The Godfather is 50. One of the most admired and influential films ever made, it premiered in a New York theatre on March 15, 1972. Paramount Pictures released a digitally remastered 50th anniversary edition of the film in February 2022, overseen by director Francis Ford Coppola, now 82 years old. The American Film Institute ranks it as the second-greatest American film ever made (after Citizen Kane). A 2014 survey of 2,120 Hollywood professionals rated it as the greatest.
By bland technical definitions, The Godfather, the story of a Mafia family, is a crime film. But by such definitions, Citizen Kane is a film about newspapers. In fact, the universal critical and popular success of the film may be due to the fact that no one saw it as a crime film.
Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) is Godfather, head of a Mafia family in the New York area. His obvious successor is his eldest son Sonny (James Caan). His second son Fredo (John Cazale) is a vacillating weakling, and his youngest, Michael (Al Pacino), has been kept away from the family business and groomed to be a civil all-American citizen. Michael dates a nice Anglo-Saxon girl Kay (Diane Keaton).
War breaks out between the Mafia families, and Michael joins in—this is both force of circumstance and his own decision. The film ends with him succeeding Don Vito as the new crime boss—more cold-hearted and clinically ruthless than his father.
But this plot summary cannot give the faintest idea of the experience that The Godfather is—the virtuoso direction, the extraordinary casting right down to the random mafioso smoking in the background, the cinematography that uses low lighting and deep shadows to create a unique ambience.
The making of the film is an epic story on its own. Paramount Pictures was in dire straits after a string of big-budget flops. Author Mario Puzo, in desperate need of $10,000 to pay off his gambling debts, sold his half-finished novel to the studio for a song. At least seven directors were approached and they all passed. Even Coppola, a near-unknown director who had never had a hit, refused initially because he thought the book was “pretty cheap stuff”. But he too was neck deep in debt and was convinced by his friend George Lucas (Star Wars) to take the job.
Coppola and Puzo believed that Brando was the perfect actor for the Don Vito role, but Paramount pushed back hard—Brando was a faded star and had been blacklisted for outrageous behaviour. Till almost the last minute, the studio would not accept the rookie Al Pacino as Michael—because he was too short (5 feet 6). All through the making of the film, the studio and Coppola had serious creative differences—the director was nearly sacked on several occasions.
The real-life Mafia tried hard to stop the film being made. Threats were issued. Producer Al Ruddy’s car was shot up. Finally, a New York mob boss glanced through the script and gave the go-ahead with one demand—the word “Mafia” should not be mentioned. This was done. But when the film was released, the gangsters loved it so much that they started walking and talking like Don Vito.
“(The Godfather) made our life…seem honourable,” Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, of the Gambino crime family, told The New York Times many years later. “I would use lines in real life like ‘I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse’, and I would always tell people, just like from The Godfather, ‘If you have an enemy, that enemy becomes my enemy.’”
But why is this film so loved by law-abiding audiences around the world? Coppola, when re-reading the “pretty cheap” novel after Paramount contacted him, had an epiphany—he could make The Godfather an exploration of Italian-American culture and the nature of American capitalism. Organised crime would only be a device.
Nino Rota’s theme music is quiet, nostalgic, elegiac. It evokes lost loves and wistful memories. Anyone listening to it with no idea about the origin of the piece would never imagine that it belongs to a movie about gangsters. The first line of dialogue in the film is “I believe in America”, spoken by an Italian-origin undertaker who seeks justice from Don Vito for the rape of his daughter.
In fact, The Godfather is silent about what criminal activities the Corleones are involved in. We only know that they have some interests in Las Vegas casinos and that Don Vito would never deal in drugs. As the great film critic Roger Ebert wrote: “(Don Vito), this lifelong professional criminal, does nothing that, in context, we can really disapprove of. We see not a single actual civilian victim of organized crime. No women trapped into prostitution. No lives wrecked by gambling. No victims of theft, fraud, or protection rackets. The only police officer with a significant speaking role is corrupt.”
The most important virtue in this way of life is loyalty. “The real world,” wrote Ebert, “is replaced by an authoritarian patriarchy where power and justice flow from the Godfather, and the only villains are traitors.” “Family” is above all. Al Pacino is at his most chilling when tells his brother: “Fredo, you’re my older brother and I love you. But don’t ever take sides against the family.”
The Godfather’s world is a closed universe which co-opts the viewer in its inherent evil—so a brutal crime lord becomes a noble figure. It is also a very male universe. Sonny is an over-sexed philanderer, but beats his sister’s husband almost to death when he suspects him of adultery. In exile in Sicily, Michael falls in love with and marries Appollonia without a second thought for Kay, the faithful fiancee he has left behind. We never get to know Don Vito’s wife’s name, and Sonny’s and Tom Hagen’s wives are barely visible extras.
Looked at through these filters, The Godfather could be termed an intensely regressive film. Yet, because of the sheer artistry invested in every frame and the exceptional acting by the entire cast, it is able to create its own mythology of acceptable immorality.
In an interview to Vanity Fair magazine in 2009, producer Al Ruddy said: “There’s one reason that movie is successful and one reason only: it may be the greatest family movie ever made. It’s a great tragedy of a man and the son he worships, the son who embodied all the hopes he had for his future. ‘I never wanted this for you, Michael.’…And he becomes a gangster too. It’s heartbreaking.” Well, that’s one way—and certainly a valid way—to look at it.
Coppola seems to have been aware of the disturbing aspects. The Godfather II (1974), which also won the Best Picture Oscar (the only time an original film and its sequel have both won), is unrelentingly bleak. It pitilessly tracks the degradation of Michael’s soul as he gets rid of everyone who could have loved him. By the end, he is a powerful but utterly lonely monster.
The world did not need Godfather III (1990), but Coppola had again run up huge debts and succumbed to the commercial guarantee of the Corleones. If you haven’t watched it, do not. Stay with The Godfather, and if you are brave, watch The Godfather II, and abandon Michael to the desolation he deserves.
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