Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Premise: The aging patriarch of a mafia family (Marlon
Brando) passes his duties to his son (Al Pacino).
What Works: New Hollywood filmmakers often
redefined genre and opened up its possibilities, such as George Lucas with Star
Wars, Martin Scorsese with Mean
Streets, and Steven Spielberg with Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. Coppola does that in The Godfather,
creating an American epic that is both sweeping and intimate. The grandiosity of
the saga is spread across the scope of the story from beginning to end but
within the individual scenes the picture often goes for the personal stories of
familial ties, and much of this is familiar to the audience as the Coreleone
family deals with death, sibling rivalry, an abusive in-law, and a family
business. The balance of the micro and the macro is done perfectly in this film
to create a portrait of intimate detail that spans multiple generations. The
Godfather has several classic performances. The most visible is Marlon
Brando as Don Vito Corleone. The character is larger than life but Brando’s
performance allows the man a great deal of empathy as he struggles with his
roles as a businessman and a father. James Caan stars as Sonny, the troublesome
older brother who is at least partly a psychopath. Caan brings a lot of energy
to the role and is a terrific counterpoint to Al Pacino’s role as Michael.
Pacino’s performance is quite different from his roles in the later films of
his career. Here he is more controlled and does a lot of acting through silence
and subtle actions. The corruption of Michael is very smartly staged and happens
so easily yet convincingly that it is a shock to the audience to see what he has
become by the end of the film. The cinematography and direction of The
Godfather are an excellent demonstration of reinterpreting the styles of a
previous era and presenting them in ways that both reflect past entries and
establish new a new style. In this case, The Godfather uses darkness and
shadows the way noir films like The
Maltese Falcon, Kiss
Me Deadly, or Howard Hawk’s 1932 version of Scarface did, but elevates the style and the genre from pulp entertainment to high craft.
Retroactively, the style of The Godfather has come to influence
contemporary directors such as David Fincher and Christopher Nolan. As a New
Hollywood picture, The Godfather is a reinterpretation of the story of
the immigrant family, which is a uniquely American narrative style. The film joins the
family with their success intact and catalogues the passing of the family
business from one generation to the next. This is also an American Dream success
story, but it is twisted by placing that success within a criminal context. As such, The
Godfather ties together various elements of our culture, ethnic and
economic, into a image of the American Dream gone awry.
What Doesn’t: Viewers who grew up on the
violence, noise, and style of later gangster films like Brian DePalma’s Scarface may have trouble adjusting to the quieter style The Godfather. That’s
not to denigrate the film, but to say that it is quite different.
DVD extras: The most recent release of The
Godfather is “The Coppola Restoration” which makes minor adjustments to
the picture and cleans up the quality, making it the best presentation of the
film to date. The “Coppola Restoration” box set includes of all three Godfather films, a documentary, additional scenes, featurettes, trailers, profiles on
the filmmakers, photo galleries, and storyboards.
Bottom Line: The Godfather is significant for enjoying commercial and critical success but it is also one of the premier films of New Hollywood, as it acknowledges the legacy of American cinema to that point as well as American immigrant narratives, and then reinterprets these elements for the contemporary audience.