Doors, Thresholds & Frames¶
The trilogy's visual motifs. Some are unmistakably deliberate. One is famously disputed. This page distinguishes.
Doors¶
The trilogy's dominant image, and the one that carries its meaning.
The opening shot. Bonasera in blackness, and a five-minute reverse zoom that gradually reveals a dark study — and, through a window, a wedding in sunlight. Two worlds, one wall, and a door between them. The film's first move is to establish that there is an inside and an outside.
Vito's study. Shutters closed at all hours. Petitioners wait in a corridor. The door opens and closes throughout the wedding sequence, and each time it does, someone is admitted to the room where things are decided.
The last shot of The Godfather. Kay in the foreground, in light. Michael in the dark room beyond. The capos file in and kiss his hand. Clemenza says Don Corleone. And Al Neri closes the door across the frame, cutting her out.
It is the most famous door in American cinema, and it is doing three things: it ends Kay's access, it ends the audience's access, and it stages the composition as a proscenium — she has just been put in the audience of her own marriage.
The second door. Part II. Kay visits her children with Connie's help and stays too long. Michael appears in a doorway. He says nothing at all, and closes it. No dialogue, no music, no reverse. It is harder to watch than the first one, because the first one at least required a lie.
The third. Part II again — Michael's bedroom door in Tahoe, through which machine-gun fire comes, and past which he later stands watching the lake.
The rule holds across the trilogy: whoever is inside the room is in the business, and whoever is outside is being protected, which is the same thing as being excluded.
Frames within frames¶
Willis's compositions constantly put a doorway, an arch, a window frame, or a corridor between the camera and the subject.
The effect is that you watch these scenes from the position of someone who has not been admitted. You are in the hallway. The film's characteristic emotional distance — the sense of observing rather than participating — is mostly this one compositional habit repeated a few hundred times.
It also gives the trilogy its handful of unframed shots enormous force. The garden scene between Vito and Michael is played in open daylight with nothing between the camera and the two men, which is why it's the only scene in the film that feels like a private conversation.
The oranges¶
The famous one, and the one to be careful about.
Oranges appear immediately before or during nearly every death and attempted death in the first two films:
- Vito is shot buying oranges from a street vendor; they scatter across the road
- The Five Families meeting has a bowl of oranges on the table, and every boss present will be dead within the film
- Sonny drives through a tollbooth past an advertisement — and oranges appear at the fruit stand earlier in the sequence
- Vito dies in the garden playing with his grandson with a piece of orange peel in his mouth
- Fanucci is handed fruit at the festa in Part II shortly before Vito kills him
- Johnny Ola brings Michael an orange in Havana
- Roth is at a table with oranges
- Oranges recur in Part III, including at the Atlantic City massacre
What's disputed: whether it was designed. Coppola has given inconsistent answers over fifty years, at times suggesting it was partly a practical decision — the sets and locations were so dark that the art department wanted a colour that would read against the amber-and-black, and oranges did.
That explanation is entirely plausible and does not settle it, because a motif that arrives for practical reasons and is then maintained across three films is still a motif. The pattern is real, it is too consistent to be random, and the strongest honest statement is: the oranges are there, they correlate with death, and nobody involved has given a straight answer about intent.
Treat with appropriate caution and enjoy anyway.
Hands¶
Kissing the hand. The gesture of submission to the Don, and the trilogy's most precise status indicator. It bookends the first film: petitioners kiss Vito's hand at the wedding; the capos kiss Michael's in the last shot.
Steady and shaking. On the hospital steps, Enzo's hands shake so badly he cannot light a match. Michael's are steady. Coppola holds on them. It is the moment Michael discovers what he is. See Michael's Arc.
The pinned hand. Luca Brasi's hand is knifed to the bar as he's garroted — the trilogy's most physically explicit violence, and the only killing staged for horror rather than shock.
The kiss. Michael takes Fredo's face in both hands in Havana. Hands to the face, at the moment of condemnation.
Light and shadow as morality¶
Nobody's face receives the light in this trilogy, and it's worth saying why that's unusual.
The convention in American film was and largely remains that moral weight is signaled by illumination. Willis reverses it: the powerful are in shadow, and the people in the light are the ones being kept out of the room. Kay is the best-lit adult in the first film.
By Part III, Michael is frequently in Sicilian daylight, and it does him no good at all.
The chairs¶
A smaller motif that lands hard once you see it.
Vito dies in a garden, among tomato plants, playing with a child.
Michael's Part II ending is a man alone in a garden chair by a lake, having won everything.
Michael's Part III ending is an old man in a chair in a Sicilian courtyard, who falls out of it and dies with a dog for company. In Coda, Coppola removes the death and leaves him in the chair — which is the harsher choice.
Three generations of the same shot. One of them is happy.
Windows¶
Michael watches Fredo's murder through a window, from inside, at distance, with a long lens.
That's the trilogy's thesis about power in one setup: the more powerful you become, the further you stand from the act, and the more the act resembles something happening on a screen.
Which is also, uncomfortably, a description of the audience's position.