Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.” So wrote Mario Puzo in his runaway bestseller The Godfather (1969), a sprawling mafia family saga chronicling the rise, fall and rise of the Corleone empire in post-World War II America. Puzo nailed what it is to be Italian — albeit through the questionable professionalism of Sicilian robbing hoods — elevating family, fine taste, faith and the ancient Roman belief that one is not born human but must become human. He spun a gangster’s grab on arrangiarsi, the Italian art of getting-by, into a culture-quake that crafted into a blockbuster cinematic classic directed by the 32-year-old Francis Ford Coppola in 1972. More than 50 years and several Academy Awards later, The Godfather still rates as one of the greatest movies of all time and retains as the definitive guide on ‘how to succeed in business without really dying’.
“I’M GONNA MAKE HIM AN OFFER HE CAN’T REFUSE,”
mumbled actor Marlon Brando in the role of Don Vito Corleone, the patriarch crime boss who famously delivered both the movie’s best line and a bloodied horse head as incentive to ink a deal. Corleone’s words seeped into the corporate playbook, becoming both a euphemism for morality-free contracts and a coffee mug cliché. No one could have foreseen how such dialogue would dig into the collective memory, describing the rise of free markets in America and the outreach, with a similar warrior culture working around accepted ways to build a better life. The best of Puzo’s potboiler lines and a little of Coppola’s visceral scripting help to expound on why Italy dominated the latter half of 20th-century design and determined its future DNA.
