Coppola's insight into the [crime film] genre reveals itself in his handling of the film's structure, which features a gallery of criminal types with wit, charm, courage, and heroic stature (who never change or develop)—an achievement that can only by accomplished by limiting the film's sphere of life to the criminal element. Coppola certainly understood that if the world of crime obtruded into the realm of society's ordinary activities—if, for instance, the general citizenry were shot at—ordinary moral concerns would dominate our relationship to the figures in the film. But The Godfather is populated only by criminals and their relatives or by people corrupt enough to belong to their world…. The Godfather's power struggles and economic and social conflicts take place in the world of the gutter, but like most films depicting microcosms, the film also operates in the abstract realm, where the believers confront the pagans, and the upholders of order and government clash with the rebels who wish to destroy a hierarchical establishment that has brought a long reign of peace. (pp. 194-95)
The actual criminal business carried on by the Don and his successor Michael is typically vague. Late in the film the family decides to get out of the "olive oil" business and buy a Las Vegas hotel. We are surprised by their ever having been in olive oil, but the gambling operation is simply the genre's traditional enterprise of gangsters. Don Corleone, in fact, tries to keep them out of narcotics, but some accommodation has to be made to the new spirit of commercial enterprise rising in the national organization of crime families. Michael pledges to his girlfriend that in five years virtually all of the Corleone enterprises will be legal—and many critics view the film as a kind of businessman's allegory of American private capitalism. Yet the business operations remain unspecified; the board meetings are really just Sicilian-style family outings, not really for generating corporate strategies. What is symbolized, perhaps, is the nature of corporate competition. The family wars resemble nineteenth-century cutthroat commercial practices energetically pursued by the great "robber barons" of American industry and finance, who engaged in similar violence, but without machine guns. The Corleones are depicted as just on the verge of moving onto that level of American myth. No wonder the film engendered a sequel bringing the family's story up to date as a fulfillment of one aspect of the American Dream. (pp. 197-98)
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