Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis: The Definitive Behind-the-Scenes Book of The Godfather

Published in the United States to mark the 50th anniversary of Coppola’s masterpiece, this irresistible making-of book has just been translated into French.

We could write an entire book about the books dedicated to the filming of Godfather. Since its phenomenal success in 1972, Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia drama continues to excite the appetite of journalists and film historians, who endlessly dissect the workings of the masterpiece, conceived in adversity by a gifted director of only 32 years old, fighting against his own studio, Paramount, and against the occult forces of the Mafia itself, which tried to prevent the film from seeing the light of day.

The amateur’s shelf is overflowing: there are the essential “making-of” bibles, like the Godfather Book by Peter Cowie and the Godfather Legacy by Harlan Lebo; the big Taschen book, The Godfather Family Album, with sublime photos by Steve Schapiro; the most precious Godfather Notebook by Coppola himself; and then the Godafter Companion by Peter Biskind, the Godfather Journal by Ira Zuckerman, Godfather Papers by Mario Puzo… And we’re not even talking about the recipe book (the Corleone Family Cookbook), or the recent Paramount + series The Offerwhich recounted in ten episodes the epic filming, with the incredible thread of the negotiations between producer Al Ruddy and the (real) New York godfather Joe Colombo.

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What can we add to this mass of documentation? Behind its funny title borrowed from a famous line from Clemenza (“Leave the gun, take the cannoli”, just after the execution of the traitor Paulie Gatto), the article by the American journalist Mark Seal does not claim to overturn the historiography, but rather sees itself as a sort of definitive compilation of all the knowledge available on the subject. Driven by research which occupied the author for more than ten years, nourished by unpublished testimonies (even if, by dint of being interviewed, the witnesses undoubtedly tend to repeat and embellish what they say in a loop for half a century), Leave the gun, take the cannolis was released in the United States during the celebration of the film’s fiftieth anniversary. Just in time, therefore, to establish itself as THE book on The Godfather. What it is destined to become on this side of the Atlantic, where most of the books cited above have not been translated anyway.

The book offers a real pleasure to storytelling “American style”. And even if the main stages are known, the story is teeming with so many details that it gives a feeling of freshness and newness that is truly exciting. Mark Seal is never as good as when he stops during the making-of to portray one of the actors in the epic.

There is Mario Puzo, the broke author, riddled with debt, addicted to gambling, looking for the bestseller that will get him out of the gutter, and who pretends to read up on the Mafia to better spend his nights leaning on tables roulettes of Las Vegas, and thus slam the advances of the producers; Charlie Bludhorn, the tough CEO, Austrian immigrant and dictatorial self-made man, who will carry out a sort of takeover bid on the dream industry by placing Paramount back in the Hollywood firmament; Marlon Brando, who wanders around his house on Mulholland Drive like a lion in a cage, is hesitant to play Don Corleone, but ends up being convinced by his assistant Alice Marchak when she tells him that Laurence Olivier (the other “greatest actor in the world”) risks undermining his politeness; and then Robert Evans, the melancholic golden-boy who, in the evening of his life, welcomes Mark Seal into his cinephile Xanadu, to rehash one last time the memories of his golden age… Flamboyant characters, bigger than lifea little more legendary each time their story is told.

Leave the gun, get the cannolis – Francis Ford Coppola’s epic masterpieceby Mark Seal, translated by François Raison, Capricci editions.