The Godfather (1972)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
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18 films that influenced The Godfather
What critics say influenced The Godfather
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.”
Moviegoers rooted for villains like James Cagney in White Heat and Angels with Dirty Faces, but Al Pacino’s performance as Michael Corleone goes far darker places.
Moviegoers rooted for villains like James Cagney in White Heat and Angels with Dirty Faces, but Al Pacino’s performance as Michael Corleone goes far darker places.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 classic, "The Godfather," is to gangster films what Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" was to super spectaculars.
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Next to Humphrey Bogart's Rick from Casablanca, Oscar winner Marlon Brando's Don Vito may be the most imitated character in screen history.
In the entire history of American cinema only a few other movies—“Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Godfather”—have been loved as much and as well as “Casablanca.”
Generally cited along with Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind and The Godfather as one of the greatest Hollywood films ever made, this winner of three Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Best Screenplay (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, adapting the unpublished play Everybody Comes to Rick's) — needs no plot synopsis, no cast breakdown, no further championing.
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.”
Luchino Visconti's influence, vis a vis his 1963 film "The Leopard," is apparent in Coppola's staging of social scenes like the wedding that serves to introduce the audience to the insular world of the Corleone family.
Like Citizen Kane, The Godfather doesn't age.
In makeup and physical movement instantly evocative of Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane,” Brando does an admirable job as the lord of his domain.
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The phenomenal critical and commercial success of “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967 revived Hollywood (and the American public’s) interest in the crime-gangster-film.
But "The Godfather" as a whole does not sustain this particular interpretation as effectively as did Kurosawa's "The Bad Sleep Well" some years ago.