the godfather film review essay

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Marlon Brando holding a cat in the film “The Godfather”

If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, “The Godfather” is it. The movie starts from a trash novel that is generally considered gripping and compulsively readable, though (maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash) I found it unreadable. You’re told who and what the characters are in a few pungent, punchy sentences, and that’s all they are. You’re briefed on their backgrounds and sex lives in a flashy anecdote or two, and the author moves on, from nugget to nugget. Mario Puzo has a reputation as a good writer, so his potboiler was treated as if it were special, and not in the Irving Wallace-Harold Robbins class, to which, by its itch and hype and juicy roman-à-clef treatment, it plainly belongs. What would this school of fiction do without Porfirio Rubirosa, Judy Garland, James Aubrey, Howard Hughes, and Frank Sinatra? The novel “The Godfather,” financed by Paramount during its writing, features a Sinatra stereotype, and sex and slaughter, and little gobbets of trouble and heartbreak. It’s gripping, maybe, in the same sense that Spiro Agnew’s speeches were a few years back. Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the film, and wrote the script with Puzo, has stayed very close to the book’s greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’ used to have. With the slop and sex reduced and the whoremongering guess-who material minimized (“Nino,” who sings with a highball in his hand, has been weeded out), the movie bears little relationship to other adaptations of books of this kind, such as “The Carpetbaggers” and “The Adventurers.” Puzo provided what Coppola needed: a storyteller’s outpouring of incidents and details to choose from, the folklore behind the headlines, heat and immediacy, the richly familiar. And Puzo’s shameless turn-on probably left Coppola looser than if he had been dealing with a better book; he could not have been cramped by worries about how best to convey its style. Puzo, who admits he was out to make money, wrote “below my gifts,” as he puts it, and one must agree. Coppola uses his gifts to reverse the process—to give the public the best a moviemaker can do with this very raw material. Coppola, a young director who has never had a big hit, may have done the movie for money, as he claims—in order to make the pictures he really wants to make, he says—but this picture was made at peak capacity. He has salvaged Puzo’s energy and lent the narrative dignity. Given the circumstances and the rush to complete the film and bring it to market, Coppola has not only done his best but pushed himself farther than he may realize. The movie is on the heroic scale of earlier pictures on broad themes, such as “On the Waterfront,” “From Here to Eternity,” and “The Nun’s Story.” It offers a wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty. The abundance is from the book; the quality of feeling is Coppola’s.

The beginning is set late in the summer of 1945; the film’s roots, however, are in the gangster films of the early thirties. The plot is still about rival gangs murdering each other, but now we see the system of patronage and terror, in which killing is a way of dealing with the competition. We see how the racketeering tribes encroach on each other and why this form of illegal business inevitably erupts in violence. We see the ethnic subculture, based on a split between the men’s conception of their responsibilities—all that they keep dark—and the sunny false Eden in which they try to shelter the women and children. The thirties films indicated some of this, but “The Godfather” gets into it at the primary level, the willingness to be basic and the attempt to understand the basic, to look at it without the usual preconceptions, are what give this picture its epic strength.

The visual scheme is based on the most obvious life-and-death contrasts; the men meet and conduct their business in deep-toned, shuttered rooms, lighted by lamps even in the daytime, and the story moves back and forth between this hidden, nocturnal world and the sunshine that they share with the women and children. The tension is in the meetings in the underworld darkness; one gets the sense that this secret life has its own poetry of fear, more real to the men (and perhaps to the excluded women also) than the sunlight world outside. The dark-and-light contrast is so operatic and so openly symbolic that it perfectly expresses the basic nature of the material. The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters: innocence versus knowledge—knowledge in this sense being the same as guilt. It works as a visual style, because the Goyaesque shadings of dark brown into black in the interiors suggest (no matter how irrationally) an earlier period of history, while the sunny, soft-edge garden scenes have their own calendar-pretty pastness. Nino Rota’s score uses old popular songs to cue the varying moods, and at one climactic point swells in a crescendo that is both Italian opera and pure-forties movie music. There are rash, foolish acts in the movie but no acts of individual bravery. The killing, connived at in the darkness, is the secret horror, and it surfaces in one bloody outburst after another. It surfaces so often that after a while it doesn’t surprise us, and the recognition that the killing is an integral part of business policy takes us a long way from the fantasy outlaws of old movies. These gangsters don’t satisfy our adventurous fantasies of disobeying the law; they’re not defiant, they’re furtive and submissive. They are required to be more obedient than we are; they live by taking orders. There is no one on the screen we can identify with—unless we take a fancy to the pearly teeth of one shark in a pool of sharks.

Even when the plot strands go slack, about two-thirds of the way through, and the passage of a few years leaves us in doubt about whether certain actions have been concluded or postponed, the picture doesn’t become softheaded. The direction is tenaciously intelligent. Coppola holds on and pulls it all together. The trash novel is there underneath, but he attempts to draw the patterns out of the particulars. It’s amazing how encompassing the view seems to be—what a sense you get of a broad historical perspective, considering that the span is only from 1945 to the mid-fifties, at which time the Corleone family, already forced by competitive pressures into dealing in narcotics, is moving its base of operations to Las Vegas.

The enormous cast is headed by Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, the “godfather” of a powerful Sicilian-American clan, with James Caan as his hothead son, Sonny, and Al Pacino as the thoughtful, educated son, Michael. Is Brando marvellous? Yes, he is, but then he often is; he was marvellous a few years ago in “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” and he’s shockingly effective as a working-class sadist in a current film, “The Nightcomers,” though the film itself isn’t worth seeing. The role of Don Vito—a patriarch in his early sixties—allows him to release more of the gentleness that was so seductive and unsettling in his braggart roles. Don Vito could be played as a magnificent old warrior, a noble killer, a handsome bull-patriarch, but Brando manages to debanalize him. It’s typical of Brando’s daring that he doesn’t capitalize on his broken-prow profile and the massive, sculptural head that has become the head of Rodin’s Balzac—he doesn’t play for statuesque nobility. The light, cracked voice comes out of a twisted mouth and clenched teeth; he has the battered face of a devious, combative old man, and a pugnacious thrust to his jaw. The rasp in his voice is particularly effective after Don Vito has been wounded; one almost feels that the bullets cracked it, and wishes it hadn’t been cracked before. Brando interiorizes Don Vito’s power, makes him less physically threatening and deeper , hidden within himself.

Brando’s acting has mellowed in recent years; it is less immediately exciting than it used to be, because there’s not the sudden, violent discharge of emotion. His effects are subtler, less showy, and he gives himself over to the material. He appears to have worked his way beyond the self-parody that was turning him into a comic, and that sometimes left the other performers dangling and laid bare the script. He has not acquired the polish of most famous actors; just the opposite—less mannered as he grows older, he seems to draw directly from life, and from himself. His Don is a primitive sacred monster, and the more powerful because he suggests not the strapping sacred monsters of movies (like Anthony Quinn) but actual ones—those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside a frail frame, those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces. No one has aged better on camera than Brando; he gradually takes Don Vito to the close of his life, when he moves into the sunshine world, a sleepy monster, near to innocence again. The character is all echoes and shadings, and no noise; his strength is in that armor of quiet. Brando has lent Don Vito some of his own mysterious, courtly reserve: the character is not explained; we simply assent to him and believe that, yes, he could become a king of the underworld. Brando doesn’t dominate the movie, yet he gives the story the legendary presence needed to raise it above gang warfare to archetypal tribal warfare.

Brando isn’t the whole show; James Caan is very fine, and so are Robert Duvall and many others in lesser roles. Don Vito’s sons suggest different aspects of Brando—Caan’s Sonny looks like the muscular young Brando but without the redeeming intuitiveness, while as the heir, Michael, Al Pacino comes to resemble him in manner and voice. Pacino creates a quiet, ominous space around himself; his performance—which is marvellous, too, big yet without ostentation—complements Brando’s. Like Brando in this film; Pacino is simple; you don’t catch him acting, yet he manages to change from a small, fresh-faced, darkly handsome college boy into an underworld lord, becoming more intense, smaller, and more isolated at every step. Coppola doesn’t stress the father-and-son links; they are simply there for us to notice when we will. Michael becomes like his father mostly from the inside, but we also get to see how his father’s face was formed (Michael’s mouth gets crooked and his cheeks jowly, like his father’s, after his jaw has been smashed). Pacino has an unusual gift for conveying the divided spirit of a man whose calculations often go against his inclinations. When Michael, warned that at a certain point he must come out shooting, delays, we are left to sense his mixed feelings. As his calculations will always win out, we can see that he will never be at peace. The director levels with almost everybody in the movie. The women’s complicity in their husbands’ activities is kept ambiguous, but it’s naggingly there—you can’t quite ignore it. And Coppola doesn’t make the subsidiary characters lovable; we look at Clemenza (Richard Castellano) as objectively when he is cooking spaghetti as we do when he is garroting a former associate. Many of the actors (and the incidents) carry the resonances of earlier gangster pictures, so that we almost unconsciously place them in the prehistory of this movie. Castellano, with his resemblance to Al Capone and Edward G. Robinson (plus a vagrant streak of Oscar Levant), belongs in this atmosphere; so does Richard Conte (as Barzini), who appeared in many of the predecessors of this movie, including “House of Strangers,” though perhaps Al Lettieri (as Sollozzo) acts too much like a B-picture hood. And perhaps the director goes off key when Sonny is blasted and blood-spattered at a toll booth; the effect is too garish.

The people dress in character and live in character—with just the gewgaws that seem right for them. The period details are there—a satin pillow, a modernistic apartment-house lobby, a child’s pasted-together greeting to Grandpa—but Coppola doesn’t turn the viewer into a guided tourist, told what to see. Nor does he go in for a lot of closeups, which are the simplest tool for fixing a director’s attitude. Diane Keaton (who plays Michael’s girlfriend) is seen casually; her attractiveness isn’t labored. The only character who is held in frame for us to see exactly as the character looking at her sees her is Apollonia (played by Simonetta Stefanelli), whom Michael falls in love with in Sicily. She is fixed by the camera as a ripe erotic image, because that is what she means to him, and Coppola, not having wasted his resources, can do it in a few frames. In general, he tries not to fix the images. In “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” John Schlesinger showed a messy knocked-over ashtray being picked up in closeup, so that there was nothing to perceive in the shot but the significance of the messiness. Coppola, I think, would have kept the camera on the room in which the woman bent over to retrieve the ashtray, and the messiness would have been just one element among many to be observed—perhaps the curve of her body could have told us much more than the actual picking-up motion. “The Godfather” keeps so much in front of us all the time that we’re never bored (though the picture runs just two minutes short of three hours)—we keep taking things in. This is a heritage from Jean Renoir—this uncoercive, “open” approach to the movie frame. Like Renoir, Coppola lets the spectator roam around in the images, lets a movie breathe, and this is extremely difficult in a period film, in which every detail must be carefully planted. But the details never look planted: you’re a few minutes into the movie before you’re fully conscious that it’s set in the past.

When one considers the different rates at which people read, it’s miraculous that films can ever solve the problem of a pace at which audiences can “read” a film together. A hack director solves the problem of pacing by making only a few points and making those so emphatically that the audience can hardly help getting them (this is why many of the movies from the studio-system days are unspeakably insulting); the tendency of a clever, careless director is to go too fast, assuming that he’s made everything clear when he hasn’t, and leaving the audience behind. When a film has as much novelistic detail as this one, the problem might seem to be almost insuperable. Yet, full as it is, “The Godfather” goes by evenly, so we don’t feel rushed, or restless, either; there’s classic grandeur to the narrative flow. But Coppola’s attitudes are specifically modern—more so than in many films with a more jagged surface. Renoir’s openness is an expression of an almost pagan love of people and landscape; his style is an embrace. Coppola’s openness is a reflection of an exploratory sense of complexity; he doesn’t feel the need to comment on what he shows us, and he doesn’t want to reduce the meanings in a shot by pushing us this way or that. The assumption behind this film is that complexity will engage the audience.

These gangsters like their life style, while we—seeing it from the outside—are appalled. If the movie gangster once did represent, as Robert Warshow suggested in the late forties, “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become,” if he expressed “that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself,” that was the attitude of another era. In “The Godfather” we see organized crime as an obscene symbolic extension of free enterprise and government policy, an extension of the worst in America—its feudal ruthlessness. Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism, it’s what we fear Americanism to be. It’s our nightmare of the American system. When “Americanism” was a form of cheerful bland official optimism, the gangster used to be destroyed at the end of the movie and our feelings resolved. Now the mood of the whole country has darkened, guiltily; nothing is resolved at the end of “The Godfather,” because the family business goes on. Terry Malloy didn’t clean up the docks at the end of “On the Waterfront;” that was a lie. “The Godfather” is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism. ♦

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EMPIRE ESSAY: The Godfather Review

01 Jan 1972

172 minutes

EMPIRE ESSAY: The Godfather

A son returns from war and doesn't want to get mixed up in the family business: organised crime. When his father is gunned down, however, he commits murder and is inextricably bound by ties of blood, heritage and "honour" to a course of vendetta and power ruthlessly maintained through fear. Eventually he inherits his father's mantle as syndicate big shot and family head, the film ending with a chilling shot of the door closing on his uncomprehending wife as Michael Corleone receives the homage "Godfather".

