An Impressive Study of the Banal Slide to the Dark Side.

Rating: 10/10 (29 September 2009)

The core of 'The Godfather' may be pinpointed in one scene. The youngest son of the Corleone crime family, Michael, wrestles with the possible fate of his and his family's fortunes as he sits across a restaurant table from the gangster, Salazzo, hungry for the power of the Corleones and the police chief in his employ. He looks down, wide eyed in thought but also at the raging fires of the abyss as he contemplates whether to flee the scene and secure the downfall of his family or kill the two figures who most immediately threaten his family and interests. A train's wheels on the track become the wailing of the damned as Michael pulls himself out of these thoughts, pulls out a gun and kills them.
So begins Michael's inexorable slide into powerful evil. In exile from is double murder charge, in Sicily, he is able to flex fledgling muscles of power and suffers not a little tragedy. These are inoculations, tinctures of the life he will embrace when he returns to America. It is as if his soul feeds on these morsels to steel itself for the trials and tribulations of the rank of Don.
The wise-cracking college kid who displayed some bemusement at his family's business returns to embrace it more vigorously and more purposefully than his father ever did. His father became a powerful criminal out of necessity, Michael does it as if to prove his mettle, that he can be greater than his father and combines traits of his brothers - Santino's rage and warrior spirit, Fredo's duplicity and Tom Hagen's cunning - to achieve his goal.
As the door finally closes on Kay at the end of the film, the door closes on the Michael she fell in love with all those years before.