The Movie Book

202 THE GODFATHER

00:01

At his daughter Connie’s

wedding to Carlo, Don Corleone

receives a series of men seeking

favors. His son Michael is there

with Kay, who is introduced to

the family.

00:45

After refusing to help

a narcotics gang, Don

Corleone is gunned down

in the street. He is shot five

times but survives.

01:54

Carlo beats the heavily

pregnant Connie. She

speaks to her brother

Sonny, who goes to see

her, but he is gunned

down at a toll booth.

02:32

Don Corleone collapses and

dies while playing with his

grandson. Just before he dies,

he warns Michael that he will

be betrayed.

F

rancis Ford Coppola’s movie

The Godfather changed

the gangster-movie genre

entirely, with its depiction of

gangsters grappling with complex

existential dilemmas, rather

than as one-dimensional, lowlife

hoodlums. Previously, all such

gangster stories had been told

from an outsider’s point of view,

and the gangsters themselves were

seldom portrayed sympathetically.

The Godfather was also the first

movie to show a Mafia organization

from the inside. Its sprawling

portrait of the Corleone family and

their travails acquires the grandeur

and scope of an ancient Greek

tragedy, in which honor, duty, and

loyalty to family are seen as the

characters’ main motivating forces,

rather than criminal intent.

The background

The Godfather is based on a best-

selling novel of the same name

by Italian-American author Mario

Puzo, which was published in 1969.

Within a year, Paramount Pictures

had commissioned Puzo to write

the screenplay.

A successful screenwriter

himself, Coppola, who had been

hired as the director, had firm ideas

of his own about how the script

should be written, and he and Puzo

worked together to complete the

final draft. Coppola’s insight was to

see that the essence of the story,

and the focus of the movie, should

be the personal transition of

Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) from

respectable, law-abiding young man

and decorated war hero to eventual

head of a crime family, when he

takes over from the Godfather, Don

Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando).

Coppola also saw the story as a

metaphor for American free-market

capitalism. The Corleones aspire

to the American Dream and fight

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

American gangster

DIRECTOR

Francis Ford Coppola

WRITERS

Francis Ford Coppola

(screenplay); Mario Puzo

(novel and screenplay)

STARS

Marlon Brando, Al Pacino,

James Caan, Robert

Duvall, Diane Keaton

BEFORE

1931–32 Little Caesar (1931),

The Public Enemy (1931), and

Scarface (1932) whet the public

appetite for gangster movies.

AFTER

1974 The Godfather: Part II is

the hugely successful sequel,

focusing on Michael Corleone

(Al Pacino) as he becomes a

brutal Godfather.

1990 The Godfather: Part III,

the less successful third movie,

concludes the Corleones’ story.

00:33

Movie studio boss Jack

Woltz wakes up with his

prize horse’s head in

his bed. This persuades

him to cast Johnny

Fontane, as requested by

consigliere Tom Hagen.

01:29

Michael shoots

drug baron Sollozzo

and corrupt police

chief McCluskey. He

then leaves for Sicily.

00:00 00:30 01:00 01:30 02:00 02:30 02:58

02:04

Michael’s new

Sicilian wife,

Apollonia, is killed

by a car bomb.

Fabrizio, Michael’s

bodyguard, has

betrayed him.

02:38

As Michael

attends his godson’s

christening, his rivals

are killed across the

city. He also has

Carlo killed.

Minute by minute

Overflowing with life, rich

with all the grand emotions

and vital juices of existence,

up to and including blood.

Kenneth Turan

Los Angeles Times, 1997