It was the first event movie of the 70s – the one multitudes queued up to see, the one whose dialogue, characters and imagery instantly became ingrained in the collective consciousness. It made stars of Al Pacino and James Caan , and won Oscars for Picture, Screenplay and Marlon Brando , in a triumphant comeback. Shortly after its premiere in 1972, Variety reported, " The Godfather is an historic smash of unprecedented proportions". At the time the director, Francis Ford Coppola , was holed up in a hotel writing the screenplay for The Great Gatsby , a job he took to relieve his financial problems because he believed in his movie. He had only been given the film after a lengthy wish-list of veterans including Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann and Franklin Schaffner turned it down. He perked up when Frank Capra wrote to him, claiming it was, " Out of this world. I cheered inwardly at scene after scene."

People are still cheering scene after scene in one of the greatest American films ever made, and committing chunks of dialogue to memory — like the goons in TV's The Sopranos who adore Godfather impersonations, and businessmen like Tom Hanks ' bookseller in You've Got Mail who explains to Meg Ryan that The Godfather is the font of all wisdom for the modern man.

Coppola can be credited with laying the groundwork of 70s cinema with his commanding technical engineering and audacious, visceral and stately set-pieces.

Evaluating the story's irresistibility, Mario Puzo's best-selling novel was, the author considered modestly, "A great combination, the family story and a crime story. And also I made them out to be good guys, except they committed murder once in a while". In adapting the book with Puzo, Coppola had a darker, ultimately more profound take: "I looked at it as the story of a king with three sons." It is pulp fiction turned into opera, an epic of gangster patriarchy, of family, of America itself. "I believe in America," are the first words in the film, spoken by the undertaker Bonasera, an immigrant proud of his assimilation and enrichment. But, he says, "for justice, we must go to Don Corleone." Puzo introduced the term 'godfather', now synonymous with crime family bosses. The words Mafia, Cosa Nostra, camorra and the like never occur in the film because Paramount producer Al Ruddy was paid a little visit by Joe Colombo, one of the heads of the real 'five families', and nervously promised the crime syndicate would be referred to in non-Italian terms.

Ironically, real Mafiosi later embraced the film, paying assiduous court to its principals to this day and affecting the language and style of Vito, Michael, Sonny, their lieutenants and soldiers. Original protests by Italian-Americans who deplored being defamed en masse (the Sons Of Italy, The Italian-American Anti-Defamation League and its champion Frank Sinatra , who raised funds to campaign against the film) have been overshadowed ever since the film's release by its popularity within that same ethnic group. Italian immigrants' descendants, whose assimilation and Americanisation has been complete, view with nostalgic yearning the Corleone clan happily pounding down their pasta, celebrating and sorrowing together at the weddings, the baptism, and the inevitable funeral. Such anecdotes, the legends (Brando did stuff his cheeks with cotton, but had resin blobs clipped to his back teeth; Sinatra, universally believed to be the model for crooner Johnny Fontane, did attack Puzo in a restaurant, calling him a "stool-pigeon"), the footnotes (the baby being baptised during the climactic murder binge is Coppola's infant daughter Sofia ), and the postscripts (Brando sending Satcheen Littlefeather to reject his Oscar) are so abundant that there are volumes of Godfather lore and trivia. TV documentaries have been made of the actor's screen tests.

This landmark remains a masterly work, fully deserving of its reputation. Coppola can be credited with laying the groundwork of 70s cinema with his commanding technical engineering and his audacious, visceral and stately set-pieces – the horse's head in the bed, the slaughter of Sonny (which Coppola acknowledges was inspired by Arthur Penn's climax to 1967's Bonnie And Clyde ), the interweaving of the sunny wedding party with Don Corleone's court indoors, the progress of Michael's respectful Sicilian courtship of Apollonia contrasted with Connie and Carlo's explosive domestic life, and, most unforgettably, the dazzling finale of assassinations, carried out against the sacramental rites in which Michael officially assumes the role of godfather. But the film's finest qualities also reveal Coppola's fluency in the classics, from the superior pulp of the 30s, into 40s noir and social dramas; his authoritative grip on an ordered, fastidiously constructed narrative, Dean Tavoularis' richly detailed design, the weight given to a fabulous supporting ensemble ( Robert Duvall , Richard Conte, John Cazale, Castellano, Alex Rocco), Gordon Willis' striking cinematography, Nino Rota's beautifully melodic score.

The one enduring criticism of The Godfather is that it glorifies the Mafia, affection mingled with abhorrence in its expression of the acts and ethos of Vito Corleone and his extended criminal family. The identification — both Coppola's and the audience's —with Pacino's Michael is unreserved. And cold, ruthless, logical Michael is definitely not the "pretty good guy" it amused Puzo to characterise him as.

Time and two more pictures would highlight the despair and nihilism in The Godfather , with its burden of sins accruing beyond redemption. The 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II (which took six Oscars, including the only one for Best Picture ever awarded to a sequel) is arguably even more compelling in its elaboration of power's corruption into complete moral decay. 1990's flawed Part III sees Michael get his with Shakespearean finality, Heaven finding a way to kill his only joy. The Godfather continues to entice and entrance with its emphatically mythic exploration of family, be it one cursed in blood and ambition.

READ MORE: The 20 Best Moments From The Godfather Trilogy

READ MORE: Francis Ford Coppola On The Godfather At 50: "It Changed My Life So Significantly"

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The Definitives

Critical essays, histories, and appreciations of great films

The Godfather

Essay by brian eggert february 20, 2022.

Myths examine origins and establish traditions, and a rich mythology sustains The Godfather. Since debuting in 1972, writers and viewers have tried to encapsulate what makes the film a watershed moment in cinema history. Based on Mario Puzo’s best-selling gangster epic, the film explores connections between fathers and sons, family bonds and brutal violence, the American Dream and capitalist greed. The story has seeped into our collective consciousness, creating a mystique around the Corleones, an Italian-American crime family, and the dramatized transition of power in their ranks. Our compulsion to keep examining the phenomenon—investigating why the film is so compelling and, in doing so, adding to the overwhelming degree of assessment—only feeds its status in the pantheon of great filmmaking and storytelling. Countless words have been written to analyze director Francis Ford Coppola’s filmmaking techniques, celebrate the incredible performances, chronicle the behind-the-scenes conflict, survey its influence on the gangster genre, and situate the film in historical contexts. And writers will devote many more words to the subject, all in hopes of understanding why it continues to have a lasting impact more than most other films. The persistent fascination with The Godfather and its unchartable reach has ingrained its mythological place in our culture and history.

So how did the film become the stuff of Hollywood legend? Everyone involved in the production, from Puzo to Coppola to actors with minor roles in the cast, has given their account of The Godfather . There’s a legacy of storytelling about the film among those involved—what it was like to watch Marlon Brando work, witness the arrival of Al Pacino, and be on the set while the battle between Paramount Pictures and Coppola exploded. Given its eventual monumental success at the box office and 1973 Oscar ceremony, which ultimately saved Paramount from going under, everyone has an opinion about who did what and where it all started. Everyone wants credit, too. The answer to the question “Who or what is responsible for this masterpiece?” remains a subject of some debate, exaggerated by the desire to give the majority of credit to a single person. Robert Evans, then the head of production at Paramount, is usually named as an integral force behind the camera. Others attribute the film’s success to Coppola, the 32-year-old Hollywood outsider whose singular vision, and willingness to fight for that vision, shaped the resulting three-hour film. But pour over any number of books and articles about The Godfather , and so many details remain unclarified, occasionally misrepresented, and often disputed by those involved. Historians and critics have taken down conflicting accounts from the principal parties and witnesses, leaving viewers without a clear picture, catapulting the film into the realm of myth.

The exhaustive accounts of the film’s development from page to screen might threaten to overshadow another film, except The Godfather also lends itself to layered textual and thematic analyses. It’s not a classically told story, after all, and it’s easy to overlook how unconventional Coppola’s approach was considered at the time, given its high ranking today on many lists of the greatest films ever made (AFI, BFI, et al.). The novelty of its aesthetic in 1972 has been taken for granted in the subsequent decades. Though it comes out of the venerable gangster movie tradition, it deviates from the classical template established during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Such films dramatized Prohibition-era controversies and created thin allusions to figures such as Al Capone. A long list of gangster classics from the early sound era— The Public Enemy and Little Caesar (both in 1931), Scarface (1932), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and The Roaring Twenties (1939) among them—solidified the genre with sensationalized stories ripped from the headlines, featuring larger-than-life performances from James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft. The genre resurfaced in postwar years, extended by film noir, when gangsters became less ethnically specific (Caucasian but not Italian) and concentrated on their warped psychology, such as Cagney’s mad robber in White Heat (1949). There would be few innovative leaps in the genre in the decades to follow. Like Westerns or swashbucklers, the gangster movie became another form of studio programmer: predictable, safe, and easy to sell.

Coppola should be credited for keeping one foot of The Godfather in traditional motifs and another foot outside them. He stood at the front of New Hollywood’s line of young upstarts—including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma—who trained at schools like USC and UCLA during the 1960s. Movie brats all, they set out to revitalize Hollywood by working within studios to overcome the stodgy and safe products of the era. In his twenties, Coppola started out making skin flicks for experience before advancing into B-grade horror ( Dementia 13 , 1963), a maligned musical ( Finian’s Rainbow , 1968), and a road movie ( The Rain People , 1969). Coppola foundationalized his rebellious spirit with American Zoetrope in 1969, his San Francisco-based production company founded to give young film artists the freedom to experiment with the medium. Their first production, George Lucas’ THX 1138 (1971), an artfully conceived commercial flop, signaled the company’s ongoing struggle to remain in the black. Coppola needed the occasional studio job to pay the bills—and keep the sheriff from locking the doors, according to Coppola in an oft-told story. He took a studio gig co-writing Patton (1970) alongside Edmund H. North, which not only earned him an Oscar but helped legitimize him in the eyes of studio brass.

Around the same time in 1969, Mario Puzo’s best-selling book, originally titled Mafia , had become an instant phenomenon, selling upwards of nine million copies in the years after its publication. Puzo, a gambling addict and struggling writer, had already published several novels and short stories, some well-reviewed but none of them good sellers. At 45, he was in debt and had grown tired of writing books that no one read, so he decided to follow his editor’s advice and write a Mafia story in a pulpy style proven to sell: larger-than-life characters, sex or violence every few pages, and multiple plotlines to ensnare the reader. Puzo based Don Vito Corleone on his mother, drawing famous lines such as “Make him an offer he can’t refuse” directly from his mother’s mouth. But this is a disputed detail. Some accounts say a mobster used the line, and Puzo’s mother borrowed it. Nevertheless, his eventual manuscript became a sensation, earning Puzo a whopping $410,000 for the paperback rights alone—a record that many attribute to the highly publicized appearance of Mafia enforcer Joseph Valachi before Congress in 1963, watched by millions of Americans on television. Valachi’s testimony—complete with gems like, “You live by the gun and by the knife, and you die by the gun and by the knife”—exposed the general public to their first hint of Italian-American organized crime. Valachi also underscored a certain mythic romanticism about the Mafia that Puzo worked into his book, which weaves a yarn about a Sicilian family who pursues the American Dream by any means at their disposal. For readers who struggled to get what they wanted in life and saw corrupt systems of government and capitalism all around them, the Corleones had a distinct appeal in their self-governance and enforceable moral code.

During the 30-minute wedding sequence, Coppola shows Vito looking out from his window through the blinds at the party. The shots establish the relationship between business and the family, how they are inextricably connected, in that one allows the other to flourish—albeit through a juxtaposition of entrenched family values and criminal acts. But the shots of Vito gazing longingly out at his daughter’s wedding suggest his business dealings have torn him away from his family. The racketeering and coercion that goes on behind closed doors is a means to an end, a way for Vito to “take care of my family.” Though Vito is a ruthless criminal, he also cherishes his loved ones. He would prefer to be savoring his time with them. To illustrate this, Coppola gives us moments of Vito’s adored role in his family—his fathering of Fredo to “be a man,” his strategic advice to Michael, his tender last scene with his grandson. Vito understands the careful balance between his two worlds. But later in the film, after Vito’s near assassination, after Michael rises to become head of the family, the family-business dichotomy becomes unbalanced. The criminal enterprise has consumed Michael, whose ruthless approach to business has sidelined everything else. Of course, Michael’s severity comes as a response to his family’s war with the Five Families over heroin and casinos, which has claimed Sonny and nearly his father. But his scorched earth approach to protecting the family consumes him, leaving his family secondary to the criminal enterprise.

