to take us because it had been written up as being very violent. But we all wanted to go.
About a month later, my parents went out of town without us, something they never did. This time however, because they had to go during the week and we couldn’t miss school and our older brothers were all of age and living nearby, they let us stay alone. There were four of us. My older sister was a couple of weeks shy of turning eighteen and I was almost seventeen. My younger sisters were fifteen and fourteen. The plan was that we would stay alone during the week and my brothers would come check on us. Then on Friday and Saturday, we were to go to my uncle’s house across town and stay there. So that’s what we did.
My uncle and aunt had a young girl that was working for them as a housekeeper. She was eighteen. I got along with her but she was very quiet. My sisters didn’t really like her. When we were there, my uncle suggested that we take the young housekeeper with us to a movie or out some place so she could be with someone close to her own age. He gave us money to go to the drive-in so my sister drove us. What to see? What to see? No one could agree. So I took the opportunity to push my choice onto the others. I never did that. Not now and not then. I usually sit back and let others have their pick but on that night, I pretty much insisted that we go see The Godfather, telling them that Mr. Matalone had made it an assignment. So we went. I love the movie and I could tell them ahead of time what was going to happen, including when to look away, because Mr. Matalone had told us all about the violent scenes. In the end, my sisters and my uncle’s housekeeper all fell asleep half way through the movie. I was the only one that stayed up for the whole thing.
Luckily, no one asked what movie we had gone to see. We couldn’t have lied and I’m sure we would have gotten into trouble.
Since that night, I have seen the original The Godfather at least fifty times, including two more times on the big screen when it played just before the release of The Godfather Part II and again before the release of The Godfather Part III. I had the three on VHS then again on DVD when I converted to DVD. Every so often I stick the DVDs in and watch all three movies, one after the other, with lots of breaks in between, and basically spend the weekend watching the three along with the bonus features in the DVD set. Sometimes I watch just one but mostly, when I watch one, the others follow.
I wonder if Mr. Matalone knew how our opinions and actions had ties to his discussion of that film. Very often, one influential person’s opinion ties many others to that original person.