The New Hollywood movement was kicked off by two films where the protagonists were, at best, only somewhat sympathetic and, at worst, straight up bad people. In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate turned the concept of what a Hollywood film could and should be on its head by becoming critical and box office smashes. They set the course for a strange period in Hollywood filmmaking that would result in some of its most ambitious—and least-commercially-oriented—films ever. One common trope across the New Hollywood genre was the use of anti-hero protagonists, or main characters who we aren't exactly supposed to root for.
If ever there were as master of the anti-hero, it's Francis Ford Coppola. As the 1970s wore on, Coppola's protagonists would grow more and more loathsome. Start with The Godfather (1972), lead by Marlon Brando in the classic role of Vito Corleone. Our main character here is a mob boss, granted one with plenty of class and more loyalty than anyone else around him, but a powerful criminal nonetheless. In the follow-up, we have Michael Corleone after his transformation from an idealistic college-boy-turned-army-man into a cold-blooded mafioso. The trend continued with Gene Hackman playing the paranoid, obsessive, and lonely surveillance technician in The Conversation (1974), and reached its apex in Apocalypse Now (1979), when Martin Sheen played a deranged US Army special ops officer who grows increasingly mad during his hunt for an AWOL colonel in Vietnam.
Coppola uses these anti-heroes to poke holes in the American ideals that are often wrapped up in the plays of masculinity necessary to these character's various lines of work. With Sheen's solider, Coppola shows us the kind of unhinged, roguish warrior who is the only type of man that could possibly thrive in the unforgiving jungle of Vietnam, as if to tell the viewer that American had opened Pandora's box by letting these people loose on behalf of Uncle Sam. In The Conversation, we see a different masculine archetype: the loner genius obsessed with his craft, so obsessed that he misses becoming complicit in a murder, ultimately driven to rip his apartment apart in a fit of paranoid delusion.
And then, of course, there's Michael Corleone, through whom Coppola portrays a vision of American power as essentially corrupt, as a rancid stew of money, politics, and thuggishness. It's well-documented that the point of The Godfather Part II is to kill off Michael's character while keeping him, in a literal sense, alive. Both Coppola and the writer of the original Godfather novel Mario Puzo wanted Michael to be a totally destroyed man at the end of the film, victorious in his endeavors but utterly alone and soulless. What's the implication of this? We watch Michael navigate various avenues of power including cozying up with a senator, collaborating with a fellow crime boss to launch a Las Vegas gambling destination, and attempt to get in on the ground floor with a Cuban dictator's real estate development projects.
With the Michael character, Coppola is showing us his interpretation of the type of person who pursues this kind of power. It's a hollow, selfish man for whom enough is never enough and anyone with sense in their lives eventually abandons. The fall of Michael Corleone stands as something of a morality tale about the types of behavior and people we encourage by way of an impulse for greed, misunderstood as the American Dream.
Coppola was so effective at portraying Michael as an anti-hero that almost all of the major gangster vehicles of the 20th century would imbue their terrible protagonists with pathos and melancholy. We see it with Henry Hill's descent into cocaine madness in Goodfellas (1990) and Tony Soprano's litany of family issues, panic attacks, and psychotherapy sessions in the TV show The Sopranos (1999 – 2007). In those projects, too, the mob is used to help us navigate essential threads in the American fabric: corporate-style greed and the suburban dream, respectively. Coppola certainly did not invent the anti-hero or even bring it to this unique era of Hollywood filmmaking, but innovated the extent to which that anti-hero is tangled up in pathos and in a society that our anti-hero both wants to conquer and finds himself increasingly strangled by.