After Coppola read Puzo’s book for the first time, he found himself attracted to the story for several reasons. The portrait of a mob family proved compelling to the Italian-American director, who could imagine what the Corleones must be like in vivid detail. He also recognized the innate classicism that would propel the story into cinematic mythology, given its hints of Shakespeare’s King Lear , complete with three sons as potential successors. More significantly, Puzo’s text as a metaphor for American capitalism attracted Coppola. If the American Dream once represented the average citizen’s freedom to enrich one’s family by getting a fair chance to prosper, it had since been bulldozed by corporate interests, corrupt politicians, and crimes against justice. “The real appeal of the movie was showing family ties in a setting of power,” screenwriter Robert Towne told The New Yorker . “It was really kind of reactionary in that sense—a perverse expression of a desirable and lost cultural tradition, filling people with longing for a family like that, a father who not only knew what was best but, if a guy was giving you a hard time, could have someone kill him.” When the American Way proved faulty, the Corleones had the influence and will to correct it for people like Bonasera. In business, they were self-starters, a paragon of entrepreneurism. But when negotiations failed, gangsters could back their drive for success with the brutality required to ensure it. Americanism was rarely purer in its all-consuming need to conquer, own, and consume ad infinitum .

Puzo’s book attracted Peter Bart initially. A former journalist turned Paramount executive, Bart first optioned Puzo’s story for $12,500 before its publication. Before being selected as Paramount’s production head, Evans also specialized in nabbing literary properties for screen adaptation. But Evans glosses over Bart’s role in discovering Puzo’s book in his 1994 memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture . For Evans, The Godfather was the latest in his line of best-selling literary acquisitions that included Roderick Thorpe’s The Detective , Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby , and Erich Segal’s Love Story —all made into profitable films. Evans even claims he met with Puzo before the book’s publication and agreed to pay the author’s gambling debts in exchange for the film rights, going so far as to give Puzo an office at Paramount to finish his manuscript. But the extent of these claims has since been disputed as Evans trying to make himself appear as the film’s mastermind. Some accounts give Puzo’s publisher or members of the mob credit for keeping the author afloat financially while he researched the book.

Regardless, Evans and Bart approached a long list of directors for the eventual adaptation. The candidates, ranging from Arthur Penn to Costa-Govras, either dismissed the material on moral grounds or, like “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah ( The Wild Bunch , 1969), focused too much on the pulpier aspects and not enough on the multiple dimensions of the narrative. Then, Evans and Bart sought to make the story as authentic as possible by enlisting an Italian-American director, and Coppola’s name came up. Evans recognized that Coppola would be cheap, and what’s more, “He knew the way these men in The Godfather ate their food, kissed each other, talked. He knew the grit.” Then again, Bart has since denied claims that they chose Coppola because of his ethnicity. He told The New Yorker , “The thing was that Francis was not the only Italian-American director I knew but the brightest young director I knew.” Like most aspects of The Godfather , the motivations that led to Coppola’s entry into the project vary, depending on the source. Not only did Bart sell Evans on Coppola by playing up the young director’s Italian heritage in contrast to the predominantly Jewish filmmakers behind The Brotherhood , but he also underscored how, if Evans wanted to make the film, he would have to act fast to undercut Burt Lancaster’s production company from tempting Paramount with a million-dollar offer for the rights.

Not everyone was convinced about Coppola. The director had to sway the film’s producer Al Ruddy in a legendary pitch meeting where Coppola stood atop a table, shouted, and sold his vision of The Godfather . Ruddy compared him to the conman Bill Starbuck in the play The Rainmaker , promising to bring rain in a drought. Unlikely though it may have seemed, Coppola, like Starbuck, made it rain, but only after convincing the studio to spend more than they wanted. Paramount chose to situate the story in a contemporary setting as a money-saving measure. Period costumes and cars would increase the budget significantly, from the intended low-budget production to a significant investment. Paramount was, after all, a struggling studio. “There were eight studios in Hollywood and Paramount was ninth,” Evans wrote in his autobiography. But Coppola convinced them to shift the settings to the late 1940s and 1950s, along with location shooting in New York. It might be tempting to give Paramount praise for trusting in the maverick director and forking out the budgetary dollars for his vision—production costs rose well above the initially estimated $2.5 million—but Evans and others at the studio also mistrusted Coppola, spied on him, and on more than one occasion, tried to get him fired from the production. In Mark Seal’s book about the film, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli , he discovered the film materialized out of “an unlikely amalgamation of brute force, artistic choice, market necessity, genius, and dumb luck.” Part of what makes The Godfather so mythological is that it ever got made.

As already noted, given how thoroughly The Godfather has saturated pop culture, it’s easy to miss how much of the production was considered unorthodox at the time. Take the cast, headlined by Brando, the down-on-his-luck actor whose erratic behavior and string of box-office disasters made him the odd man out in Hollywood. Puzo always saw Brando in the role and reached out to him well in advance of the production to ask if he would play Don Vito, though the actor turned down the part—at first, anyway. Al Pacino was a veritable unknown performer on the New York stage, appearing only in The Panic in Needle Park (1971) on film. Diane Keaton was best known for a television commercial. At least, James Caan and Robert Duvall had several credits to their name, and Coppola had seen their work on stage and screen. Brando, Pacino, Keaton, Caan, and Duvall always topped Coppola’s wishlist for the leading players, yet Evans and everyone else at Paramount recoiled at his picks. So the studio spent eight months and $400,000 on an elaborate casting call, the most highly publicized and widespread since David O. Selnick spared no expense to find his Scarlett O’Hara for Gone with the Wind (1939). Everyone who was anyone was considered, and many of them auditioned and screen-tested. But after all the rigamarole, Paramount, in time, agreed to the cast that Coppola wanted in the first place. In a story that continues to permeate Hollywood lore, Coppola eventually convinced the studio to cast Brando after recording a screen test—with shoe polish in his hair and tissues in his cheeks—showing how completely the actor disappeared into his role. If the casting process didn’t result in the studio finding a cast they approved of, the coverage helped publicize the upcoming film.

The Godfather’s screenplay, which Puzo started under Bart’s supervision, led to a working partnership between the author and Coppola, who took turns rewriting the other’s revisions. But the screenwriting process never quite ended. Coppola would produce rewrites sometimes the night before shooting, sometimes the same day. The actors improvised as well, creating some of the film’s most memorable and quotable dialogue. Caan invented Sonny’s “bada-bing” out of nowhere when he says, “You got to get them close like this and bada-bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” Today, the phrase Caan introduced into American vernacular has become synonymous with Tony Soprano, the complex personality from HBO’s watershed drama The Sopranos (1999-2007), a similar look into the private lives of gangsters. Playing Clemenza, Richard Castellano added the latter half to the famous line, “Leave the gun, take the cannoli,” supposedly on his wife’s suggestion—to emphasize the practicality of Clemenza putting food on the table for his family. The choice not only became iconic, but it underscores the film’s central theme of chronicling Italian-American families. Among the less fortunate improvisations was Pacino’s leap onto a moving car in the first week of filming, injuring his ankle and putting the production behind schedule.

Coppola’s endless rewriting, sometimes between setups, put the schedule in disarray. As a result, the budget rose over $6 million under Coppola, who insisted on doing things his way. For instance, Coppola wanted reality for the notorious scene where the Hollywood producer—who refuses to cast the Sinatra-esque Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino)—wakes up to a horse head in his bed. So the production designer, Dean Tavoularis, obtained the real thing from a dead horse slated for processing at a dog food company. By all accounts, choices like these worsened tensions between Coppola and the price-conscious studio, and some longtime film-workers on the set turned against their director. Take Aram Avakian, the film’s first editor, who veritably spied on and badmouthed Coppola to the studio. Avakian aligned himself with Jack Ballard, a studio crony sent to New York by Paramount to monitor the production. Avakian suggested that the studio should fire Coppola and make him the replacement (he had a single directing credit). Hearing about this, Coppola fired Avakian before any such coup could occur. Only the scenes shot on location in Sicily, far from anyone loyal to the studio, brought Coppola any pleasure; every other day, Coppola was under enormous pressure and came to work expecting to be fired. But he wouldn’t quit, even if his anxieties were giving him nightmares. And worse, they were not unfounded anxieties. Bart and Evans met with Elia Kazan as a possible replacement, but nothing came of it. The director told film critic Michael Sragow in 1997, “It was just an awful experience. I’m nauseated to think about it.” It’s stories like these that turn The Godfather ’s production into such an against-all-odds account and build the film’s mythical status.

Coppola worked with cinematographer Gordon Willis, nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness,” to create the film’s distinct visual schema of heavy shadows and businesslike sit-downs between Mafia families. But when Evans saw the initial footage, he couldn’t see anything. Willis’ photography had been too dark. The producer couldn’t understand Brando’s mumbled lines, either. The footage and performances were a disaster, according to Evans. The disappointing appearance of the initial dailies contributed to the producers turning on Coppola. Then again, this was Willis and Coppola’s plan. However unified, the director and cinematographer were not immune to conflict either, given the shouting matches that caused them to walk off the set or punch holes into doors. But if brightly colored Doris Day movies were the studio norm, Coppola wanted something different to represent the Corleones, who, on the surface, looked like an average American family. Behind closed doors, darker things were happening. Willis used overhead lighting to give the figures a theatrical quality. This highlighted the contrast between the bright wedding scenes and the darkened office to emphasize further the thematic conflict between light and dark, the exterior and the interior worlds. Indeed, the predominance of interiors implies the safety inside the family and the danger outside that awaits. Note that the assassination attempt of Don Vito occurs outside in the market.

Coppola and Willis instill a classicism into the look of The Godfather as well, which is why it doesn’t look like other films from the 1970s. The filmmaking represents an intricate application and unification of set design, camera placement, and lighting, arranged to make the Corleones look at once like a family but also players in a grand drama. Willis also insisted, whenever possible, on classical tableau shots that put the entire family on display—a family portrait in sfumato shadows and the amber hues of his underexposed film stock. Coppola and Willis’ visual agenda not only conveys a story that feels like history unfolding onscreen but also builds the narrative’s thematic underpinnings about the Mafia as a capitalist enterprise. In his monograph for the British Film Institute, Jon Lewis notes how Coppola stages sit-downs between family members like a corporate negotiation. Vito announces, with the cadence of an executive looking to broker a deal, “I hoped that we could come here and reason together. And as a reasonable man, I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to find a peaceful solution to these problems.” The tactic makes these tableau scenes feel momentous, giving them the sense of a myth in the making. The same is true of scenes blocked around Michael, who wields a different strategy used by ruthless business people to control the room and subtly influence others. Michael isn’t his father’s outwardly humble businessman; he’s an unforgiving tactician bent on taking over the competition.

The film’s strategic slow release into theaters, compounded by exultant praise from nearly every prominent critic from Variety to Pauline Kael to Vincent Canby, resulted in a major box-office success for Paramount. The film opened in March and remained in theaters for much of 1972, earning upwards of $250 million worldwide. The Godfather was credited with not only saving the studio but saving the struggling film industry by reminding everyone that art and commerce could work in unison. David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), wrote Coppola and told him, “Your film is a real shot in the arm for anyone who loves our medium.” The rarity of The Godfather is that, even though Coppola was a director-for-hire at the outset, it became a blend of uncompromising artistry and commercial success. “A work of art that is also a blockbuster,” as Seal described it in his book. Kael wrote something similar: “If there was ever a great example of how the best popular movies come out as a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather it is.” The film’s triumph continued into 1973 on Oscar night. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, The Godfather did not win the most awards that night; Bob Fosse’s Cabaret won eight statues. But The Godfather won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Puzo and Coppola, and Best Actor for Brando. The accolades continued for years to come. In 1998, the American Film Institute ushered in the new millennium with a list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The Godfather came in third after Casablanca (1942) and the list’s highest-ranked Citizen Kane (1941). When they reordered the list in 2007, it moved up a spot ahead of Casablanca .

Beyond money and awards, the film turned out iconic performances and catapulted the careers of Pacino, Keaton, and many others; reignited Brando’s reputation; and turned Coppola into Paramount’s golden child for the remainder of the 1970s. They quickly signed the director to two sequels, gave him the freedom to make The Conversation before The Godfather Part II (both in 1974) , and earned him enough clout to finance another passion project with United Artists, Apocalypse Now (1979). And The Godfather has sustained Coppola’s legend and career in the decades since. He continues to revisit the trilogy—a seemingly endless wellspring of financial opportunity with new restorations, home video releases, alternate cuts, and anniversaries. Sometimes, he seems compelled by his artistic desire; other times, he’s obligated by Paramount to revisit their enduring cash cow: the made-for-TV chronological cut, the 2018 “Coppola Restoration” consisting of a new audio and visual cleanup, and The Death of Michael Corleone in 2020 to give his underrated Part III another shot. In a stroke of irony, Coppola’s film decrying the dangers and corruptibility of capitalism has been his most enduring financial reservoir. And each time Coppola returns to it, The Godfather and its sequels create a renewed interest among moviegoers through this wide array of cuts and visual presentations. Upon the time of this essay, the film celebrates its 50th anniversary, prompting a new 4K restoration, theatrical rerelease, and physical media boxed set.

