Critics on The Godfather Films

The international hour-and-a-half to two-hour feature film, despite its obvious use of art-cinema techniques (Griffith's Intolerance, Gance's Napoleon, and Murnau's Sunrise, are three mature early examples of enterprising creativity geared to a general public eager for spectacle, drama, and romance), still adheres to narrative conventions and expectations. The Godfather and The Godfather II are painterly nostalgic tableaux of an irretrievable past. Their selfconscious technique and revisionist impulses are signs of the cinema's late arrival at a full-blown modernism. Its early fling was short lived and, confined mainly to experimental shorts, of no commercial impact. The feature film, commercially dominant and perhaps wary of unprofitable innovations infiltrating its well-developed formulas of success, skips past the inherent dangers with a steady diet of dream-factory product, spiked occasionally by a borrowed flourish of avant-garde style and/or attitude (a quickie montage or gratuitous wipe or time-and-space-scrambling superimposition). Modernist viewpoints, though sometimes implicitly hanging in the air throughout certain sophisticated films (Singin' in the Rain,Scaramouche, Ulmer's The Black Cat), had to wait until the dismantling of the studios and the arrival of fresh, better-educated, and independent-minded cineastes who felt unconstrained about displaying the changes in visual and narrative understanding necessary to bring the medium up-to-date (Arthur Penn, Ingmar Bergmann, Wim Wenders). Only then do films, by and large, accede that significant shifts have occurred in assumptions about the making and viewing of feature films. So “modernism, ” quick to take over the galleries around the turn of the previous century, had a much harder time speaking its piece on neighborhood screens, content to make sparing, nonfundamental appearances as illusion-threatening transitional devices (montages, etc. ), but destined, nonetheless, to become an intrinsic part of a seamless mastery of visual articulation when it peaks in what is sometimes referred to as the “high forties. ” By the time of films like Point Blank,Bonnie and Clyde, and The Godfather, the takeover is complete, and they can, without much risk, ask the audience to pay heed to and enjoy some new kinds of moviegoing experience.

Organized Crime in USA

Organized crime has always been a subject of fascination in popular culture and a major criminal justice concern for more than a half century. Books and films about it are abundant, and many such as The Godfather novel and films have a worldwide popularity. The names of famous (or infamous) gangsters with their colorful aliases and street names are almost as well known to the public as they are to law enforcement officials. Most important, organized crime has survived changing ideas of what is illegal: As bootlegging gave way to drug trafficking and as prostitution expands into video pornography on the Internet, organized crime continues to resist suppression and eradication.

"Godfathers" analogous to chief executive officers or an informal network of criminal activity conducted from time to time by a gang of local hoodlums, it has an existence and permanence that go beyond individual membership. Because it is organized, it differs from street crime, which is more episodic and does not typically involve the degree of planning or the interconnected linkages of legal and illegal activities that are characteristic of most organized criminals. Second, organized crime is protected, depending on corruption and bribery of police and regulatory criminal justice agencies. Third, organized criminal activity encompasses a wide range of illegal activities whose main objective is to provide goods and services to a demanding public that has an appetite for illicit goods--drugs, for example--and services including various types of gambling, loansharking, and sexual activities that are legally forbidden. Based on these descriptions, organized crime can be broadly defined as a persisting form of criminal activity tied to a client-public that demands goods and services defined as illegal. Further, it is a structure or network of individuals who produce, supply, protect, or distribute those goods and services and use the profits earned to expand their activities into other illegitimate or legitimate activities and do so by intimidating victims and criminal rivals who compete for customers by means of violence and corrupting police and public officials with the aim of getting their protection.

Although organized crime thrives in cities and is popularly associated with immigrants, its social and economic roots reach back into the early history of the United States. That heritage is represented by the famous outlaw gangs of the western frontier--lawless bands led by the Daltons, the James brothers, Jesse and Frank, and Billy the Kid. Many of these gangs developed out of groups of gunmen regulators who enforced order in large areas ruled by powerful wealthy families of ranchers and cattle barons. As early as the 1890s, there had been allegations that Italian immigrants were bringing with them a secret criminal organization called the Mafia. After World War I in 1919, the immigration renewed fear of an alien criminal conspiracy. However, Irish and Jewish gangsters had a grip on public notoriety. In the late 1930s and 1940s Thomas Dewey, Samuel Seabury, William O'Dwyer, District Attorney of Brooklyn, and the federal Treasury officers in Chicago exposed gangs of racketeers, extortionists, and murderers. In 1951 the Kefauver Committee of the U.S. Senate concluded in a sensational report to the nation that there was a nationwide organization of the Mafia in the United States. Since that time, the debate over the involvement of Italian Americans in organized crime has centered on the existence of a Mafia, also known as La Cosa Nostra, in the United States.

It has been fiction, and not fact, that made organized crime and Italian domination of it a household idea in America and elsewhere. The Godfather films of the early and mid-1970s made the character of Don Vito Corleone and his family symbolically representative of the power, influence, and wealth of organized crime. But, as will be seen, organized crime in the United States wears many faces, and this is a truth that is often ignored or forgotten.

Taken from: Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States: From Capone's Chicago to the New Urban Underworld. Contributors: Robert J. Kelly - author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2000.

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ACTORS:

Al Pacino

Brad Pitt

Brandon Routh

Clint Eastwood

Colin Farrell