The Godfather (1972)
Review, Synopsis, Cast, Critics
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IMAGES:
Picture Gallery 1 Miscellaneous Pictures
Picture Gallery 2 Miscellaneous Pictures
Movie Stills
The Godfather Photos
M. Brando & Godfather Posters, Prints, Photos
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THE GODFATHER: DIRECTOR: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA (1972). Screenplay: Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.
Also Known As (USA - Complete title): Mario Puzo's The Godfather
Runtime: 175 min.
Genres: Crime, Gangster, Drama, Las Vegas, Wedding
Country: USA
Language: English / Italian / Latin
Sound Mix: DTS (re-release) / Mono
Color: Color (Technicolor)
CAST:
Marlon Brando: Don Vito Corleone
Al Pacino: Michael Corleone
James Caan: Sonny Corleone
Richard S. Castellano: Pete Clemenza
Robert Duvall: Tom Hagen (consigliere)
Sterling Hayden: Capt. Mark McCluskey
John Marley: Jack Woltz
Richard Conte: Emilio Barzini
Al Lettieri: Virgil Sollozzo
Diane Keaton: Kay Adams
Abe Vigoda: Salvadore "Sally" Tessio
Talia Shire: Connie
Gianni Russo: Carlo Rizzi
John Cazale: Fredo
Rudy Bond: Ottilio Cuneo
Al Martino: Johnny Fontane
Morgana King: Mama Corleone
Lenny Montana: Luca Brasi
John Martino: Paulie Gatto
Salvatore Corsitto: Amerigo Bonasera
Richard Bright: Al Neri
Alex Rocco: Moe Greene
Tony Giorgio: Bruno Tattaglia
Vito Scotti: Nazorine
Tere Livrano: Theresa Hagen
Victor Rendina: Philip Tattaglia
Jeannie Linero: Lucy Mancini
Julie Gregg: Sandra Corleone
Ardell Sheridan: Mrs. Clemenza
Simonetta Stefanelli: Apollonia
Angelo Infanti: Fabrizio
Corrado Gaipa: Don Tommasino
Franco Citti: Calo
Saro Urzì: Vitelli
Widely recognized as one of the greatest of all American films, The Godfather, together with its two sequels, comprises one of the most respected, admired, and beloved sequences in American film history. This original won the Academy Awards for best picture and best adapted screenplay, while star Marlon Brando won the Oscar for best actor. The film combines an engaging narrative, impressive acting performances, and thematic richness to produce a work that is both compelling and thoughtprovoking. Its story of the operations of the Corleone family add to an already rich tradition of American gangster films, while making especially clear that this organized crime family of Italian immigrants is a quintessentially American phenomenon, pursuing the American dream in ways that are paradigmatic of modern capitalist society.
The Godfather begins just after the end of World War II with the elaborate wedding of Connie Corleone (Talia Shire), daughter of Don Vito Corleone (Brando), to Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), a small-time hood. This grand communal festival speaks volumes about the traditional family values represented by the Corleone syndicate under the leadership of the aging, and old-fashioned, Vito. But it also announces the beginning of the deterioration of family traditions. Many of the attendees are show business personalities and others who represent a more modern era in American society. One of these is Vito's youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), an Ivy League graduate and recent war hero, who arrives still wearing his military uniform, indicating his complete interpellation into American society. Michael is accompanied to the wedding by his WASP girlfriend, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), a further sign of his assimilation.
It is, of course, part of the secret of the popular success of the film (which, by 1974, had grossed more than any other film in history) that it gradually shifts its focus to Michael, the individualist American, and away from Vito, the communalist Italian. The family hopes to keep Michael free of their criminal operations so that he can spearhead their future plans to move into legitimate businesses, suggesting the Americanization of the entire clan enterprise. In the same way, Michael's adopted brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), has been educated as a lawyer so that he can help out with the family's legal problems. Both cases show the strain placed on the Corleones as they continue to attempt to base their operations on family connections, while also modernizing and becoming more businesslike.
Soon after the wedding, the traditional operations of the Corleone clan face a specific threat when drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), backed by the rival Tattaglia family, attempts to enlist the support of the Corleones in a major expansion of his drug operations. Vito, feeling that drugs are a dirty business the involvement in which might jeopardize the important political contacts he has cultivated for years, declines the offer. As a result, Sollozzo and the Tattaglias decide it is best to remove the Corleones from the scene altogether, launching a gang war in which Vito is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. Michael, incensed by the attack on his father (and by his own abuse at the hands of a New York police captain who is in league with the Tattaglias), takes the lead in seeking revenge, personally killing both Sollozzo and the police captain ( Sterling Hayden). He is then forced to flee to Sicily until things cool down, leaving his hotheaded older brother, Santino (James Caan), in charge of the family business while Vito continues to recuperate.
In the meantime, the war goes on. Santino ("Sonny" to his family and friends) is killed in an ambush that Carlo Rizzi helps to set up. An assassination attempt is also made on Michael in Sicily. He escapes, but the young bride he has taken there is killed. Michael returns to America with vengeance in his heart, taking over the management of the family when Vito retires. But Michael is no hothead, and he bides his time, meanwhile marrying Kay, starting a family, and gradually preparing to move the family business to the more lucrative setting of Las Vegas, where huge amounts of money can be made in relatively legal ways. Finally, on the eve of the move, the time is right, and Michael, in one of the sequence's many overt examples of fantasy fulfillment, arranges a carefully coordinated bloodbath in which all of the family's major enemies (including Carlo) are killed virtually simultaneously. The family then prepares to head for Las Vegas and to begin their new era of more efficient and businesslike management.
The Godfather seeks in numerous ways to suggest parallels between the operations of organized crime and of capitalist business in general. Its gangsters continually refer to themselves as businessmen, once pointing out that their goal is pure profit, because "after all, we're not communists." Indeed, The Godfather may make this point more effectively than any other American film. On the other hand, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, there is a real danger that this parallel will simply displace criticisms that should rightly be directed at capitalist business, instead attributing the negative effects of the capitalist system to criminal aberrations from that system. "The function of the Mafia narrative," Jameson notes, "is indeed to encourage the conviction that the deterioration of daily life in the United States today is an ethical rather than economic matter, connected not with profit, but rather 'merely' with dishonesty, and with some omnipresent moral corruption whose ultimate mythic source lies in the pure Evil of the Mafiosi themselves" (32). At the same time, however, Jameson also notes that The Godfather counters this tendency by presenting the Corleones in a relatively positive light, as men of dignity and principle who tend, if anything, to resist, if unsuccessfully, corruption by the conditions they find around them. Moreover, the representation of the Corleone family as quite literally a family before its appropriation by capitalist modernization suggests a utopian vision of an older and more humane form of social organization that is no longer available in contemporary America.
Bibliography : Film and the American Left: A Research Guide, Biskind (Easy Riders); Biskind (Godfather Companion); Clarens; Cowie (Coppola); Cowie (Godfather Book); Ferraro; Jameson (Signatures); Lebo; Papke; Robert Ray.
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