Moreover, The Godfather redefined the audience’s understanding of screen gangsters, established by classical Hollywood archetypes. Although the broad descriptions of organized crime explored by studios such as Warner Bros. in the ’30s and ’40s portrayed sensational violence with a moralizing message demanded by the Production Code, it’s easier to watch The Godfather and find the Corleone’s world appealing. Vito controls a small empire from his living room, and for people who feel powerless in their everyday lives, that’s a very attractive notion. Coppola admitted, “People love to read about an organization that’s really going to take care of us… When the courts fail you and the whole American system fails you, you can go to Don Corleone and get justice.” In his critical biography about Coppola, Peter Cowie notes that the Don’s “dignified” and “courtly behavior” tends to romanticize the character, ignoring the real-life violence and uncouth behavior of Mafia leaders recorded in court hearings. As with many subsequent gangster films, representation is often mistaken as a glamorization of the Mafia’s code of violence.

For a film about Michael destroying his family and straying from his father’s example to keep the business afloat, the idea that anyone could interpret the story as romantic remains curious. Perhaps the scenes detailing Vito’s backstory in Part II lend a romantic, rise-to-power narrative appeal. But the attractive prospect of the Corleone family’s self-empowerment, which is nonetheless marked by violence, ends with Vito. He sought to balance his family’s prosperity and his criminal enterprise. Viewers who argue that Part II is the superior film fail to recognize that the original says everything the story needed to say in this regard: The Corleones transform from a family into a business. The second film, albeit another landmark, reinforces the point through further narrative examples and a closer character study, building upon ideas conclusively established in its predecessor. One hesitates to call it redundant because, as it further illustrates that Michael has strayed from his father’s path, it deepens the myth of the Corleones. But there’s a quality about the original that feels singular, whereas the sequels feel innately secondary and tertiary. Indeed, along with the two sequels, countless other films about the Mafia followed The Godfather . But none, including Martin Scorsese’s brilliant inclusions in the genre— Goodfellas , Casino , The Irishman (2019)—boast the same classical themes and iconography that elevate Coppola’s film to the stuff of American myth.

The Godfather feels so essential to American cinema and mythology because it draws from established motifs in a grand tradition. If it feels ingrained into American storytelling, it might be because Puzo based his book on a Western, the only true American genre—1910’s The Heritage of the Desert , by Zane Grey. Readers and moviegoers had become accustomed to rooting for well-meaning outlaws and gunslingers who carved out a place for themselves in the Wild West. The gangster genre, Puzo recognized, was a variation on that theme. Puzo’s material deals in vast imagery and themes, from the baptism sequence that combines Christian motifs with murder and hostile takeover to Michael giving up his immortal soul to beat his competition. Coppola turns the story into an epic about universal generational conflicts that occur in a succession, when the former leader must give up their power for the next in line. Michael’s capitalist mindset and decidedly American way of doing business set aside his father’s Old World approach. Such imposing themes are bolstered by the lore surrounding its unlikely journey to the screen. The blended soup of conflicting accounts and behind-the-scenes drama, all of which has received as much coverage as the film itself, further engrains the film into the status of myth, inspiring a new tradition of storytelling about its production and legacy. Five decades later, The Godfather still resonates with the paradigm shifts from one generation to the next, still influences one filmmaker after another, and continues to be the foundation of a lasting mythology.

(Editor’s Note: This essay was commissioned on Patreon. Thank you for your generous support, Martha! )

Bibliography:

Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood . Simon and Schuster, 1998.

—. The Godfather Companion: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About All Three Godfather Movies . Harper Perennial, 1990.

Coppola, Francis Ford. The Godfather Notebook . Regan Arts, 2016.

Cowie, Peter. The Godfather Book . Faber & Faber, 1997.

—. Coppola . André Deutsch, 2013.

—. The Godfather: The Official Motion Picture Archives , 2012.

Evans, Robert. The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life . Hyperion Books, 1994.

The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration . Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 2008.

The Godfather Legacy . Dir. Kevin Burns. History Channel and Prometheus Entertainment, 2012.

Jones, Jenny M. The Annotated Godfather (50th Anniversary Edition): The Complete Screenplay, Commentary on Every Scene, Interviews, and Little-Known Facts . Black Dog & Leventhal, 2021.

Lebo, Harlan. The Godfather Legacy . Fireside, 1997.

Puzo, Mario. The Godfather . G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.

Seal, Mark. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather . Gallery Books, 2021.

Sragow, Michael. “Godfatherhood.” The New Yorker . 24 March 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/03/24/godfatherhood. Accessed 10 January 2022.

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The Godfather: Have we misunderstood America's greatest film?

Fifty years after its premiere, Francis Ford Coppola's classic gangster movie is still considered one of the greatest artworks made about the US, but have we overlooked a key element, asks Nicholas Barber.

Fancy watching The Godfather? It's an offer that most of us can't refuse. Adapted from Mario Puzo's bestselling novel, Francis Ford Coppola's gangster saga came second in BBC Culture's 2015 critics poll to find the 100 greatest American films , and there aren't many such lists that don't have it in the top 10. Fifty years on from its release in March 1972, it stands as the defining US artwork not just on organised crime, but on immigration, capitalism and corruption. Even people who aren't familiar with the film can recognise Marlon Brando's weary, wheezy Mafia boss, Vito Corleone, and his favourite son Michael, played by Al Pacino. They can also quote or misquote its most memorable lines – including the one at the top of this paragraph. And its aficionados know it off by heart. In You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks cites it as the source of all wisdom. ("What is it about The Godfather?" sighs Meg Ryan.) The characters in The Sopranos are such enthusiasts that they name their strip club Bada Bing! after another of its lines.

From 1972: ‘The Godfather’ is a film ‘close to the soul of modern man’

Editor’s note: “The Godfather” was released 50 years ago this month. This review appeared in America on March 25, 1972. The original grammar and style elements are preserved here.

Often films set at some distance lend a perspective to the here and now; they allow us to step back from our everyday skin to see who we really are. Bergman, for example, used a medieval knight in The Seventh Seal (1956) to reveal the crisis of faith in post-Christian Europe, and Robert Gardner, in Dead Birds (1963), used a primitive tribe of warriors in New Guinea to reveal the pathetic madness of a people, who like ourselves, have come to accept war as a normal way of life. And now The Godfather . How remote from actual experience, this world of violence and treachery, and yet how close to the soul of modern man.

With The Godfather , Francis Ford Coppola, at 33 years of age, has become a major new talent among American directors.

The mafiosi , murderers and extortionists all, emerge from the film as believable people, when they might easily have become comic gangsters or monsters. Their world tips wildly from the orbit of normalcy; it is a closed world, where their ghastly brutal work is considered an ordinary way to support a family. In the idyllic Sicily sequence, the quaint customs, the fierce family loyalties and the rigid patriarchal formality have a rustic lovely charm; in the New York underworld they are pathetic anachronisms. Yet it is precisely these grotesque rural customs that humanize the members of the famiglia . They are human in the midst of a sordid world, and they do what they must to survive. That is their way, and perhaps the way of all of us.

Don Vito Corleone, meaning lionhearted, is an aging racketeer whose empire and health both show the stress of old age. Brando brings depth and sensitivity to the part, but because of his long established “star” quality he has taken too much of the prerelease publicity. Al Pacino, as his son Michael, gives a virtuoso performance which should bring him instant recognition. He is an idealistic college graduate, marked for a career in the foreign land outside the mob, but gradually the destructive world of his father overwhelms him in its evil. He matures both in humanity and ruthlessness to become a calculating killer and worthy heir to the Don's empire.

At three hours, The Godfather is by any reasonable standard too long to sustain interest, but most viewers will be sorry to see it end.

With The Godfather , Francis Ford Coppola, at 33 years of age, has become a major new talent among American directors. Two sequences in particular are set pieces of editing and directing, and are even more remarkable because of their different styles. During a baptism at which Michael is godfather, his men plan and execute a series of assassinations designed to consolidate his power over the other famiglie . The ceremony drags on endlessly, but the intercutting of the preparations for the murders builds a palpable tension. The explosion of violence at the end of the sequence snaps the tension; it is almost a relief to end it all despite the horror of the bloodletting.

The second sequence, by contrast, is a tender, loving family portrait of Don Corleone and his infant grandson playing together in the garden of his estate. The Don is weak, but with his grandchild he appears perfectly at peace with himself. At this moment, when he appears most fully human, he dies quietly and gently, alone with his grandchild and his flowers. Alone, each of the two scenes is a cameo of directorial art; together they show Coppola's immense versatility.

Nino Rota, who prepared the music for all of Federico Felliní's great films, blends Italian folk themes and America kitsch of the 194O's into an effective comment on the dramatic action.

Richard A. Blake, S.J., served as managing editor and executive editor of America and director of the Catholic Book Club, as well as America 's regular film reviewer for many decades. He is the author of Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers , among other books.

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The Godfather’ by Francis Ford: Movie Review

Introduction, unity and balance.

The Godfather is a world-famous masterpiece directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1972. According to multiple expert reviews and public opinion, the movie is nearly peerless film-making (Chiang). The film has a marvelous screenplay, flawless cast, excellent camera-work, and mindful composition. The present paper offers an analysis of the movie considering art elements and principles of design. According to the analysis, the film is valued for its unity, balance, and contrast.

The most important element of the movie is the sense of harmony of all its parts. Coppola organized and designed all aspects of composition so that they concord with each other, painting a holistic picture of the criminal world in the middle 1900s. At the same time, all elements create a perfect equilibrium since action scenes are followed by mindful conversations, and the positive sides of being a criminal leader are balanced by the drawbacks. None of the elements seem redundant or out of place, which is vital for the composition to be effective.

The movie is built upon contrasts and controversies, which makes it appealing and stimulating. Contrast is seen everywhere from camera work to composition, making the viewer wonder about the questions asked by the director. For instance, in the opening scene, the camera first captures Nino Rota’s evil eyes and skeleton-like face. However, as the picture zooms out, the viewer sees a meek and balding middle-aged man. This is an excellent example of how Coppola uses contrast even within one scene. On the macro level, the viewer is forced to feel empathy with a criminal leader, which is controversial.

The Godfather is a well-composed movie that emphasizes unity, balance, and contrast. All of the scenes seem in place, which helps to achieve equilibrium in composition. At the same time, the feeling of controversy is promoted throughout the movie by showing the contrasting aspects of the life of a criminal leader.

Chiang, James. Shot Analysis: The Godfather. Animated Spirit. Web
Coppola, Francis Ford. The Godfather. Paramount Pictures, 1972.

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The Godfather

by Mario Puzo

Critical Context

The Godfather appeared at a turbulent time, when racial tensions flared, crime rates rose, young people indulged in sex and drugs, and an unpopular war in Vietnam made citizens lose faith in their government. The Godfather, with his solid family and supreme power on both sides of the law, loomed in the public imagination as a figure ironically sympathetic and even nostalgic. Seldom has a literary character had such a major impact on popular culture.

The novel stayed on bestseller lists a record sixty-seven weeks, and more than twenty million copies were sold, though academic reviewers largely ignored it and press notices usually treated it sensationally, not seriously. The book inspired scores of imitations in both fiction and nonfiction, such as Peter McCurtin’s The Mafioso (1972), Gay Talese’s Honor Thy Father (1972), Richard Condon’s Prizzi’s Honor (1982).

The 1972 movie based on the novel broke box-office records, received critical acclaim, and launched a screenwriting career for Puzo. He won Oscars for the screenplays of both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II (1974), and he scripted eight other films, most notably The Godfather: Part III (1990), The Cotton Club (1984), also about ethnicity and crime, and two Superman movies.

Critics praised the artistic brilliance of Puzo’s first two books: The Dark Arena (1955), a melodrama set in occupied Germany after World War II, and an autobiographical novel The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), which included some Mafia material. Yet sales were slow, and when an agent suggested amplifying the Mafia theme, Puzo began The Godfather , writing from research without actual contact with real Mafiosi. He later admitted writing it to make money, without fully using his artistic gifts. Puzo returned to his crime theme in subsequent novels, Fools Die (1978), about Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the world of publishing, The Sicilian (1984), a picaresque tale, and The Last Don (1996), which draws complex correlations between industrial tycoons and their underworld counterparts.

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Critical Overview

The Godfather Film Review

Be warned, the above trailer contains multiple spoilers

A Magnificent Cinematic Masterpiece

The Godfather is one of those timeless movies that stands as a benchmark for how to craft a true epic that can stand the test of time. Boasting a colourful host of characters, amazing plot twists within its sprawling storyline and impressive cinematography, The Godfather is a classic and easily one of the best crime films ever released. While there are slower moments here and some of the editing feels a little dated, the sheer visceral shock to each individual death and the absorbing storyline are enough to overlook this in what’s otherwise a magnificent film.

The story plays out like a crime-style coming-of-age with Don Vito Corleone ( Marlon Brando ) in charge of a vast criminal empire while his reluctant son Michael (Al Pacino) refuses to become entangled in the family business, instead deciding to stick to the straight and narrow. After a tragedy strikes the family, Michael is forced to make a choice and what ensues is a tale of vengeance as he takes up his father’s position as head of the family and tries to navigate the murky criminal underworld rife with backstabbing, double crossing and shady characters. Throughout the film numerous twists and turns keep this unpredictability at an all time high which in turn makes much of The Godfather wracked in suffocating tension, much to the plot’s benefit.

