The Baptism Sequence¶
Do you renounce Satan? — I do renounce him. Michael Corleone, while five men are being murdered on his order
Roughly six minutes at the end of The Godfather. It is the most-studied piece of editing in American cinema, and the thing that makes it work is not the cutting.
Watch it: Scenes & Trailers § The baptism.
What happens¶
Michael stands as godfather at the baptism of Connie and Carlo's infant son, in a church, in a white shirt, holding a baby.
Simultaneously, in five locations, Corleone gunmen kill the heads of the other Four Families and Moe Greene:
| Victim | Where | How |
|---|---|---|
| Victor Stracci | Hotel elevator | Shotgun, as the doors open |
| Moe Greene | Las Vegas massage table | Shot through the eye, reaching for his glasses |
| Carmine Cuneo | Revolving door, hotel lobby | Trapped in the door, then shot |
| Philip Tattaglia | Hotel bed, with a woman | Shot |
| Emilio Barzini | Courthouse steps, Foley Square | Al Neri, in a police uniform, in daylight |
Interleaved with the priest's questions, and Michael's answers.
The thing that makes it work¶
Not the cutting. The sound.
The church organ — Bach, played on the instrument in the church — runs continuously and unbroken across every location. There is no score. There is no other music. The organ does not duck, does not fade, does not modulate at the cuts.
The consequence is that the murders do not happen alongside the sacrament. They happen inside it. The audio bed says these are one event, occurring in one place, and the images are simply five angles on it.
Try the counterfactual and it collapses instantly. Score the murders and you get an action sequence with an ironic frame. Cut the organ at each location and you get parallel action. Hold the organ and you get a sacrament that includes homicide as one of its parts, which is a theological claim rather than a stylistic one.
The escalation¶
The sequence is built as a slow tightening, and the mechanics are worth laying out:
Duration. Early shots hold. As it proceeds, the cuts come faster and the shots get shorter — a standard accelerating montage.
The organ rises. The registration builds. By Barzini it is enormous.
Michael's proximity. He never moves. He is in a church, in the light, in a white shirt, doing nothing at all. The further the violence escalates, the more still he becomes — and the more clearly the film establishes that this is what power looks like: not a man with a gun, but a man at a font.
The questions land on the beats. The priest's Do you renounce Satan? and Michael's I do renounce him fall at the sequence's centre, with murders on either side of the answer.
The baby¶
The detail people miss.
Michael is holding an actual infant, and the infant is Sofia Coppola — the director's daughter, then a few months old, credited as "Michael Francis Rizzi."
Eighteen years later she plays Mary Corleone, and dies on the steps of an opera house at the end of Part III, during a sequence deliberately constructed as this one's answer.
The same person is in Michael's arms at the moment he becomes a monster and in his arms at the moment it costs him everything. This was not planned in 1971. It is one of the luckiest accidents in film history.
What it's for¶
Three functions at once, which is why it's the film's climax rather than merely its best scene:
Plot. The war ends. Every rival boss dies in six minutes and Michael's position becomes unassailable.
Character. Michael has learned the thing his father knew: the more powerful you are, the further you stand from the act. In 1945 he shot two men in a restaurant with his own hands and nearly couldn't. Ten years later he is in a church.
Theology. He is asked, formally and out loud, whether he renounces Satan and all his works and all his empty promises. He says yes. He is lying in a sacrament, which in the terms the film has been using since the first frame is a considerably worse act than murder. See Catholicism & Ritual.
The credit¶
The assembly is generally attributed to Peter Zinner, co-editor with William Reynolds — who was, notably, the man who suggested using the organ music as the connective tissue. Both were nominated for the Academy Award and lost. Zinner later won for The Deer Hunter.
The sequence's influence is enormous and mostly bad: the "religious ceremony intercut with violence" construction has been copied so often — most famously in Scarface, The Untouchables, The Departed, and roughly every prestige crime series since — that its imitators have made the original harder to see fresh.
Almost all of them score the violence. That's the tell.
The answer, thirty years later¶
Part III's finale is this sequence restaged with the sacrament replaced by art.
Michael's son sings Cavalleria Rusticana at the Teatro Massimo while the family murders Keinszig, Altobello, Lucchesi, and Gilday across Rome and Palermo. Same construction: one continuous piece of music, multiple locations, a Corleone standing still in the middle of it.
And the ending inverts. In 1972, Michael takes a sacrament and his enemies die. In 1980, his enemies die and his daughter dies with them — the accounting the first sequence deferred.
Whatever else Part III gets wrong, that structural rhyme is completely earned. See Part III Reassessed.