Phone Booth Scene from “The Godfather”

Scene 6 of “The Godfather” (directed by Francis Ford Coppola) is titled “The Shooting of Don Corleone”. This scene, a turning point in the film, features a call made from a payphone in a phone booth.

Movie scenes involving payphones used to be pretty standard fare. In current cinema payphones are most likely to appear in films set before the mid-1990s.Movie scenes with payphones interest me because they illustrate how the pace of communication has changed. If the attempted assassination of a mob boss took place today virtually anyone with an interest in the matter would be expected to know about it within minutes, if not seconds after the incident occurred.

In this scene from “The Godfather” Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) remained ignorant of the news for many hours. The scene opens with the marquee of Radio City Music Hall, a façade which looks the same today as decades ago.

Michael and his wife, Kay Adams-Corleone (played by Diane Keaton), are chit-chatting when Kay notices a newspaper headline that troubles her, but which she knows will trouble Michael even more.

Michael picks a copy of the paper, an undated edition of the Daily Mirror, Vol. 23, No. 115.

After rifling through the paper Michael finds nothing as to whether or not his father is dead after the assassination attempt. He looks around and across the street, looking for (what else?) a payphone, so he can call the family.

Michael Corleone remained ignorant of the news for as long as it took the newspaper publishers to write the story and get the papers printed and distributed.

After running into traffic Michael steps in to what appears to be an old-style wood Manhattan phone booth, complete with a closing door, an overhead light and fan, and probably a phone book. Kay looks on from outside, through the mesh glass, while Michael talks to Sonny. Sonny doesn’t seem to know anything more than what Michael read in the paper.

This booth would have been on 50th Street, near 6th Avenue, across from Radio City Music Hall and outside what is today a Nine West clothing and accessories store. No payphone stands at this spot today. I do not know if a phone booth ever did exist at this corner on this spot or if the booth seen here is a prop. Whatever the case, the details of the booth and the rotary dial payphone appear to be accurate.

I have what has been described as an otaku-like antenna in my head that instinctively waits for payphones to appear in movies of a certain vintage. I have more scenes like this to share in the coming weeks and months.

I am not a “Godfather” fanatic by any stretch, and I can tell you exactly why. When the series of films commenced in 1972 I was 4 years old, and in the years to come my mother never took me to see violent films of any kind. Guns were verboten even as a discussion point. This might have been because my mother’s brother was killed in a burglary of his house. The robber arrived unarmed, and used her brother’s gun against him. She always maintained that owning a gun made you infinitely more likely to be injured or killed than if you did not own a gun.

True or not (and the point is obviously debatable) I never saw movies like “The Godfather” until adulthood, and specific to this film I never even considered seeing it until 1999, after “The Sopranos” began its 6-season run on HBO. As I became immersed in that series I encountered critics’ and commentators’ inevitable references to “The Godfather” as a work of similar vintage.

So I bought a copy of the trilogy. And boy was I disappointed. Compared to “The Sopranos” “The Godfather” was, by my estimate, extremely lightweight on all the qualities for which “The Godfather” was so widely praised: character development, choreographic violence, memorable dialogue. “The Godfather” wins on cinematography, I think, but not on substance. I know, a multi-season series has a far more expansive time horizon to develop characters and build a world of family. But since I never experienced “The Godfather” until well into season 1 of “The Sopranos” I came into the trilogy with a perhaps unfairly diminished bias toward the format.

By the time I saw “The Godfather” some of its most famous moments had become cliché. The once-compelling image of the decapitated horse’s head and the line “Make ’em an offer he can’t refuse” had become trite jokes, the stuff of “Saturday Night Live” skits and “Mad Magazine” parody. Had I seen “The Godfather” series while it was current I am sure I would have a more seasoned impression of the work. As it is the DVDs sit on my shelves.

If you, on the other hand, are a “Godfather” junkie who thought the film had been analyzed and scrutinized from every possible angle then you might enjoy my then-and-now photo series: “Where Was Vito Corleone Buried in ‘The Godfather’?“ I put that series together a number of years ago after discovering that no one on the public Internet had pinpointed the exact spot of Vito Corleone’s fictional burial site. Any “Godfather” fanatic would know that the funeral scene was filmed at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, but for a film so thoroughly scrutinized as this I was surprised to find that a precise location was not included in any of the tours of or guides to filming locations.

Take my brief Godfather cemetery tour here.