To Each His Own

Let’s face it – gangsters are everywhere. Gangsterism may have flourished in Prohibition-era America (1920-1933) and Hollywood capitalized on it with numerous movies on the subject. But there are effective gangster movies made everywhere by now: in Britain, France, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia, etc.

The origins of American crime syndicates can be traced to Italy, specifically to Sicily, and since the Italian film industry is one of the oldest and most vital in the world, it’s no wonder that some of the most authentic gangster films should originate in Rome. 

Francis Ford Coppola, attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of the third part of The Godfather, has released a refurbished version of the film titled The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. With nothing left to do for the past two decades but tweak his lopsided legacy, with a Redux of Apocalypse Now in 2001 that only muddied the paddy water, and, last year, the resuscitation of The Cotton Club, supposedly a tribute to a legendary Harlem jazz club that was sunk by a love story between two white performers, it was inevitable that he should turn to his most famous films. 

I have to admit that I never saw The Godfather Part III, despite repeated opportunities. I simply had no desire to sit through the terminal installment of a vastly overrated trilogy. I think Marlon Brando’s performance as the titular Don was horrible, and Al Pacino was wasted in the role of Michael Corleone. As for all the rest – I have expressed my hope that Italian-Americans will some day attempt to rehabilitate the image of them on American movie and TV screens as gangsters.

The Godfather was based on a novel by the Italian-American writer named Mario Puzo. One of the most offensive inferences that critics have drawn from his work and from the films it inspired is that it is somehow a metaphor of American life. Puzo may have domesticated the mob, by drawing us into their family squabbles, but he did it at the expense of his own people. In the films, I never mistook the hyenas who go about slaughtering one another in the name of some preposterous code of honor for human beings. (1)

The Godfather(s) featured some scenes shot on location in Sicily that would otherwise have seemed gratuitous if they weren’t so resplendent. Gordon Willis, Coppola’s cinematographer, made the most of the chosen locations around Messina, in the northeast of the island. Leonard Sciascia was born in Racalmuto in the southwest. He used Sicily as the setting for his novel A Ciascuni il Suo, translated as To Each His Own. (2) In his introduction to the New York Review edition of the novel, W. S. Di Piero wrote:

Society held hostage to a suffocating ethos of secrecy, silence, and misdirection; criminality as an expression of maniacal self-containment; evil as an all-powerful but apparently authorless entity (the mafia, Fascism, the Red Brigades); the monstrous perversions of loyalty, love, and honor sponsored by the mentality that is  mafia—these are the real subjects of Sciascia’s best novels.

Five years after the book’s publication in Italy, Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro wrote a film script “loosely based” (liberamente ispirata) on the novel, and Petri directed the superb film. The political undercurrents that Sciascia expected every Italian to know well are expressed in the film in terms of the inter-personal relations of the lead characters: pharmacist Arturo Manno (Luigi Pistilli) who has been receiving letters telling him his death is imminent, Dr. Roscio (Franco Tranchina) who is murdered with him while shooting pigeons, lawyer Rosello (Gabriele Ferzetti), Professor Paolo Laurana (Gian Maria Volonté), who conducts his own investigation of the murders, and Luisa Roscio (Irene Pappas), wife of the murdered doctor and cousin of Rosello, with whom Paolo is in love. 

The film opens with a spectacular aerial shot approaching the northern Sicilian city of Cefalù which is the center of the film’s action. Luigi Kuveiller’s camerawork is fluid and sharp. Nothing is diffused or deliberately atmospheric – he shows us a place inhabited by characters who belong there. Gian Maria Volonté plays Professor Laurana, a role quite different from those that made him an international star. He is a neurotic intellectual, the type who plays with fire without knowing that fire is hot. He is utterly ignorant of the facts of life in his town which everyone else takes for granted. He figures out why the pharmacist and the doctor were murdered and even who is responsible, but he goes about his sleuthing sloppily, and forgets the cardinal rule when it comes to life in his neck of Sicily: trust no one. Gabriele Ferzetti as Rosello is once again the debonair monster, only this time we don’t find out until it’s too late. And Irene Pappas, her Greekness reminding us that the Greeks colonized Sicily, demonstrates how completely love can blind a man. She is not just in league with Rosello, but they’ve been in love since they were children but, since they’re cousins, the Church wouldn’t allow them to marry. The last scene is a masterpiece of brutal irony, underpinned by one character’s appraisal of the whole dismal affair: “Hanno fatto un vero capolavoro.” They pulled off a real masterpiece.

The alternate title We Still Kill the Old Way comes from a line delivered in the film. After a car is blown up with a clumsily planted bomb, a communist friend of Professor Laurana (played by the marvelous Leopoldo Trieste) says to him, “It’s like Chicago around here!” And Laurana replies, “But in my town, my honorable friend, they still kill the traditional way.” The “old way” being the traditional murder with impunity that became a trademark of the Mafia that is as much a statement in itself to everyone still paying attention. Petri’s film was saddled with this stupid title for its American release doubtless to attract fans of the kind of violence glorified by The Godfather. Fortunately, they do not kill the same way in Petri’s film. Murder is represented like it’s supposed to be: as an obscenity on civilized society. But only because the people in Petri’s film are sufficiently realized as human – sufficiently for us to care about what becomes of them. So there are no displays of spattering blood. Just the strange, horrible way real people react to being murdered. 

(1)Paramount has announced interest in a Godfather Part IV, “if the story is right.”

(2)The title is literally equivalent to To Each His Own, but a British title, Each To His Deserts, comes closer to Sciascia’s meaning.