CHAPTER 1: THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
Harlan Lebo (author, The Godfather Legacy): I think The Godfather should be—and will always be—remembered as one of the great achievements in cinema, one of the rare motion pictures that is appreciated by filmmakers, critics, and audiences alike. It is also one of the most watchable films ever made; hard to believe that it is three hours long!
Robert Casillo (author, Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese): The Godfather will continue to be remembered for several reasons. Not the least of these is its high artistic quality, which set a standard for the modern gangster film, and which inspired a generation of prominent Italian American directors and actors (Pacino, De Niro, Scorsese, De Palma, Cimino, and Tarantino among others). At the same time, The Godfather has an important place in American social and cultural history, especially in connection with ethnic history and experience.
Tom Santopietro (author, The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me): I think The Godfather should be remembered as one of the greatest films ever made. Full Stop. Even with all of the cultural heft attached to it—and I wrote an entire book about that!—the discussion begins and ends with what an extraordinarily effective film it remains. These were the best men and women in Hollywood working at the top of their game—from Coppola, Brando, and Pacino to Gordon Willis, Dean Tavoularis, and Anna Hill Johnstone.
Raymond Benson (reviewer, Cinema Retro; author of over 40 novels): The Godfather is one of those landmark films that often gets cited as one of the “greatest movies” along with Citizen Kane or Casablanca, and it deserves that accolade. Yes, it’s that good.
Alison Martino (Vintage Los Angeles; daughter of Al “Johnny Fontane” Martino): A half a century later the film's greatness is undiminished. Coppola crafted an enduring, undisputed cinematic masterpiece with producer Al Ruddy and cinematographer Gordon Willis. Mario Puzo wrote some of the most memorable dialogue that we continue use in everyday situations. And the music! That haunting trumpet theme completely embodies the Corleones. Can you imagine the movie without it??? The Godfather’s impact on cinema, pop culture and society is on a whole other level. Its influence is everywhere.
Jon Lewis (author, BFI Classics: The Godfather and Whom God Wishes to Destroy… Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood): As not only a really good film but as an industry landmark. Much as we can say there were films before Citizen Kane or Breathless and films after—the same goes for The Godfather.
John Cork (co-author, James Bond Encyclopedia): It is hard to overstate the importance of The Godfather both in Hollywood history and cultural impact. The film gave us a generation of great actors, iconic dialog, and indelible images. The movie also changed the film industry.
Sergio Angelini (reviewer, Sight & Sound): It’s a classic family film in the sense that it is primarily concerned with families (and what some people do in the name of family). It is also a critique of the corrosive effects of unfettered capitalism, seemingly even more potent a point of view now than it was on its original release. The Godfather is a true masterpiece, as dynamic, romantic, inventive, intelligent and spectacular a film in 2022 as it ever was.
Ray Morton (contributing editor, Script Mag; author, King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson): First and foremost, The Godfather is a terrific movie—it tells a cracking good story and it tells it very well through compelling scenes, exciting action, and colorful characters. The direction is brilliant; the screenplay expertly constructed; the performances are all memorable; the cinematography is stunning; and the production design, the editing, and the score are marvelous. The picture is extremely entertaining—it’s filled to the brim with drama, action, violence, sex, and humor. It is suspenseful and sometimes shocking and is jam-packed with memorable moments and (infinitely) quotable dialogue. It has remarkable scope and sweep, powerful themes, and an ending that haunts long after the movie is over. The Godfather is American commercial cinema at its very best.
Lee Pfeiffer (editor-in-chief, Cinema Retro): The Godfather should be remembered as it is being remembered: as one of the greatest films of all time. The fact that so much attention has been lavished on the film for this anniversary is all the evidence anyone needs about its significance, not only as a film, but as a staple of popular culture. The film brought about a great burst of dynamic young talents, including Francis Coppola, who would go on to immediately prove that his success with the movie was not a flash-in-the-pan. Think of the masterful films that followed: The Conversation, The Godfather Part II (which I believe is even better than the first film) and Apocalypse Now. The movie also brought to the fore the talents of Al Pacino (who was virtually unknown), Diane Keaton, James Caan and Robert Duvall, who already had many screen credits under their belts but seemed consigned to having careers as supporting actors. So, I think the film should best be remembered as having unleashed all these talents in marvelous roles that justifiably elevated all of them to major stardom.