All of this is made ever more convincing from the impressive performances from the entire cast. It would be unfair to single out one or two people here but suffice to say every characters does a magnificent job bringing their respective personas to life. It’s rare to find such an array of talent in a film like this but The Godfather pulls off this feat effortlessly, managing to deliver deliberate bites of hard-hitting dialogue in every scene. It’s surprising too as a lot of these lines of dialogue hold up just as powerfully today as when this was first released back in the 70s.

Aesthetically the film looks great. There’s a distinct feel to the editing too with many of the shots blended by fades in and out of the various scenes and the accompanying soundtrack helping to give the film a slight Italian flavour to it. There’s some really fascinating juxtapositions throughout this 3 hour film and whether it be the contrast of a wedding and funeral placed at the beginning and end of the film or the visceral, brutal murders shown in gruesome detail while other characters embark on significant moments in their personal lives, The Godfather is a film made with real care and is quite the ride from start to finish.

If you haven’t seen The Godfather yet you really owe it to yourself to check this one out. Everything about this film is near perfection and even if crime dramas aren’t your thing, it’s hard not to be impressed with what’s been achieved here. Whether The Godfather will go down as the best film ever made is obviously open for interpretation but from a cinematic perspective, it’s hard to knock this ambitious, staggering epic that manages to craft one of the best films of this generation.

Verdict - 10/10 10/10

The Godfather the Movie Essay

The Godfather the Movie THE GODFATHER, made in 1974, details the Corleone crime family in Manhattan during the mid 1930s. The Don, Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando, leads his organization against a relentless narcotics push by a rival family, the Sollozzos. Vito Caleone does not want anything to do with drugs because he believes they will be the downfall of the Mafia. The story, covering a ten year time period, offers a rich tapestry of Mafia life from the inside, drawing the audience into witnessing the transfer of power within a close-knit family According to the October 1999 issue of “Entertainment Weekly”, THE GODFATHER is one of the greatest movies of the decade. Rarely can it be said that a film has defined a decade, …show more content…

Special effects play a huge roll in modern day films; they are mainly used to grab the attention of the audience. In the making of THE GODFATHER, very few special effects were used. The director, Francis Ford Coppola was able to capture the audience’s attention with a terrific cast, and a captivating story line. The movie explores many aspects of real life such as family responsibility, a father's legacy, the need to earn respect and the corrupting influence of power. These are some of the ingredients combined in Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece. The movie ran close to three hours and every scene was better then the last; not boring the viewer throughout the entire performance. Throughout the film, Michael Corleone played brilliantly by Al Pacino, experiences a major change in his way of thinking. Michael changes from believing that what his family does is wrong, to believing that his family's crimes are a necessary evil. He begins by insisting to his girlfriend that his family's crimes belong to his family, not to him. He was not involved in the business and did not want anything to do with it. By the end of the movie, most of the Corleone family have been murdered. Michael organizes the execution of several people within the other crime families as the Corleon family's new Don, having reasoned that these murders are necessary. Feeling that he must follow in his father’s footsteps he transforms from an innocent bystander to the central manipulator.

Godfather Goodfellas Essay

The Godfather and Goodfellas are both considered “mafia movies.” Both of these films portray some form of organized crime committed by Italians. They mutually romanticize the mob lifestyle and depict it with pure clarity. Although both of these movies portray the lives of the same kind of people, they are more than just a simple characterization. Violence plays a major role in each of these films. The Godfather and Goodfellas are obviously very similar. However, they also have several aspects that differ from one another.

Michael Corlee Flaws

In the movie, Michael Corleone had several tragic flaws that changed his life. The first hamartia was murdering Captain McCluskey and Sollozzo. In this cause, he became the target of another crime family He needed to leave away from America and escaped to Sicily because other crime families would kill him. After his wife was dead for a car bomb, he understood that he could control both of his and other people’s fate if he had power. Another was he was eager for power. Michael believed that he could protect the Corleone family and expanded their business. For example, Michael could use he order his people to kill the five leaders of the crime families. Many people started to fear Michael and no people tried to assassinate Michael. Although Michael

American Mafia vs. Italian Mafia in Cinema Essay

6 Works Cited

The gangster genre within films in America has accomplished numerous positive criticisms and constant willing audiences due to containing outstanding spectacles and mind-blowing action. The Godfather, being second on the IMDb Top 250 Movies, has set a new popular concept to life within the Mafia from their point of view. Doing so, creating a positive association. Yet within Italy, the same topic contains a complete different view. Movies such as I Cento Passi demonstrate unenthusiastic view by those whom are outside yet negatively affected by those members. Unlike American films, the gangsters are not as often viewed at the protagonist and are the main causes for the problematic events. But how different is Italian Mafia and American

Power In The Godfather

There are numerous themes expressed in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Through the use of cinematography and mise en scene, one of the most dominant themes expressed throughout the film is power. Though, only possessed by few, power is an important aspect of progress and growth in this film. Specifically, the development of power demonstrated through Al Pacino’s character: Michael Corleone; transforming himself into the succeeding Don after his father. The fight for power, as shown in the in the baptism scene and the Italian restaurant scene in the film, exemplify the idea of ‘getting rid of the competition’ and fighting for the power to control.

Analysis Of The Use Of Lighting In The Godfather Essay

photography of The Godfather as an entire film is very planned and used specifically to

Cinematography in Godfather the Movie Essay

Mario Puzo’s "The Godfather" was the first and most influential gangster movie that paved the way for gangster movies of the future. The movie was directed by Frances Ford Copolla, who made many different ingenious ways to portray this gangster classic. The movie was a very subversive movie, and one of the first of all time.The Godfather has a many different uses of light settings through the whole movie, in which the movie can be interpreted on.

Essay on La Cosa Nostra

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La Cosa Nostra Perhaps one of the most poignant moments in American cinema is the closing scene in the film “The Godfather” when Don Vito Corleone’s son Michael takes over his father’s position... and one of the most unforgettable moments, a severed horses’s head lies bloody in a man’s bed. It is this tradition and brutality that characterizes the Mafia, a secret Sicilian society that lives and functions just as much today on American soil as it did and does still in Italy. To understand this organized crime, one must begin to understand how it came to be organized in the first place. During the medieval times in Sicily, Arabs invaded the land and native Sicilians fled and took refuge in the hills. Some of these refugees formed a

What Is The Similarities Between The Scarface And The Godfather

The Godfather is a mob film focuses on the Corleone Family, with its head Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) trying to find a suitable heir to his empire, while war is breathing down the neck of other crime families. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) then steps in to organize the family back to shape. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based from the novel of the same name written by Mario Puzo. It received critical acclaim by critics and was cited as an influence by real life mobsters due to its rather realistic portrayal of gangster life and Cosa Nostra.

Theme Of Mise En Scene In The Godfather

The mise-en-scene in The Godfather I, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, plays a huge role in how the film is perceived by viewers. Mise-En-Scene is characterized as, “The arrangement of everything that appears in the framing – actors, lighting, décor, props, and costume” (elementsofcinema.com). The Godfather utilizes mise-en-scene perfectly. Coppola combined all the right components of a typical mafia film and made something extraordinary. From the clothing, to the homes, to the cars, and lighting; The Godfather was executed wonderfully. Lighting plays a huge part in The Godfather. The first scene opens with only one man talking, in low light. The relaxed lighting makes the scene intense and leaving the audience with a sense of fear. With the light just appearing on the man's face, the foundation is totally dark, highlighting the threatening tone of the scene. This scene uses the same lighting elements as chiaroscuro paintings would have. If you were to pause the scene at certain points you would be able to see the rembrandt light and the strong tonal contrasts between light and dark. Different props are also used throughout the film. When you think about the Mafia, you think Italian men

The Godfather Analysis Essay

The Godfather presents Vito as the paradigmatic Mafia don. He is wise and intelligent, an excellent reader of others’ intentions, and a smooth, subtle talker, able to convince with words, not only bullets. Though a ruthless, violent criminal, Vito is also a warm, loving father and husband. In his later years, Vito comes across as relaxed and playful, even mellow. He has lived a rich, full life and earned a quiet retirement. Vito is both the perfect father and the perfect Godfather, making him a difficult model for all of his children, especially Michael, to imitate

The Movie ' The Godfather '

However, this gives the audience a feel for The Godfather’s power. The color designs, align with the era, nothing too bright, even tone and dark colors to give vibes of the dangerous mysteries that await with yet another assassination. All things considered Michael, the younger brother slated to become a congressman or maybe president, assassinated drug lord Sollozzo and the corrupt police officer McCluskey. Michael falls into the wild card category portraying him, as innocently trying to fit in, as later he developed into the character of “The New Godfather.”

The Godfather Essay examples

The Godfather is the story of a Mafia family. It follows the rise of Michael Corleone within the family. Michael was once a war hero and did not want to be involved in the family business. When his father is shot though, Michael takes revenge on the people who did it and becomes a part of the Mafia lifestyle. When his older brother is murdered, Michael ascends to become the boss of the family, and proves to be more ruthless than his father and brother combined. The scene that I am analyzing is one where Michael is becoming his nephew’s godfather at his baptism.

Essay On The Godfather

His role in The Godfather is that of the Don, or a commanding officer. He climbs the social ladder in the Corleone family, starting as a member and gains a higher reputation by killing the man believed to have orchestrated the attacks against his father, Virgil Sollozzo, and a corrupt police captain paid by Sollozzo. Michael then travels to Sicily and doesn’t move up in the family for a while. Two years later, his brother Sonny Corleone, who was the acting head of the family after their father was injured, was shot in a phone booth. Michael then returns to America to help out with the family: he assumes Sonny’s role as his father’s heir apparent, a Vice President who steps in when the Don is injured or killed. Once the Don retires, he becomes the new Don and takes over as the head of the crime family.

Scarface The Shame Of A Nation Analysis

According to Thomas Schatz, in most gangster films, the genre dictates that the gangster always gets killed or goes to jail. There is nothing different that will, or should happen, and Scarface closely follows Schatz’s model of Hollywood’s genres. Schatz’s model is concerned with the movie’s alignment with classical Hollywood setting and narrative.

The Godfather Character Analysis Essay

The old saying, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” is true in the case of Michael Corleone, the son of Don Vito Corleone of The Godfather. The film focuses on the story of Michael and how he changes from a respectable, educated Marine to the ringleader of his father’s mafia business. In between the drastic turn of events, Michael has two love interests, both of which have a large, yet quiet, impact on his life.

Why The Godfather, Part II is the Best of the Trilogy

What exactly makes “ The Godfather, Part II ” better than its predecessor?

“The Godfather, Part II” was the first film in the Godfather saga that I saw. This was perhaps a couple of years after it was first released. Knowing then very little about its predecessor and considering that the follow-up constantly jumps between time periods, it didn’t end up making all that much sense to me, but it raised enough curiosity to try to fill the voids, even if the only material available to me at that time was their Mad Magazine parodies. There’s just something about the protagonists of certain movies that makes it hard to shake them off—the Fast Eddie Felsons, the Vincent & Neils, the Red & Andys, and above all, the Corleones. “The Godfather, Part II” deals with the continuing story of that family, as new patriarch Michael tries to expand its many businesses. Director Francis Ford Coppola highlights the professional and personal challenges Michael has to face by contrasting them with those of his father in their very different times and cultures.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1980 that the original “Godfather” made another round in cinemas down here in Mexico. After all these years and dozens of viewings, I still find it to be as great as ever regardless of a few warts, such as the use of a bit too much stock footage (think of Tom Hagen arriving in the 1940s Hollywood, or Paulie, Rocco and Clemenza driving through New York) and the obvious use of stand-ins that don’t look all that much like the actors (like Hagen and Jack Woltz walking by the gardens of the latter’s mansion). Even though its financial success meant that the sequels wouldn’t have to suffer from similar budget limitations, the first Godfather clearly stands above them when it comes to background plot. I’ve always found the hounding of the Corleones by their enemies to be much more interesting than Michael doing business in Cuba just before the 1950s revolution in Part II, or him trying to wipe his family’s past clean by way of a real estate company in Part III. During my annual viewing of the sequel, at the stage of the first half, I invariably find myself missing the departed characters from the first entry during the good old days when the family was under siege from Sollozzo and the other families. In contrast, the discreet actions of Hyman Roth, whose evil intentions we never even get to hear on screen, tend to pale a bit. And yet, strangely enough, once my viewing of both movies concludes, the impact of the sequel is invariably stronger than that of its predecessor, leading me to wonder how it was ever possible for Coppola to be able to improve on the first film’s greatness, especially considering the handicaps he had to cope with.

