The Family Business: Heroism and Criminality in The Godfather By Angela Jardina Kurtz: Are you an assassin? Willard: No, I’m a soldier. Apocalypse Now (1976) I first watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) as a 13-year-old. The film, the first of what would become a three-film series (The Godfather, Part II, and The Godfather, Part III were released in 1974 and 1990 respectively), had been out of theaters for 43 years by then. Still, it remains a staple at our house; my father loves the film and, having watched it with him at least once a year since that first viewing, so do I. Our mutual love was the primary impetus behind my research which, ironically, has revealed how differently we experience the film. The more I knew about the context of the film’s making, the more I understood it as a contemplation of its era – the same era in which my father was deployed to the War in Vietnam. The Godfather was released three years before the fall of Saigon brought the conflict between North and South Vietnam to an end, although "officially” U.S. involvement ended in January of 1973. During the approximately eight years of American participation – U.S. Marines first landed in Vietnam in March of 1965 – the conflict divided the American public in complicated and evolving ways. William Lunch’s “The American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam” characterizes this evolution in terms of the trust the American people had in the political elite (29). Whereas early in the conflict, most Americans implicitly trusted that policy decisions were made on legitimate bases and in the national interest, their faith also came from a place of “innocence” (29). Broadly, they lacked knowledge 62
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