CHAPTER 2: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Gary Leva (director, Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco): Francis took what could have been a pulpy, by-the-book gangster picture and infused it with the gravity, scope and tragedy of a great opera. And this didn’t come from nowhere. Francis comes from a family with deep roots in the arts. His father was the first flautist in Toscanini’s orchestra. One of his grandfathers helped engineer and build the first Vitaphone that made sound movies possible. The other grandfather imported foreign language films to America to entertain immigrant audiences in the early 20th Century. When you talk about Francis Coppola, that context is important, because he brings all of that to bear when he makes films. Yes, he’s considered one of the “Film School Brats,” but his artistic roots grow from much richer soil than that.
Raymond Benson: First, all the directors Robert Evans and team asked to helm the picture turned it down. As I understand it, they grudgingly decided to ask Coppola, and then he had to be seriously talked into doing it. (Apparently it was his pal George Lucas who finally convinced him to take it on.) While Coppola is indeed Italian, he had little or no experience with the Mafia… but still, I think his cultural background surely helped to infuse the film with the deep dive Italian traditions and familial rituals that most of us in America had no clue about.
Robert Casillo: The Godfather was made by Paramount Studios, which a few years earlier had released another Mafia film entitled The Brotherhood, starring Kirk Douglas, Alex Cord, Irene Pappas, and Luther Adler, and directed by Martin Ritt. According to Robert Evans, the head of Paramount and producer of The Godfather, The Brotherhood had failed artistically and financially largely because the director and most of the actors (Cord was an Italian American) lacked an easy and comfortable familiarity with Italian American and more particularly Sicilian American ethnicity. In a sense, the film’s content had been handled from the outside, anthropologically and schematically rather than dramatically, from the inside. In this context I can’t help but think of Coleridge’s permanently valuable distinction between the organism (or work of art) that is formed ab intra, from within, as against that which is formed ab extra, from without, the former being or organic and the latter mechanical. Yet despite the failure of The Brotherhood, Paramount was willing to risk the making of another Mafia movie in view of the enormous box-office potential of a film based on Puzo’s blockbuster novel, but this time an Italian American director was deemed essential so as to provide the necessary degree of ethnic authenticity and credibility. As Robert Evans said, he wanted a film in which you could “smell the spaghetti.” In retrospect Coppola was the right choice, despite the fact that at the time he was better known as a script writer than as a director. Few if any Hollywood directors at that time could match Coppola in his understanding of Italian American cultural values and behavior. And far from treating them anthropologically or ethnographically, he gave them their full dramatic weight and expressive power. Coppola, who had already won an Academy Award for his script for the film Patton, also did a fine job in eliminating the needless narrative digressions (Lucy Mancini’s vaginal plastic surgery, the Johnny Fontane sections) and otiose dialogue which mar the novel so as to achieve a much more streamlined and impactful product. Without his gift for concision, the film would have been as sprawling and diffuse as the novel.