The first factor, I believe, is that the director somehow managed to turn Part II’s weakness into strengths. For instance, few film series by nature have lost as many characters during their first entry. This list includes just about all of the family’s enemies along with Sonny, Tessio, Carlo, Paulie, Luca Brasi and above all, the central figure of Brando’s Vito Corleone. The latter was originally supposed to appear in the final reminiscing scene but somehow by that point, there’s a feeling that he has been present all along anyway. Perhaps this had to do with how Robert DeNiro was able to play the Brando character without missing a beat. The same problem should have applied in the sequel to the missing character Clemenza, whose part was basically taken over by Michael Gazzo’s Frank Pentangelli. He was even given the Don’s old home and was made to be a history buff just like Clemenza, though his absence from the decade long events of Part I is more than a little hard to buy. At the end, Gazzo’s Frankie “Five Angels” turned out to be just as memorable as his predecessor. His (on the surface) unremarkable conversation with Hagen that ends with the latter bidding him “Addio” (quite literally, as it turns out) is clearly one of the best moments of the series. Would it have helped if Brando had made his appearance in the end’s family reunion scene? Would the sight of Vito’s old caporegime at the Mafia Hearings, or dead in the bathtub have brought a feeling of full circle to the defeat of the family’s enemies? It’s hard to imagine otherwise in both cases but their substitutes turned out so well, we don’t end up longing for these alternatives all that much.

Still, when trying to assign each of these films their rightful place, the most important factor to consider is that they tend to be even more interesting when looking towards the interior of the family as opposed to when looking outside, and Part II comes second to none in this regard. The Cuba plot basically serves as a framework for the Corleone’s own conflicts and those conveyed in the sequel include much more interesting contrasts and facets. Down deep what makes the “Godfather” trilogy sublime are the unique bonds and occasional deep hate that can only fully take place between parents/children and their siblings, and no filmmaker before or since has been able to convey this with as much truth and resonance as Coppola (with Scorsese in “ Raging Bull ” coming second). This is one of the main reasons why the audience ended up seeing this particular family as their very own and it is also why the increasingly decaying Michael Corleone, perhaps even against Coppola’s best intentions, kept the audience’s sympathy until the very end of the series when he dropped dead in that Sicilian garden. Part I’s main focus was Vito’s extraordinary ability to deal with his enemies and how the most unexpected of his sons inherited such. The second movie went even further by conveying how Michael’s intelligence was not enough when it came to the inner workings of his own crumbling family.

Generally speaking, the first “Godfather” film can be considered flashier than the second, but when it comes to some of the series’ most valuable traits such as its stirring revelations, the impact of Michael listening to Fredo reveal himself accidentally as the family traitor in Part II is by no means any less shocking than that of the Don realizing who his true enemy had been all along in Part I. When it comes to unforgettable knowing glances, not even Kay’s realization that Michael has lied to her face at the end of Part I can match the seemingly conciliatory embrace that Michael gives Fredo, followed by the slightest of knowing nods at his bodyguard in what is clearly one of the great moments in movie history. Even Camine Coppola’s arrangements of Nino Rota ’s music manage to improve the original film’s themes, resulting in what is my very favorite film soundtrack.

It is by considering another key problem with the controversial Part III that we can further appreciate what made Part II the best entry in the series. The characters we see early on the third “Godfather” barely reflect the logical evolution of those we left at the end of the second. For instance, what exactly prompted Michael to forgive Kay and seek a reconciliation (which ended up feeling so forced)? How could Connie accept the silly “drowning” excuse about Fredo “drowning” death? The answers to these questions seem to have been based more on casting choices and actor availabilities than on how their stories should have naturally played out. In contrast, this is one of the Part II’s greatest strengths. While watching such sequences as the superb conversation between Michael and Hagen about their bonds and life lessons (the “there’s a lot I can’t tell you Tom” dialogue) or by witnessing such seemingly small details as Vito going back to help the wounded friend who assisted him in his revenge plot, we come to better appreciate the roots of their deep loyalties. Additionally, the initial musings in the first movie about Michael promising Kay to eventually change and his warning of Fredo to never take sides against the family again, are followed through in the sequel to their full extent, in the latter case taking the series into fratricidal territory that not even the first movie could have ever imagined, proving that a sequel to “ The Godfather ” was something truly necessary. At the end of the day “The Godfather Part II” enhances our understanding and appreciation of the legendary characters presented in the original film. It surpasses it, in part, because it manages to make its predecessor even better.

Gerardo Valero

Gerardo Valero is lives in Mexico City with his wife Monica. Since 2011 he’s been writing a daily blog about film clichés and flubs (in Spanish) on Mexico’s Cine-Premiere Magazine . His contributions to “Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary” were included in the last twelve editions of “Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook.”

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Final Film Critique

Part 1 analysis, contextual information.

Story and Plot

Aesthetic choices, social impact, part 2 reflection, works cited.

Cowie, P. (1997). The Godfather book. Da Capo Press.
Kagan, N. (2012). The Cinema of Oliver Stone. Continuum International Publishing Group.
Leydon, J. (2019). The Godfather Movie Guide. Rough Guides.
Lebo, H. (2015). The Godfather Legacy: The Untold Story of the Making of the Classic Godfather Trilogy. Simon and Schuster.
Puzo, M. (2002). The Godfather. Random House Publishing Group.
Schatz, T. (2010). The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. University of Minnesota Press.
Thompson, D. (2010). The Godfather. British Film Institute.
Wagner, M. (2008). Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Peter Lang Publishing.
Willis, R. (2004). The Godfather: Anatomy of a Film. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Benson, T. (1997). The Godfather Companion: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About All Three Godfather Films. Harper Perennial.

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Godfather: Central Themes of the Film Essay

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The Godfather: Baptism and Murder

Despite the fact that a movie is only a way to depict a human’s life, and it cannot show all of its tints and hues, the final scene of The Godfather manages to create an illusion of living trough the film, and living with the film. One of the most impressive episodes, it provokes one’s thinking and suggests different points of view on the film. Because of its unusual structure and the means to build the tension, the final scene helps to create the full picture of the movie without letting any end loose.

The very baptism ceremony was actually supposed to mean more than simply following the tradition established long before within the family and the society. It actually meant making the ties of the family to be bound together, for the members of the once great clan not to get broken and separated, and for the little newborn not to feel lost in the cruel world of the adults, full of cold, suffering and misconceptions.

Next to the scene of baptism, there is the scene of murder. Making a striking contrast to the cool-blooded murder which is happening outside the church, the scene of baptism also serves as the means to highlight the key idea of the book, driving the conflict between the dreams and the reality to the boiling point. With all its splendor and richness, the church looks like the place to escape from the dread and misery of the world outside, where murder and violence are so usual and not falling out of the ordinary for as moment.

Playing on the contrasts which people’s imagination sets as they watch the scene in the church, the film director makes them encounter the situation which they would have never placed in the religious surrounding, which makes the scene look even more natural, so dreadful in its realistic vision.

On the one hand, there is a slight air of surrealism of what is happening inside and outside of the church, yet in the other, the film director makes the audience believe that what they see is truth, which pushes the conflict between the ordinary frame and the scene in the movie even further.

Once a shelter for those who have been lost on their way to paradise and those who have been deprived of hope, the church becomes the place where the lead character of the movie can be safe for once from the cruel reality of what is happening outside of the holy place.

In this case, the church serves as the place where no evil dares tread, and where the lead characters can feel safe for a while, without fearing that the foes can bring any danger on them. A range of the religious attributes which have been depicted in the movie helps to restore the image of the church as the place of safety and sanctity.

One of the key elements which help the scene to become as tense as it can is the music. There should be no better solution for the movie to gain the necessary momentum.

The anxious sounds of the organ, and the solemn and ceremonious music, somehow making one think of the futility of life, also conflicts with the theme of baptism as welcoming the new life into the laps of the church. In general, the impression which the environment in the church sets is somewhat tense, making one feel alert, as if anticipating something weird and scary to happen.

The float of the ceremony contradicts harshly the action which is going on outside. With all its purity and innocence, the church atmosphere is the best background for the murder which is going on outside, for it provides the necessary shade, making the scene of the murder as cruel and useless as it can be. The image of the child, all flesh and blood yet its consciousness clear from the sins and miser of the outer world provides the best background for the murder which is taking place outside the sacred place.

What deserves being described in the most precise way is the religious imagery which Coppola uses to make the scene even more impressive and unbelievable. As the audience sees the church and its perfection, they understand that there must be some other idea which hides beneath the bliss of the richness and the spirituality of the church and its attributes. As the scene unwinds, one can see the church items which are so usual for the Catholic religion, everything dusted with an air of splendor.

Although the camera does not focus on them for a long time, simply snatching the pieces of the attributes bow and again and concentrating rather on the faces of the people in the scene, the people whose faces the camera has gripped in its focus speak better than the words can.

It is peculiar that Michael Corleone’s face expresses nothing but satisfaction, the happiness of being a godfather – and the Godfather… Being completely aware of what is going on behind the door of the church premises, he knows that his time has come, and it adds to his mournful delight of becoming the Don.

Meanwhile, Connie’s face expresses more than mother’s concern about the baby. There is that certain something in her eyes that will not let go even after the film is over. Is it the anxiety? Or the past experience of hers? Or the fear of the future? Anyway, she is afraid, it cannot be denied.

Because of the method of cross-cutting, the movie looks even more convincing, and the scene becomes saturated with another idea, which is the idea of cool-blooded revenge and the fight for the power over the world. There is nothing personal, it is just business. The fight with the other clan is over, and the rivals have lost the war, which is another reason for Michael Corleone to celebrate his victory. He has proven once again that he is worthy of holding the power over the entire state which the mafia family is.

However strange this may sound, the fighting scene and the scene of baptism crossing each other create the atmosphere of calmness – or, it would be better to say that it heralds the coming of the new era for the family and for the Godfather. It s another stage in the formation of the piece of society which is the most influential one of all existing, for it holds the power over everything that happens in the world of money.

The final stage of baptism and the murder is the triumph of Michael Corleone, because there comes the moment of his recognition – his being recognized as the head of the mafia organization in the entire city. A moment worth living for and killing for, it makes for all the sufferings that Michael went through and makes the audience feel that for now on, he is worth being the head of the organization. The evolution of Michaels’ personality is what one can see in this final scene.

The cross-cutting also provides a retrospective idea of the story, allowing the audience to look deeper into the personality of the lead character and to understand the reasons for him to gain the weight necessary for the young man to become the authority with the people even more experienced and with even greater authority.

The scene adds to the magnificence of the godfather and makes it clear that the young man is o longer an inexperienced youth but a man with enough influence to make the criminal authorities thrill with horror and awe in front of the new Godfather. The smile on Michael’s face signifies that he is perfectly aware of what is going on outside of the church, and he accepts that as the fairest and the most just solution of the problem.

Michael has come to the idea that the famous “cosa”, the business, is the most important thing in his life, while the rest can be settled as time passes. The change of the situations, remaining the light switching off and on, from the church to the murder, form the baptism to the slaughter, provides the deepest understanding of the film and the ideas underlying it.

Although the ceremony could be considered as the background which emphasizes the cruelty and rage of the murder, in fact the ceremony of baptizing serves as the silencer for the cruelties of the savage judgment, turning them into the sequence of mishaps, the obstacles which Michael Corleone removes to gain the weight in the society.

The final scene shows that, although the mafia gas suffered very difficult times, it does not give up. Since the clan is headed by another influential man of cool temper and cold and calculating mind, the mafia will survive one more round of fight.

The Problem of Politics

Although it is a doubtful question whether art is supposed to be responsive to the events of the world or to abstract away from the reality, it seems that a movie industry is the sphere which is bound to be responsive to what is going on in the world. Like many great movies, The Godfather also touches upon the issues of the social life, as well as the politics.

The question is whether the issues that the movie raises are precisely the mores of the epoch when the movie was created. Has the entire spectrum of the political and social issues of the century been depicted in the movie is the question to discuss.

Since the century of the gangs’ rule was one of the most picturesque episodes of the twentieth century evolution, it well deserved depicting in a book, or in a movie, or both. It is a well-known fact that organized crime was a pain in the neck of the American justice in the middle of the twentieth century. The numerous gangs seized the power over the political and economical life of the state, and there was nothing that the legal authorities could do.

Practically, all their actions were restricted to either nonintervention, or to complicity in the deeds of the mafia members. Thus, the influence of the mafia power was huge, which is no wonder, for the very word mafia meant “arbitrary rule”, the notorious lynch law. Whenever there was an incident in which mafia was involved, it was bound to stay unsolved, and there was nothing the police could do.

The power of mafia was more than impressive in the distant 60ies. People dared not speak of the dreadful bandits who killed without mercy and could not be corrupted or annihilated. The members of the mafia seemed to be invulnerable to any influence form the outside, and the only hope for the rest of the people was that the mafia members are busy enough with the consociation. The spheres of their influence were the prior aim of their actions, while the mere mortals did not interest the giants of crime.

The fact that they did not pay attention to the innocent civilians was somewhat soothing for the anxious dwellers of New York of 60ies, since the people could be sure about their own safety and well-being. However, it was well understood that no one could be secured against the riots that could run as the mafia started acting.

Because of the increasing influence of the organization and the police along with the government unable to do anything to fight the rising tide of corruption and the influence from the outside, the citizen felt insecure and dependant on mafia – on the people who knew no mercy and were guided only by their own understanding of the law and order, completely different fro the one which was established in the society.

