We all know many memorable lines from this now classic movie:
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
“That’s my family, Kay. That’s not me.”
“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”
“That little farce you played with my sister, you really think that could fool a Corleone?”
The Godfather (“Il Padrino”) is a 1972 American gangster film based on the novel of the same name by Mario Puzo and directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a screenplay by Puzo, Coppola, and Robert Townsend (uncredited). The movie differs in some variations of the book (which I read and highly recommend to those who have never read the book), with major characters (Sonny’s girlfriend, Lucy Mancini, her later doctor/boyfriend Jules Segal, and the history of Luca Brasi’s life), whittled down from their original place in the novel.
The Godfather Trilogy: A Website You Can’t Refuse
The movie was released by Paramount Pictures on March 15, 1972.
It stars Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Richard S. Castellano, Robert Duval, Sterling Hayden, Richard Conte and Diane Keaton. It also features Talia Shire, John Cazale and Abe Vigoda. The story spans ten years from 1945 to 1955 and chronicles the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. Two sequels came later: The Godfather Part II, released in 1974, and The Godfather Part III, released in 1990.
The Godfather received Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando) and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is preserved with the National Film Registry (National Film Preservation Board) and is ranked as the second greatest film in movie history, after Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (American Film Institute.)
From the first scene where Don Corleone is being requested of a favor by Bonasera, the undertaker, to avenge the dishonor done to his daughter, to the unforgetable scenes of the horse’s head in the bed (which used the head of a real horse that was slaughtered, obtained from a dog food company ),Michael’s first wife blown to bits in their car as she waits for him, the garrotting of Carlo (Connie’s husband), the shooting death of Sonny at the toll booth causeway, the numerous murders of his father’s enemies by Michael as he stands as godfather for his sister Connie’s baby at the church, The Godfather has left its indelible mark on the American moviegoer conscious.
“Popularly viewed as one of the best American films ever made, the multi-generational crime saga The Godfather is a touchstone of cinema: one of the most widely imitated, quoted, and lampooned movies of all time. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino star as Vito Corleone and his youngest son, Michael, respectively. It is the late 1940s in New York and Corleone is, in the parlance of organized crime, a “godfather” or “don,” the head of a Mafia family. Michael, a free thinker who defied his father by enlisting in the Marines to fight in World War II, has returned a captain and a war hero. Having long ago rejected the family business, Michael shows up at the wedding of his sister, Connie (Talia Shire), with his non-Italian girlfriend, Kay (Diane Keaton), who learns for the first time about the family “business.” A few months later at Christmas time, the don barely survives being shot by gunmen in the employ of a drug-trafficking rival whose request for aid from the Corleones’ political connections was rejected. After saving his father from a second assassination attempt, Michael persuades his hotheaded eldest brother, Sonny (James Caan), and family advisors Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) and Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda) that he should be the one to exact revenge on the men responsible. After murdering a corrupt police captain and the drug trafficker, Michael hides out in Sicily while a gang war erupts at home. Falling in love with a local girl, Michael marries her, but she is later slain by Corleone enemies in an attempt on Michael’s life. Sonny is also butchered, having been betrayed by Connie’s husband. As Michael returns home and convinces Kay to marry him, his father recovers and makes peace with his rivals, realizing that another powerful don was pulling the strings behind the narcotics endeavor that began the gang warfare. Once Michael has been groomed as the new don, he leads the family to a new era of prosperity, then launches a campaign of murderous revenge against those who once tried to wipe out the Corleones, consolidating his family’s power and completing his own moral downfall. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards and winning for Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather was followed by a pair of sequels. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
Who can forget that haunting and beautiful score composed by Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola? Just a few notes of it can bring back images of various scenes.
Today is the 38th anniversary of the release of The Godfather.
Love it or hate it, with the Corleone’s twisted outlook on American capitalism, the movies does glorify the Mafia and the criminal underbelly of drugs (originally pushed onto Black neighborhoods to keep drugs away from the so-called “clean people”) prostitution, gambling, extortion and vicious murders of competition with gang warfare when the Corleones “went to the mattresses”.
Most real life La Cosa Nostra (“our thing”), the Mafia (mafiusu [masculine] “swagger; bravado/boldness” or mafiusa [feminine] “beautiful”) and the earlier La Mano Nera (“Black Hand”-extortion), were nothing more than street thugs, many of whom were never as organized or competent as the Corleones are depicted. They mostly preyed on newly arrived Italian immigrants in turn-of-the-century America, killing innocent people, even women and children.
But, as with the film The Godfather, just when you think you have seen it enough, it pulls you right back in.
So, pop some maize, open a cold fructose corn syrup effervescent and enjoy The Godfather.
It is one film that offers so many facets that make it hard to refuse another viewing.
Ciao!
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 