On this date: The Godfather makes “an offer he can’t refuse” a national catchphrase

During the 1960s, Mario Puzo made his living primarily as an editor of and writer for men’s adventure magazines.

Under the pen name “Mario Cleri,” he wrote dozens of wild war stories and adventure yarns for men’s pulp mags.

Puzo also wrote several novels in his spare time during those years.

But he didn’t become famous as a writer until his fifth novel — The Godfather — was published in 1969.

Early in the book, actor and singer Johnny Fontane tells Mafia “Godfather” Don Vito Corleone that a movie studio executive had refused to give him a role he wanted in an upcoming movie.

Don Corleone tells Johnny he’ll convince the studio executive to change his mind. When Johnny wonders how, Corleone gives a simple explanation.

“He’s a businessman,” the Don said blandly. “I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.”

Corleone has his lawyer visit the studio exec and make a seemingly polite request to have Johnny reconsidered for the movie role. The studio exec refuses. Soon after that, he finds the bloody, severed head of his prized stud racehorse in his bed — and quickly decides to give Johnny the role.

Later, after Vito’s son Michael takes over the family business, Michael predicts that another mobster who had declined the family’s offer to buy his casino will change his mind.

Michael says simply: “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Soon, that mobster is dead and Michael’s family owns the casino.

As you probably know, these same events are played out in the movie version of The Godfather, which was scripted by Puzo and director Francis Ford Coppola and released in the USA on March 15, 1972.

Marlon Brando’s line as Don Corleone is slightly different than in the book. Brando says: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Al Pacino, as Michael, says the same words Michael uses in Puzo’s novel.

Soon after The Godfather hit movie theaters, “an offer he can’t refuse” became a national catchphrase that is still widely known and used today.

However, while it was originally used in the novel and film with chilling effect, it is now often used humorously.

One of my favorite funny uses was in HBO’s Mafia family TV series The Sopranos. In Episode 4, the character Uncle Junior (played by Dominic Chianese) tells this politically incorrect joke:

“You hear about the Chinese Godfather? He made them an offer they couldn’t understand.”

If any members of a Chinese Tong are reading this blog, please don’t send me any offers.

I suddenly realize it’s a terrible joke and promise never repeat it again.

Newly recommended in The Quotation Bookstore: The Sopranos: Classic Quotes — 100 Unforgettable Bits of Wisdom & Humor From America’s Favorite Families

On this date: “A Raisin in the Sun” explodes on Broadway

On March 11, 1959, the play A Raisin in the Sun, written by Lorraine Hansberry, premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York City.

It was the first Broadway play written by a black woman.

It was the first Broadway play directed by a black director, Lloyd Richards.

And, rather unexpectedly, Hansberry’s intimate story about hopes and troubles of “one Negro family” in segregated Southside Chicago was a critical and popular success.

The play boosted the acting careers of cast members Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ivan Dixon and Louis Gossett, Jr. — who went on to star in the excellent 1961 film version.

It also cemented the phrase “a raisin in the sun” into our culture’s language.

Hansberry didn’t coin the title of her play. She took the phrase from a famous poem by a groundbreaking “Harlem Renaissance” poet and novelist she admired, Langston Hughes.

The poem was originally titled “Harlem.” But it is also known as “A Dream Deferred” — which is another well known phrase it includes.

It was published in 1951, in one of the collections of Hughes’ poems, and it was a powerful statement in that racially-charged era.

Although race relations in America have obviously improved since then, the poem still packs a wallop.

It’s short and full of potent imagery.

And, if you haven’t read it, you should.

So, here it is, posted on the anniversary of the play that made the third line familiar to Americans of all ethnic backgrounds”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

By the way, the last line — “Or does it explode?” — was used by historian Howard Zinn as the title of a chapter in his great book A People's History of the United States. (And, if you haven’t read that, you should.)

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March 8: the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s famous “evil empire” speech

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”

This came near the end of that strange period between the years when the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II and the period since the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s. That period called “The Cold War.”

I was born in 1950 and lived through the Cold War era. I remember the fallout shelter craze, doing “duck and cover” drills in elementary school to practice what to do if atomic bombs started dropping in the middle of a school day, and being truly worried that a nuclear war would start.

Those childhood traumas tended to make me a supporter of nuclear disarmament and a fan of “The Bomb Song” by the legendary Hippie-era band, Country Joe & the Fish. The one with the chorus that goes: “Please don’t drop, don’t drop that H-bomb on me...”

When Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, the Cold War was still ongoing. And, I basically thought Reagan might be crazy when he took positions that seemed to escalate the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and basically sneered at suggestions about reducing or even just “freezing” the levels of nuclear weapons.

He was not only against a nuclear freeze, he was in favor of putting more NATO (read American) nuclear missiles in Western Europe, claiming that it was a necessary response to the Soviets’ deployment of nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe.

President Reagan decided to drop his word bomb — “evil empire” — on the Soviet Union at a convention of Christians, the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals held on March 8, 1983 in Orlando, Florida.

Among other things, Reagan told them this:

“I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority...In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”

It wasn’t the first use of the term “evil empire.” Those words had previously been used in pulp magazines, movies, cartoons and political propaganda dating back to the early 20th Century.

But Reagan’s use of it to describe the Soviet Union was new and notable in American political rhetoric. And, it was quickly analyzed, repeated, praised, mocked and ultimately made famous.

When I read the news about that speech in 1983, I was sure Reagan was crazy.

Then, in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union, under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, started changing, going broke and splitting apart. And, in the 1990s the Cold War faded away due to a lack of sufficient cash and, I guess, a lack of sufficiently evil ambitions on the part of what was left of the USSR.

In recent years, some historians have credited Reagan’s hard line stance on nuclear weapons — and even his use of the term “evil empire” — as reasons for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. (There’s a write-up about this in Wikipedia, and a video of and commentary about Reagan’s “evil empire” speech on the Voices of Democracy website.)

So, was I wrong about Reagan being crazy? Maybe.

But I still sing along whenever I listen to the 1967 album I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die and hear Country Joe sing “The Bomb Song.”

It’s one of my favorites.

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