The representatives of the mafia were actually the new layer of society, the ones who were above the existing justice and the laws of morality suggested by the mere mortals. Although also following their traditions and their specific understanding of what a decent man must and must not do, they made the impression so terrifying that ordinary people could not withstand the very thought of living next to the members of the clan.

With regard to the situation described above, it becomes clear that it was impossible to take the mafia issues out the scope of the audience and the writers. The world needed someone to speak of the people who have been the bugbear of the society for a sufficient amount of time. Because of the scale of the problem, it needed a sufficient consideration, for the mafia families captured almost every sphere of people’s political and economical life.

In fact, the mafia families created an empire within a state, the empire invulnerable and impossible to defeat. The conflicts between the clans was a clash of strong wills and even stronger arms, with everyone who was somewhat connected to the mafia business running a serious danger.

The mafia was practically impossible to defeat, and the only hope for the citizens was that the members of different clans will finally destroy each other and the new order, so unusual and savage for the citizen of the civilized country. Indeed, the latter saw the descendants of Sicily as sort of civilized barbarians who could behave in the society with the due decency and with the politeness worth of a king, but who did not hesitate to kill the person whose point of view contradicted theirs.

On the other hand, there is an idea that it is the society which drives the filmmakers to create the movies with specific morals conflicting with the ones already established. Thus, the films which represent the morals new to the society are aimed at the specific needs of the one. Whenever there is a system represented, the people who area part of this system are subconsciously trying to test this system, checking whether there can be any other way to create a just system functioning on another basis.

In this respect, the movies in question serve as a kind of a valve for letting off steam. The idea is that people need some outlet for their emotions. However well the social system may function, there is always an air of irritation rising now and again about its imperfection, and people feel the urge to escape from the existing reality to see what happens if the imaginary vision of the world comes true. In contrast to the previous idea of the films depicting the reality of the New York streets, this idea can be dangerous.

Once idealizing the world of gangsters, people might take the means of mafia as the model for their social behavior, which may result in the future social tragedies. One of the most important points of the cinema is that it idealizes the characters it creates. Thus, hundreds of people are trying to imitate the heroes which the films create, and forget to live their own lives.

Since the images created by the cinema and the live people are incompatible, a huge conflict emerges, and the only way out is to accept the model of behavior suggested by the society, however unpleasant and inappropriate it seems to the spectator. Unfortunately, it is not often that the result of fighting the movies virtual reality ends up in the victory of the spectator.

On the contrary, it is often that the man is consumed by the world which has been suggested by the film directors to him. The situation becomes even more complicated as the spectator understands that he has been trapped in the image of the hero whom he has thought up himself. The image which people wanted to see on the TV-screen so much suddenly turned into an enemy of their own.

It is quite understood that the entertainment industry never contradicts the will of the audience, and in case people want to see something, they get it immediately. Because of the cinema focusing on what people want, not on what they need, there is a constant conflict between the reality and the illusion which the cinema creates.

Although the images of the heroes which cinema creates are the imprint of the century with all its famous personalities and the deeds of theirs, the audience fails to understand that these are the ideas, not the live people whom they see in the movie. Thus, the audience gets trapped into the pit of their own wishes and ambitions.

Indeed, following the footsteps of the famous gangsters and the other people of huge success is alluring, especially if the latter are portrayed as the people of great will and influence. As the audience watches the adventures and the peripeteia of the gangsters’ lives, the audience feels that becoming dangerous is another step to greatness.

Unfortunately, some of them try to put the newly acquired knowledge into practice. With all regard to the art o cinema, it must be well remembered that film directors merely try to take a snapshot of the epoch, but not to create the model for all people to follow. Indeed, the action movie heroes are an attractive material to apply to the everyday life. However, for the sake of one’s own safety and the well-being of the rest, this must not be done.

Thus, the question whether these are the people or the film directors who make the anti-heroes appear on the screen remains open. Such is the specificity of film-making that all the elements of a man’s life including the social and the political ones find their place in the moviemaking process.

However, it still seems that the impact of the society on the movie industry drives the latter to create the movies of the kind. Without the historical prerequisites, it would have been impossible to create the movies of the kind. Still, whatever the reasons for the given movies to be created are, there is no doubt that they are the masterpieces which are taken into the pattern of the art of the twentieth century to make the full picture of what the epoch was like.

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6 Reasons Why “The Godfather: Part II” Is The Best Movie In The Trilogy

Film critics and historians all agree that “The Godfather”, released in 1972, is one of the greatest films ever made. It plays somewhat like a Shakespearean tragedy as the youngest son, who’s been shielded from the family business of organized crime, must assume power as the Godfather to protect and keep his family together.

The movie would go on to become the highest grossing film of the year, and won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Film critics have also hailed the movie as a masterpiece in cinematic storytelling.

It’s surprising that Francis Ford Coppola was able to deliver such a powerful film with all the pressure he was under at the time; the studio behind the film wanted to fire Coppola, and a replacement director was present on set during a good duration of the production waiting to take over if Coppola was axed. The studio also disapproved of his choices of actors, especially Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, and Coppola had to fight hard to get both men cast in their now iconic roles.

The studio also didn’t want to make “The Godfather” a period piece and instead of taking place in New York, the executives wanted the story to take place in Kansas City. Coppola’s sister Talia Shire, who plays the character Connie in the film, had this say about the uncertainty and chaos in the first film’s production: “No one knew when you were going to be fired on the first movie, so the thing is get enough footage in the can, keep going, keep shooting.”

The up and coming director at the time overcame huge obstacles and created a piece of art that has entertained cinephiles for decades, but Coppola’s greatest accomplishment was creating a sequel that, on many levels, surpassed the original masterpiece. “The Godfather” romanticized the life of organized crime by telling the story as a family drama while “The Godfather: Part II”, released in 1974, gives an unflinching look at the dark side of power and vice, giving the sequel a more realistic portrayal of the Mafia, and making the second movie the superior film in the “Godfather” trilogy.

1. The Origins of Don Corleone

Vito murders Don Fanucci from The Godfather Part II

Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Don Corleone is one for the ages. The performance transcends the craft of acting, because Brando disappears and the viewer actually believes Don Vito Corleone is a living breathing person instead of an actor playing a role.

The sequel tells the story of how a young Vito Andolini escapes certain death in his birthplace of Corleone, Sicily after his mother and father are murdered by a local Mafia Don. The young boy travels to America, living the immigrant experience all by himself, and Vito’s last name is changed from Andolini to Corleone during a clerical error when he arrives at Ellis Island.

Robert De Niro takes the mantle from Brando and accomplishes the same acting feat by becoming a younger Vito Corleone; his performance is just as powerful as Brando’s, and being a method actor, De Niro lived in Sicily prior to filming to learn the local dialect. Just like Brando, De Niro would go on and win an Oscar, this time for Best Supporting Actor and is the only American actor to win an Oscar by reciting his dialogue in a foreign language.

We watch as De Niro delivers a restrained and subtle performance of a hard-working immigrant who struggles to raise his small family after losing his job. Vito is reluctantly introduced to a life of crime by his neighbor Peter Clemenza, but takes the leadership role once Vito assassinates a local neighborhood gangster Don Fanucci.

De Niro’s performance is brilliant because throughout the transformation, he remains humble and devoid of ego, and this storyline retains the same romanticism from the first film as opposed to the darker storyline belonging to Michael Corleone.

2. Father and Son

The movie juxtaposes the lives of Vito Corleone and his son Michael Corleone at similar ages, and is a prime example of “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” Vito slowly rises to power and would go on to achieve wealth and power, control over politicians and judges, the ability to form alliances with other powerful gangsters, and to have many loyal capos to do his bidding.

However, Don Corleone’s sins have been passed on to Michael. As his father had influence in the world of politics, his son is being dragged before a congressional hearing to testify about his connections to organized crime, and a local senator in his new hometown of Las Vegas shows nothing but content for Michael. A former business associate of Don Corleone, Hyman Roth, is trying kill his son in secret and utilizes one of his loyal capos to undermine Michael’s power.

The foundation that Don Corleone built is coming back to haunt his son, bringing him nothing but grief and tragedy. The parallel storylines prove that no one can escape karma, and even if Don Corleone didn’t suffer or pay for all of his sins, his son Michael must surely answer for them.

3. Francis Ford Coppola

The young director burst onto the scene as part of the new Hollywood wave of filmmakers; after co-writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Patton” starring George C. Scott, Hollywood took notice. After several well-known directors turned down the opportunity to direct “The Godfather”, including Sergio Leone, Peter Bogdanovich, and Costa-Gavras, producer Robert Evans wanted an Italian-American to direct the film, and Francis Ford Coppola was hired for the job.

However, soon after signing on as director, the nightmare began for the young filmmaker when Mario Puzo’s novel became a huge bestseller, and suddenly, studio executives had second thoughts about hiring Coppola.

The legendary filmmaker summed up his experience during that time: “’The Godfather’ was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn’t like the cast. They didn’t like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn’t like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn’t at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I’d ever get another job.”

When “The Godfather” was released, it became a commercial and critical success, and Paramount wanted to produce a sequel. However, Coppola didn’t want to direct the next installment after the horrible treatment he received from the studio; Coppola agreed to produce the next film, but wanted Martin Scorsese to direct the sequel. The studio made nice with Coppola by buying him a Mercedes, and he eventually agreed to direct Part Two.

The director had this to say about the approach to the second film: “I worked very hard on ‘The Godfather: Part II’ to try to have you feel what these people were feeling.” One of the strengths of the sequel is the way it pulls in the viewer emotionally from watching Vito Corleone’s mother being blown away with a shotgun in his home in Sicily, or years later in New York when an adult Vito refuses a handout by his former boss after losing his job, or when Michael Corleone discovers his brother is the traitor within his family while in Cuba and gives him a kiss before reciting the line: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart.”

While the first “Godfather” was more of a nostalgic experience, the sequel has more heart, even though the second film is darker than the first. Coppola’s skill at bringing out incredible performances from his actors, as well as his storytelling abilities, would earn him an Oscar for Best Director, and Coppola is the reason why “The Godfather: Part II” is hailed as one of the greatest films of all time.

4. Gordon Willis

The Death of Fredo Corleone from The Godfather

The late cinematographer Gordon Willis is one of the most influential directors of photography of all time. His style of underexposing his films and his use of shadows prompted his best friend and fellow cinematographer Conrad Hall to give him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness”. His style of photography has influenced films up to this very day; the technique of lighting he pioneered is known as “crushing the blacks”.

For the “Godfather” movies, Willis created a yellow tone for the films that has been copied in just about every movie that’s a period piece. Willis had this to say about the visual contrast in “The Godfather”: “You can decide this movie has a dark palette. But you can’t spend two hours on a dark palette. So you’ve got this high-key, Kodachrome wedding going on. Now you go back inside and it’s dark again. You can’t, in my mind, put both feet into a bucket of cement and leave them there for the whole movie. It doesn’t work. You must have this relativity.”

For The Godfather: Part II”, Willis made the film darker as Michael Corleone becomes a darker person himself, and even this prince of darkness would later admit that for the second film, he went too far with underexposing, especially the scene between Michael and his mother when he asked her if it’s possible to lose your family. Coppola described Willis’ style: “He has a natural sense of structure and beauty, not unlike a Renaissance artist.”

5. Lee Strasburg

Strasburg was a legend in the acting community and is considered the father of method acting. As the director of the Actors Studio in New York, he trained countless actors, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Jane Fonda.

Playing the role of Hyman Roth, Strasburg proved that not only was he a great teacher of the craft, but he was also an incredible actor himself. The character of Hyman Roth is based off of the real-life gangster Meyer Lansky, and Roth seems more dangerous than the entire five families which Michael eliminated in the first “Godfather” film.

Roth attacks Michael on two fronts: he tries to have him killed, and he has former associates of the Corleone family testify against Michael at a congressional hearing, which can lead to incarceration. Michael and Roth play a cat-and-mouse game of who can eliminate who first, and Strasburg gives a powerful performance of a old man pretending he has one foot in the grave, all while plotting to bring down Michael Corleone.

6. Losing one’s soul

“You won't take my children!”abortion reveal scene from The Godfather Part II

In “The Godfather”, we rooted for Michael Corleone when he avenged his father’s assassination attempt by gunning down Sollozzo and a crooked police captain inside a restaurant. When he took out the heads of the five families, Moe Green, and his brother-in-law once his father passed away, the audiences supported the bloodshed because we all knew Michael did it reluctantly as he tried to protect his family.

But in “The Godfather: Part II”, Michael is a very different man; he’s embraced his role as the Don and has become a darker individual, one who’s intoxicated with the power he wields. Michael gives the orders to murder an innocent prostitute so they can frame and control a senator, and at this point, the audience can no longer support his bloodshed.

He exiles his wife once Michael learns she had an abortion, snatching her children away from her. After finding out his brother betrayed him in unwittingly helping Hyman Roth, he exiles his brother and puts a death sentence over his head.

