The Legend of Santino Corleone

On the 39th anniversary of The Godfather’s release in the US, a film writer marvels at how Bollywood keeps reincarnating its most undervalued character

In the early-1990s, Doordarshan aired The Godfather and Godfather Part II as a four-part mini-series in its late-night slot. It was called The Godfather Saga. I was a school-going kid who happened to be spending the night at a friend’s place to catch up on studies, and the friend happened to have a TV in his room, a rare thing in those days. My friend would doze off as I sat awake watching whatever was on, and it was The Godfather Saga. I could not follow the story. I missed the second episode. But I did catch up on the third and fourth episodes.

When I moved to Mumbai to become a filmmaker, whatever images and bits of fractured narrative I remembered from that Doordarshan telecast helped me get by whenever the film was being discussed.

Then, in 2004, I was working with Ram Gopal Varma. I had written two films for him already: Darna Mana Hai and My Wife’s Murder. Around that time, he needed a writer for Sarkar—his to-be-adaptation of The Godfather. I proposed myself, and Varma agreed. I had not read Mario Puzo’s novel on which the movie was based, and he was surprised. He suggested that’s where I should start and report back once I was done reading.

I picked up a copy of The Godfather from a scrap shop in Lokhandwala. I could not get beyond the chapter devoted to Lucy Mancini’s vagina operation. I went back to Varma and told him that I found the novel boring. That was like criticising the Gospel in the Pope’s presence. I did not end up writing Sarkar. But what came of that exercise was that the man having an affair with Lucy Mancini in the book grew on me. His name was Santino Corleone, aka Sonny, Don Vito Corleone’s eldest son. All I remembered of him from Doordarshan was his brutal murder, where he is riddled by a barrage of bullets at a toll plaza.

The Godfather had released on 24 March 1972 in the US. In the 39 years since then, the film has seen several adaptations in Indian cinema. In these, the characters of Don Corleone and Michael Corleone have stayed close to the original. What’s taken on various shapes, forms and traits is Santino Corleone’s character.

The first adaptation of The Godfather was Feroz Khan’s Dharmatma. Released on 30 April 1975 to huge commercial success, it was a hybrid of Western (portions shot in Afghanistan) and Gangster movies—the two genres that the late Feroz Khan seemed to love. He played the part of Michael himself, as Ranbir, while Premnath played the Don’s part as Dharamdas Dharmatma.

But the Don does not have an elder son in the movie. What he has is a son-in-law played by Imtiaz Khan; he is called Kundan in the film and has traits of Sonny Corleone. He is hot-headed, has a voracious sexual appetite, and voices his opinion in front of rival gangsters much to the displeasure of his father-in-law. But Kundan is meaner than Sonny. Kundan plots against Dharmatma, chokes the Don lifeless, batters his own wife to death, and kills rival gangsters and their children (played by Sudhir and Ranjit) in a double-cross, before he himself is killed in a climactic showdown by Ranbir, avenging his sister and father.

Feroz Khan’s Sonny has no redeeming qualities. We can only guess why the filmmaker made Kundan that way, and my guess is that when he watched The Godfather, he felt that Sonny had been under-used. To have a character like that and have him killed in a one-sided gun battle just so that Michael, the innocent Michael, could step forth and reveal what a fantastic Don he is? This must have made Feroz Khan take the character in his hands and push it a few notches up in devilry.

Also, there were no DVDs or VHS tapes those days, and to copy a film you needed to carry it in your head as vividly as memory would allow. And when you do that, it always takes its own shape and form.

In 1988, came a Malayalam film titled Piravi. Directed by Shaji Karun, the film went to the Cannes Film Festival and won the coveted Camera d’Or. It told the story of an old man Raghavan, who comes from a small village in Kerala to a big city, looking for his son who has gone missing. He gropes towards the realisation that his son is probably dead, killed by police torture, and his death is being covered up. Piravi had nothing to do with The Godfather. But two years later, Mukul S Anand and Nitin Manmohan took Piravi, and cross-bred it with The Godfather to make Maha-Sangram. It was an unlikely cross, and the offspring story went like this: a simple middle-aged man Vishal (Vinod Khanna) comes to Bombay looking for his missing brother Arjun (Govinda) and slowly uncovers the truth that his brother had fallen in love with a daughter of The Godfather family and has probably been bumped off by them. The family is headed by a don called Bada Goda, played by Amjad Khan, ageing and in a wheelchair. His hot-headed son Chota Goda, played by Aditya Pancholi, is coming up in the business and helping his father fight off a Sollozzo-like rival.

