Leave the Gun. Take the Eye Candy.

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone going back to his roots in Sicily. I wanna have a shotgun totaing hottie with me everywhere I go, next time I'm vacation.

I have a good friend who went through some difficult times a few years back.To cope, she spent a lot of time with a fictional character, Michael Corleone. She watched the first two movies a lot and even dipped into the disappointing Part Three. When asked about it she just told me, “sometimes you just need Michael Corleone.” She isn’t the only one to turn to the young Don in a time of trouble. Sarah Vowell, author and frequent contributor to This American Life, tells in an essay from her book “Take the Canoli” how she watched The Godfather, or part of it, every day during her freshman year at college. She took her quest to find Michael Corleone so far as to visit Sicily. Vowell struggled to understand her obsession with a film that in many ways she found repellant. She took what she wanted from the movie and left the sexism, the violence behind. Like Fat Clemenza, she left the gun and took the canoli.

What is it that draws us to the Godfather? While not as common an icon as Al Pacino’s Scarface, plenty of Michael Corleone posters hang on dorm room walls 35 years after the film was made. On the surface it seems simple. It’s the fantasy of having a quick solution to an intractable problem. Sure Michael Corleone is a murderer, a liar, and controls an evil criminal empire. But he really gets results. He makes decisions clearly and quickly and he acts. When he meets his first wife, Apollonia, he asks her father for her hand in marriage that same afternoon, based on one look across a meadow. When he finds his wounded father unguarded in the hospital he uses a nurse, a baker and a bit of bluff to scare off a car full of assassins. The story of the first Godfather movie is the story of his rise to power, and perhaps the loss of his soul to the family business. It is also the story of a young man who comes into his own. In that respect, it is somewhat heartening to watch the younger brother of the Corleone family rise by his wits, ingenuity and loyalty to his family. Though the movie goes a long way to show his motives for all the bad things he does, there is an underlying current of ambition moving through the character. Does fate force his hand or does merely see every disaster as an opportunity to take control and move forward?

One of the most famous and effective sequences in The Godfather is the montage of the baptism, in which Michael’s vow to protect and preserve the soul of Carlo’s child is intercut with a series of murders that Corleone orchestrated. The priest asks him if he renounces Satan and all his works as the soundtrack thunders along with an organ straight out of a silent melodrama and Fat Clemenza blows away a mark with the stereotypical gun hidden in a flower box. That is the appeal of the character to me. We haven’t quite figured out whether he is the Devil, has made a deal with him or is something different we can’t name.