Lee Pfeiffer: Coppola was an up-and-comer, having won an Oscar for his screenplay for Patton, but the few movies he had directed to date provide scant assurance that he would be capable of making a classic. His only big budget studio production, Finian’s Rainbow, was a high-profile bomb. The Rain People, which followed, was a small film that Coppola thought might prove to be a critical and niche market hit, but even that failed to catch on. I’m sure some of the consideration in hiring him for The Godfather was that he was largely unknown outside of the industry and would not be commanding a major fee. The Godfather allowed Coppola the latitude to showcase his cinematic visions. He proved respectful and adept at working with veteran actors as well as those who would emerge as stars following release of the film. Coppola is a movie purist, like Scorsese and Spielberg. Despite their fame and fortune, these guys still enjoy talking about the movies they love with great enthusiasm. Coppola could have made a by-the-book Mafia movie, something akin to The Valachi Papers, which was released the same year. Competently made and entertaining, but hardly memorable. But Coppola wasn’t just after a paycheck. He saw the possibility of greatness in the film, something the studio big shots did not. As to where it stands among his films, you can make a plausible argument that it’s his greatest achievement, but I think the first sequel and Apocalypse Now are even more impressive, the latter in part due to the sheer number of obstacles—financial and otherwise—that had to be overcome. It’s the kind of mad dream that few directors pursue, let along succeed with. I should point out that there are doubtlessly people who might name The Conversation as his best film. A plausible case can be made for any of these, but The Godfather is clearly the one that resonates most in terms of its impact on popular culture. People still quote the dialogue in everyday conversations.
Ray Morton: Coppola directs the film with a writer’s mind and an actor’s heart. The script presented a sumptuous, perfectly-constructed narrative and Coppola focused his direction on putting that narrative on screen with clarity, detail, and a steady dramatic build. Working with cinematographer Gordon Willis, Coppola delivered a visually stunning movie, but one without the cinematic gimmickry that marred some of his later films. In The Godfather, Coppola used all of his considerable technique to develop and advance the story—to simply tell the tale. Knowing that this was a story that was told primarily through its characters, Coppola also worked with each and every cast member to help them create and deliver fully-realized, deeply-nuanced performances that propelled the story as much as the imagery did. The result was Coppola’s most fully-realized film and the one that made him one of the most acclaimed and revered filmmakers of all time.
Raymond Benson: There’s no question that The Godfather was the best thing Coppola had directed up to this point, as his earlier pictures, while interesting, never really leaped out to the mainstream. He would display his chops even more as the decade went on, and for my money, The Godfather Part II is even better than the first one. The Conversation is great, and Apocalypse Now is another masterpiece. I don’t think Coppola ever reached the heights of those four films again in his career, although he’s made some good pictures and some not so good ones.
Gary Leva: Francis has been in several of my documentaries over the years, and there were times when he didn’t want to discuss The Godfather at all. The memory of it was too painful for him. I remember feeling how sad it was for an artist to recall the creation of his masterpiece as a miserable experience when, for us as film lovers, it’s a source of so much joy.
Robert Casillo: To the extent that Coppola and Puzo belong to a post-immigration generation of Italian Americans, The Godfather lends some support for Marcus Hansen’s “third law” of immigrant consciousness. As Hansen argued, whereas the second generation ethnic typically wants to forget the tribulations and challenges faced by the first generation, the third generation ethnic, owing to his or her relative assimilation into the host society, tends to be more willing to acknowledge and reflect openly upon the ethnic past. Yet in contrast with Coppola and Puzo, who recognized the Mafia as part of that past, many Italians found in the Mafia their chief stumbling block, and indeed various Italian American anti-defamation groups nearly undermined the production of The Godfather through the threat of strikes, boycotts, and lawsuits. To be sure, these protesters were quite wrong in contending that the presence of Mafia stereotypes in American cinema stigmatized the entire group, as it has been shown by Lee Jussim and other psychologists that people readily recognize that stereotypes admit of many and exceptions. In short, most people will acknowledge that relatively few Italian Americans belong to the Mafia, the truth being that rates of criminality among the group are actually below the national average. By the same token, the complaints by Italian American anti-defamation organizations that the Mafia stigma had greatly reduced the life chances of the group as a whole made little sense in view of the fact that Italian Americans had largely assimilated into the American mainstream in terms of wealth, status, and education by 1970—something that is not likely to have occurred had the Mafia been hanging like an albatross around the group’s collective neck. As it turned out, the centrality of the Mafia in Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s film resulted not in the stigmatization of Italian Americans but rather in a largely favorable set of stereotypes identifying them with the warmth of family affections, loyalty, community, and masculine toughness. And that the Mafia was the vehicle by which these values were communicated did little if anything to detract from them.