And once Michael’s mother passes away, he pretends to forgive his older brother Fredo as he gives the signal to his enforcer Rocco to proceed with the hit. Toward the end of the movie, Michael has outwitted Hyman Roth, but is so hellbent on killing his nemesis that he sends one of his best enforcers on a suicide mission to kill the elderly gangster.

When Michael finally kills Fredo, we realize he’s lost his soul and become a monster. This is the brilliance of “The Godfather: Part II”; it strips away the romanticism that pop culture has with the gangster lifestyle, letting the viewer know that the price is too high to pay for the wealth and power that comes with organized crime. And the last scene is almost poetic as Michael sits all alone in his backyard contemplating, realizing he can never get his soul back.

Author Bio: R. Prince is a filmmaker from Harlem, New York and the author of the book How to Roll a Blunt for Dummies.

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Movie Review: The Godfather

The film that is analyzed in the paper is The Godfather directed by Francis Ford Coppola. This film is considered a masterpiece of cinematography. If to choose one moment, which has absorbed all splendor and charm of The Godfather, there is one scene that suits the best. On the background of the Statue of Liberty, Clemenza, a capo of Don Corleone, is waiting for his helper to kill an ordinary Mafioso. When the dirty work is done and they can go, Clemenza gently reminds the helper: “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”. It is not just a note of black humor in the midst of a serious film. In this phrase, there is the whole dynamics underlying in The Godfather – from the shackles of the criminal world to the warm family ties. Coppola’s masterpiece extremely naturally shows both these sides – with an operatic scale or with a touching intimacy. This fact is just one of the many advantages of the film, which undoubtedly ranks among the most outstanding achievements of cinema. The Godfather can be safely put on a par with the best representatives of the arts of any kind. The topic of the paper is to analyze the film The Godfather and its influence on subsequent cinematography.

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The Godfather is the epic gangster drama directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is a screen adaptation of the novel by Mario Puzo. The producer of the film is Albert Ruddy. The cameraman is Gordon Willis (Caldwell, 2011). The main roles are played by Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, and James Caan (Caldwell, 2011). Filming took place over four months in mid-1971 (Caldwell, 2011). The premiere was in March 1972 (Caldwell, 2011). Despite a low budget, The Godfather grossed whopping cash charges. The author Chris Messenger (2012) states that “The Godfather films were stunningly powerful for audiences all over the world” (p. 4). The film won the love of viewers thought the world.

The film takes place in America in 1945-1955. Don Corleone conducts business under the old rules. However, there are different times and there are people who want to change the existing order. The story begins during a festive reception in the house of Don Vito Corleone in honor of the wedding of his daughter Connie. The house is full of guests as the Corleones are one of the most influential families in America. Numerous connections of the “godfather” provide a protection for most of the Sicilian clans in the territory of the New World. This fact is a guarantor of the capital increase and authority of the family. This situation does not suit the competitors. They decide to announce war to an influential clan. They have tried to kill Vito Corleone. However, everything ends with the injury not threatening to life. The injury temporarily displays the “godfather” of the game. At this point, one of Vito’s sons – Michael Corleone – comes to the fore. He is determined to win this war against other mafia clans whatever it may cost. The Godfather depicts not the mafia but the family and family relations in the broadest and most concrete sense of the word. The difference between the film’s story and its plot consists in the fact that the story tells the viewers about the business of the family but the plot – about firm family ties in this family.

Immediately after the film was released in the world rolled, it became clear that it is a masterpiece. Critics and audiences unanimously admired the epic gangster drama. Both Coppola and Al Pacino became idols for millions of viewers. Significantly that the interest in the film did not cease with time. Even in the XXI century, The Godfather is considered one of the best films in cinematography. This film was found extremely significant in the United States and around the world. The direction of Francis Ford Coppola in conjunction with the game of outstanding actors and a wonderful script provided the film a success among critics and ordinary viewers. It can be said that the film contains much violence. However, in this case, it is only an artistic means for the reflection of the director’s vision and the creation of the appropriate atmosphere in the film.

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However, the main drama of the film is the tragedy of Michael Corleone – a young man, a war hero, whose life and even soul is broken under the pressure of his responsibility, power, and interests of the family. His transformation into a cruel and treacherous boss is a one of the most elaborately illustrated metamorphosis in the history of world cinema.

The social message of The Godfather is ultimately bogged down in an insoluble paradox. The public condemnation of the myth of the “good” America as an agent of civilization along with a fighter with the savages and people outside the law cannot be separated from the propaganda of family values. The protection of these collective and limited values is conservative. The main goal of all illegal activities of Don Corleone is the power and prosperity of his clan and not himself.

The Godfather could not become such a famous film without skillful usages of technological effects in the movie. The direction of the film is perfect. In the film, there is rigorous directorial control – on camera movements, colors, sound, and music. The result in terms of technology of cinema is incredible. The film should be seen for the story structure of the screenplay of Mario Puzo and the technicalities. The Godfather is full of improbable set pieces, moody lighting, and an excellent acting that has become a legend. Most scenes of the film are made in the dark rooms. The location is cloaked in dark shadows and only one part of actors’ faces is usually visible. The director uses the dark color palette when the Mafiosi meet behind the closed door. It adds the shadowy subject, which is explored. In the book Essential Cinema , it is stated that “The Godfather and the Godfather: Part II was the director’s signature style: an affection for theatrical mise-en-scene: stagey set pieces captured in long takes and a penchant for chiaroscuro lighting; a narrative focus on the family melodrama as opposed to the practical execution of crimes” (Lewis, 2013, p. 255). The director applies techniques of the camera angles to show the drama effect. Many critics note the incredible work of the cameraman – Gordon Willis (Lewis, 2013). Aesthetic choices in the movie reflect the views on the period depicted in the film. All the work was based on the thoughtful combined process of the whole team involved in the film. Music is a separate character in the film. Sentimental hits that sound on the record and on the radio are intertwined with various Catholic rites. The composer Nino Rota felt and reflected the task of the director.

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Henceforth, The Godfather became classic. The film has anticipated the process of the resurrection of dying genres. In many ways, it has overcome the limits of the genre of the classic gangster drama. Another distinctive feature of the film is that it includes much privacy. If Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde opened the door to a new wave of filmmakers, The Godfather made the whole generation of young, bearded graduates of film schools threatening to break into the mainstream to look respectful (Lewis, 2013). In such a way, the film of Francis Ford Coppola made a great influence on future directors. The emergence of such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Matthew Robbins, Carroll Ballard, and others was possible only due to the resounding success of The Godfather (Lewis, 2013). It not only changed the landscape of the film industry but had an enormous impact on a film as such. In a broader sense, The Godfather became the epitome of organized crime, Italian, masculinity, and reverent attitude to the family. Orders of the real mafia have affected the film. However, the film equally influenced the demeanor and the image of the mafia. Despite this fact, the mafia has also had a great contribution on the film. The film was shot under the watchful eye of the Italian Mafia, which has made its adjustments in the movie. In such a way, it can be said that such a current in the society as the mafia has led to the creation of the film.

The film has been criticized for the popularization of crime and demythologization (Lewis, 2013). However, it offers a frank portrayal of violence and murder while avoiding the image of Italian Americans simply as cruel and primitive blood-thirsty monsters. It is combined with a radical critique of the dominant American values that were absent before. The film has a subsequent impact on cinematography. The image of Don Corleone became the prototype for Carmine Falcone from the universe of DC Comics, Batman’s enemy (Lewis, 2013).

The film The Godfather was released for the first time in 1972. The spectator watches a story of a Sicilian family settled in the United States. At the time, this film received many reviews and won many awards. It still attracts the attention of viewers. In many ways, it is a perfect movie that combines the tastes of the audience, critics, and film industry. The Godfather has a strong storyline, memorable characters, superbly organized action, and emotional intensity befitting any classics of the genre. There are enough subtexts and difficulties to withstand the keenest critique analysis.

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The purpose of the paper is to analyze and study one of the most outstanding films in the history of cinematography – The Godfather . During the course, I have learned to analyze and examine various aspects of films. Without a doubt, it helped me in writing this paper. At first it was hard to analyze the film from the point of view of directing, camera work, and work of the actors. However, after reading great deal of literature and studying the comments of many critics, it became easier to form an independent opinion regarding the movie.

To write this paper, it was necessary to watch the film The Godfather several times. Every time, I have noticed different aspects and details in this movie. At first, I watched this film as an ordinary viewer not paying attention to simple details that make The Godfather the masterpiece in cinematography. Nevertheless, analyzing every scene of the movie, I started to notice many small nuances such as the angles of the camera, the shadow in the room, and the expression on the actors’ faces. These details make the atmosphere in the film complete and perfect.

There are several film theories that help analyze the films. All of them analyze the movies to comprehend how they founded reactions and responses in viewers and what they mean. To analyze the film, it is necessary to use not a single approach or a theory but a combination to receive the full meaning of the movie. However, to analyze The Godfather , the genre theory was mostly used. This film is considered a drama and a gangster film. Both these genres make adjustments to the plot.

Through analyzing the film, it can be gained that the film is consisted of small parts that constitute the whole movie. It is necessary to watch every film noticing every scene. It has changed my way of watching the movies. Previously, I have not paid enough attention to work of actors or a camera. I have just watched a plot and a storyline. However, The Godfather has demonstrated that there is something more that the story in the film.

During this course, I was able to gain such skills as watchfulness, curiosity, and scrupulosity. I think that will be extremely useful in my future life and career. This course also helped me understand that art and films in particular plays a significant role in people’s life. Every good film leaves a place for reflection.

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The Godfather movie review & film summary (1972)
The Godfather movie review & film summary (1972)
Review of The Film "The Godfather": [Essay Example], 534 words
Review of The Film "The Godfather". Due to the fact that I like reading the criminal news, stories, history as well as watching criminal movies I jut could not pass by legendary "The Godfather". This film has everything from incredible activity scenes to world celebrated on-screen characters. This motion picture stars Marlon Brando, Al ...
The Godfather movie review & film summary (1972)
Roger Ebert. January 1, 1972. 4 min read. We know from Gay Talese's book Honor Thy Father that being a professional mobster isn't all sunshine and roses. More often, it's the boredom of stuffy rooms and a bad diet of carry-out food, punctuated by brief, terrible bursts of violence. This is exactly the feel of "The Godfather," which ...
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Rated. R. Runtime. 177 min. Release Date. 03/24/1972. Myths examine origins and establish traditions, and a rich mythology sustains The Godfather. Since debuting in 1972, writers and viewers have tried to encapsulate what makes the film a watershed moment in cinema history. Based on Mario Puzo's best-selling gangster epic, the film explores ...
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Analysis. The Godfather is a film that offers an insight into society, social structures, and social relations of supremacy, violence, honor, crime, justice, corruption, and other forms of evils in America society in the 1930s. The first part of the film reflects Corleone's crime. It is Don or the Godfather (Marlon Brando) who controls the city in the mid 1940s.
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Mario Puzo was an American author and screenwriter. He is best known for his novel "The Godfather," which was adapted into a film by Coppola. The movie was released in 1972, during a period of political and social upheaval in the United States. The movie's themes of power, corruption, and loyalty resonated with audiences at the time.
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The Godfather is a world-famous masterpiece directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1972. According to multiple expert reviews and public opinion, the movie is nearly peerless film-making (Chiang). The film has a marvelous screenplay, flawless cast, excellent camera-work, and mindful composition. The present paper offers an analysis of the movie ...
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The much-acclaimed movie 'The Godfather' introduces one to the life of a multi-ethnic American family that was of American and Italian background. The film paints a picture of life as it was in the 1940s and part of the 50's, majorly zeroing in on the most prominent family as far as crime was concerned. The film was directed, Francis Ford ...
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The Godfather Movie Analysis Film Studies Essay. The Godfather (1972) is a one of a kind movie; it is even considered by many an American classic. The American Film Institute (AFI) has The Godfather listed at number two in 2008 as one of the greatest films in American culture today. This movie has everything from great action scenes to world ...
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The Godfather is one of those timeless movies that stands as a benchmark for how to craft a true epic that can stand the test of time. Boasting a colourful host of characters, amazing plot twists within its sprawling storyline and impressive cinematography, The Godfather is a classic and easily one of the best crime films ever released. While ...
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Essay On The Godfather. 701 Words 3 Pages. Sarah Kull. Jordan. Contemporary Literature. 18 October 2014. Film Review The film, The Godfather, was released on March 24, 1972. The time period that the movie was set in was 1945, which was the time period of the Mafia. This film is based around two families fighting throughout the film.
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The Godfather the Movie Essay. THE GODFATHER, made in 1974, details the Corleone crime family in Manhattan during the mid 1930s. The Don, Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando, leads his organization against a relentless narcotics push by a rival family, the Sollozzos. Vito Caleone does not want anything to do with drugs because he believes ...
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At the end of the day "The Godfather Part II" enhances our understanding and appreciation of the legendary characters presented in the original film. It surpasses it, in part, because it manages to make its predecessor even better. Gerardo Valero. Gerardo Valero is lives in Mexico City with his wife Monica.
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