Family Business

Rating: 10/10 (18 August 2015)

As the film opens, it is the last Saturday in August, 1945 - the Japanese have just surrendered. In the opening scene of the film, the camera (very slowly) pulls back from the face of a man who is in Corleone's dark home office, where the Don regally and ruthlessly holds court. He carries on with the crime family business during his daughter's wedding reception, that is being held in the bright, sunshiny outdoor veranda of his Long Island compound. According to Corleone's Irish-German overseer and surrogate son Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall): "It's part of the wedding. No Sicilian can refuse any request on his daughter's wedding day." It is the custom of the father of the bride to grant favors and promises to all petitioners and supplicants who pay homage.
Seated in front of the Don's desk is an undertaker named Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), speaking in a heavy accent (Vito Corleone's wife is god-mother to Bonasera's daughter). Bonasera desperately pleads for a favor - proper vengeful "justice" (rather than American justice) for the threatened near-rape and brutal beating suffered by his daughter (whom he raised "in the American fashion") by her non-Italian boyfriend and his friend. The two brutes had received a court date and only a suspended sentence:
I believe in America. America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom, but - I taught her never to dishonor her family. She found a boyfriend, not an Italian...Two months ago, he took her for a drive, with another boyfriend. They made her drink whiskey. And then they tried to take advantage of her. She resisted. She kept her honor. So they beat her like an animal...She was the light of my life - my beautiful girl. Now she will never be beautiful again...I-I went to the police like a good American. These two boys were brought to trial. The judge sentenced them to three years in prison - suspended sentence. Suspended sentence! They went free that very day! I stood in the courtroom like a fool. And those two bastards, they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife, 'for justice, we must go to Don Corleone.'