The Godfather

Mario Puzo's 1969 novel is looser, pulpier and far more crowded than Coppola's film, even though Puzo co-wrote the screenplay. The movie narrows everything to Michael. The book spreads out across the whole Corleone world and lingers on the people the film only glimpses. Much of that extra material is backstory. Vito's life is followed from childhood, so the patient, courteous Don becomes a man you watch being made. McCluskey gets a lineage of crooked cops behind him, and Luca Brasi is written as a true horror, which makes his fate hit differently. There are also whole storylines the film left out, from Johnny Fontane's Hollywood rise and collapse to Lucy Mancini's life after the wedding. The novel also treats Michael's turn more gradually, and it ends on a different emotional note, with Kay at prayer rather than shut outside a door. Readers who know the film by heart will find the same story told with more sprawl, more gossip and more sympathy, and a clearer sense of how the family's ordinary lives sit alongside its crimes.

Kay's final scene diverges most. The film closes on her watching Michael's office door shut, sure he has just lied to her. In the novel she leaves him over that lie, returns once Tom Hagen explains his reasons, converts to Catholicism and goes to Mass with Mama Corleone to pray for Michael's soul. Coppola reportedly shot a version of that church scene, with Kay lighting candles, before choosing the closing door instead. Whole strands of the book were dropped. Johnny Fontane's Hollywood story, with his marriages, the throat trouble that ruins his voice and his turn to producing, shrinks to a favor asked at the wedding. His friend Nino Valenti disappears entirely. Lucy Mancini, whose subplot runs long in the novel and includes a graphically described surgery, is little more than a bridesmaid on screen. The film also cuts the backstories Puzo gives his cast, including Vito's life from childhood onward and McCluskey's upbringing in a line of corrupt cops. Some of this material was filmed and later surfaced in re-edited versions such as The Godfather Saga. A few smaller changes are reported. Luca Brasi is a nervous, awkward figure on screen, but in the book he is a monstrous killer, the one man the Don is said to fear. Fabrizio, who flees before the car bomb in the film, is tracked down in the novel running a pizzeria in Buffalo under a false name. And Michael reportedly resists the family business longer in the book, taking a less direct path to succeeding his father.