In this avatar of Sonny, Pancholi delivers the performance of a lifetime. Chota Goda has a restless energy. He twitches his shoulder when he cannot express his anger verbally. He kicks the shoes off his feet when he’s called into the family temple against his wishes. His anger aside, Mukul Anand’s Sonny is a compassionate man. Here, Sonny is an anti-hero, unlike Feroz Khan’s Sonny. While Khan had pushed Sonny a few notches up in his vices and made him a villain, Mukul Anand drilled deeper into whatever was nice about Sonny. Chota Goda loves his father, though he never seems to agree with his benevolent ways. He loves his sister, but is not above plotting the murder of her lover who he does not approve of. Chota Goda, that way, is twisted. You might love him or you might hate him, and it is to Pancholi’s credit that he plays the role in such a way that you end up both loving and hating him. But the role largely went unnoticed because Maha-Sangram didn’t do well at the box office. It, however, is my favourite adaptation of the character on Indian screen.

If you ask me for the best Indian adaptation of The Godfather, I would name the Tamil superhit Thevar Magan, which starred Kamal Hassan. Written by him too, the film is set among rural Tamil Nadu’s Thevars (literally meaning ‘aristocrats’ in Sanskrit). The year was 1992. This was two decades since the release of The Godfather, whose characters had taken on mythological proportions by then, its plotlines turning into archetypes like the characters and plotlines of The Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is possible, therefore, that Kamal Hassan was not even thinking of The Godfather while writing Thevar Magan.

Saktivelu, played by Kamal Hassan, is the younger son of Peria Thevar (played by Sivaji Ganesan), and reluctantly ends up being part of a society where the smallest issues are settled by bloodshed. Apart from Saktivelu, the patriarch has another son—a weakling and drunkard played by Wijay Adiraj who reminds one of Freddie Corleone. Saktivelu gets sucked into a feud with a rival family of his uncle and cousin. This cousin, Maya Thevar, is a brash and violent man who keeps plotting against his uncle. When Peria Thevar dies, the mantle falls on Saktivelu, who finds himself face-to-face with Maya as the film heads for a violent climax.

Maya Thevar is a scary villain. He is physically violent. His bitterness has turned him half-mad, half-rude. If he had been born as Peria Thevar’s son, he may have been okay. But he is not Peria’s son. It’s Sonny minus the genes of Vito Corleone. It is this deviation in Sonny that makes Thevar Magan a classic in its own right and brings original moments to the film.

If I were writing about The Godfather remakes in India and not only about Sonny’s legend, then I would next have touched upon Aatank Hi Aatank, which released in 1995. In what would have been a casting coup of our times, the film had superstar Rajinikanth playing Sonny and Aamir Khan playing Michael. But back in its days, the film did not register even as a flicker in Indian filmdom. I did not see it.

Then, there was Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar in 2005. Ironically, it did not even have a Sonny. No, Kay Kay Menon as Vishnu was not Sonny, he was just an angry Freddy—short-fused, gullible, and played around by family rivals plotting against them, only to be eventually bumped off by the Michael Corleone avatar played by Abhishek Bachchan.

And then there was the 2010 blockbuster, Rajneeti. Alas, it had no interesting take on Sonny either. Also, the film trapezes too clumsily between The Mahabharata and The Godfather, leaving me with the satisfaction of neither. The meshing of the two signals something interesting, though: The Godfather is now seen fit for blending with the more Machiavellian of the two great epics.

When a literary work permeates your senses in a way that you start seeing life through it, when you begin to understand real characters around you by drawing parallels with fictional characters of a story, that’s when you realise that the particular work has achieved religious status.

I recently picked up Patrick French’s latest book, India: A Portrait. In one of the initial chapters, he describes the Gandhi family. There’s a quote by a Rolls-Royce employee describing the younger son Sanjay Gandhi—“All he was interested in was booze and women.”

Just like others of my generation, I too have heard of this Gandhi son’s escapades during the Emergency—his brash manners, the muscular support he lent to his Prime Minister mother, his interest in women (by the hearsay and quote in French’s book), his affair and wedding with a model. I often refer to Sonny Corleone when I try to understand Sanjay Gandhi. In some of his pictures, Sanjay even looks like Sonny (I thought of saying James Caan for a moment, but then decided against it).

On the other hand, you have Rajiv Gandhi—the soft-spoken man with a shy Italian girlfriend, an aircraft pilot (a man in uniform, like Michael Corleone) and a reluctant politician who stepped up to his mother’s side in politics after his brother’s untimely death.

If I were to ever adapt the story of Indira Gandhi for stage, then I know what source material would loom large. I know what testament to refer to.

That’s how deeply The Godfather and its characters have seeped into our minds, and Sonny, for me, remains the most enigmatic of them all—because in him lies the possibility of creating villains, anti-heroes and, who knows, maybe a tragic hero someday. Perhaps that’s why all these Indian adaptations extended his screen life far beyond the original novel/film’s.

This year, on 24 March, it will be 39 years since The Godfather released. Vito, Michael, Connie, Clemenza, Luca and others still live.

But Sonny looms.

Santino CorleoneSonnyThe Godfather