The Women¶
Don't ask me about my business, Kay.
The most common criticism of the trilogy is that its women are marginal. That's accurate as a description and wrong as a criticism — the marginality is the subject, and the films are more precise about it than they're given credit for.
Whether they're precise enough is a fair argument, and this page makes both cases.
The structural fact¶
The Corleone business excludes women absolutely. Not incidentally — as a rule, stated on screen, enforced without exception:
- Don't ask me about my business. Michael to Kay, twice, in two films.
- Connie is married off to a man Vito then deliberately gives no position, because a son-in-law is a liability.
- Carmela runs a house for forty years and is never in a room where anything is decided.
- Kay is shut out of the office by a closing door three separate times across two films.
The films depict a world with an airtight gender rule, and they depict it from inside, which means the camera obeys it too. Women are in kitchens, at parties, in doorways, and in the frame behind the frame the men are in.
The question is whether the trilogy is describing that or endorsing it. The answer is mostly the former, with the notable exception discussed at the bottom of this page.
Kay: the witness¶
She's the only sustained outside perspective in the trilogy, and the character the films use to measure how far Michael has gone.
Her arc is three closed doors (see Doors, Thresholds & Frames): the last shot of the first film, the banishment after the abortion, and the silent door in Part II when she overstays a visit to her children.
Her one act of power is the abortion, and it is the only successful act of resistance anybody mounts against Michael in two films. He cannot undo it, avenge it, or punish it in any way that isn't an admission she was right. He hits her, which is what a man does when he has no other move.
The film refuses to tell you how to feel about it, which is the correct decision and the reason it still generates argument fifty years on.
Full page: Kay Adams.
Connie: the transformation nobody notices¶
The largest character arc in the trilogy after Michael's, delivered almost entirely off-screen.
Battered wife → widow of her own brother's making → drifting wreck → the family's fixer, who sanctions Vincent's hits without consulting Michael and personally poisons her own godfather with cannoli and sits with him while he dies.
The accusation scene in the first film is the key: Connie bursts in and tells Michael, in front of Kay, that he murdered her husband. She is right about everything she says, and the scene is staged so that she is dismissed as hysterical — by Michael, by the blocking, and by most audiences for fifty years.
By 1979 she has become her father. That is what the family's protection did to the one person it was supposedly for.
Full page: Connie Corleone.
Carmela: the deal¶
Vito's wife speaks perhaps a few dozen lines across two films and is in nearly every scene that matters.
She knows and does not know. She never asks what happened to Sonny, or where Michael went for two years, or what happens in the room with the shutters closed. That non-knowledge is a job, performed perfectly for forty years, and the household exists because she does it.
Her one moment of authority is with Michael: he asks, obliquely, whether a man can lose his family. She says no, never — and he says times are changing. He has already decided to kill her son, and has deferred it until she dies.
Full page: Carmela Corleone.
Apollonia and Mary: the bill¶
The two women who die for Michael rather than by him, thirty years apart, both killed by weapons aimed at him.
Apollonia — a car bomb in Sicily, 1948. She has almost no lines. She is a life Michael could have had, shown to him and then destroyed in front of him.
Mary — a bullet on the steps of the Teatro Massimo, 1980. The only person in the third film who believes her father is a good man.
The rhyme is exact and deliberate: Michael's adult life is bracketed by two women killed by ordnance meant for him. Every atrocity in between was justified as protecting his family.
The novel problem¶
The films' treatment of women looks considerably better next to Puzo's novel, which contains the Lucy Mancini subplot — a lengthy storyline about Sonny's mistress, her anatomy, her insecurity about it, and the surgeon who corrects it and falls in love with her.
It is the reason a certain generation of readers remembers The Godfather as a trashy book, and Coppola cut essentially all of it — reducing Lucy to one wordless scene at the wedding.
That's the right call artistically and it creates a debt: eighteen years later, Part III has to announce that Sonny fathered Vincent on a woman the audience has never met. See Book vs. Film.
The honest criticism¶
Two things the trilogy does that are harder to defend as description:
The camera agrees with the men. In the Connie accusation scene, the staging — her hysteria, Michael's calm, Kay's uncertainty — invites the audience to side with the man who is lying. You can argue that's a trap the film sets deliberately. You can also argue that a film sets that trap successfully for fifty years by actually being a bit persuaded by it.
Nobody gets an interior life on the scale the men do. Michael gets three films of psychology. Kay gets doors. Connie's transformation happens in a twenty-year gap the film doesn't dramatize. Carmela gets one question. That's a choice about whose consciousness the story is willing to enter, and it is not the same as depicting exclusion.
The strongest defense is Part II, which gives Kay the abortion scene — a woman committing the single most destructive act in the trilogy, for a stated and coherent reason, and being neither punished narratively nor endorsed. That scene is proof the films could do it.
They just didn't do it very often.