The Godfather

The Godfather; crime drama, USA, 1972; D: Francis Ford Coppola, S: Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Richard Castellano, Sterling Hayden, Richard Conte, Gianni Russo

New York, 1 9 4 0s. An undertaker asks Don Vito Corleone, one of the most influential mafia bosses in the country, to punish the men who raped his daughter. Don Vito accepts and then continues to attend the great wedding of his daughter Connie. Among the guests are also his sons Sonny, Fredo, adopted lawyer Tom and Michael, a soldier who has just returned from the war. Michael is not too keen on his family's business and openly admits to his girlfriend Kay that he does not want to be a criminal. When Don Vito refuses to invest a million $ into Sollozzo's drug business, he is shot on the street. Don Vito survives and ends in a hospital. That enrages Michael and for the first time in his life he uses a gun and shoots Sollozzo and his corrupted police chief at a restaurant, running away to hide in Sicily. There he marries. The violent Sonny dies in an assassin attempt, and when Michael returns Don Vito names him his successor. When Don Vito dies Michael kills all his opponents and becomes just like his father.

Not only number 1 on the movie website IMDb, "The Godfather" is generally considered by many to be the best film of all time. That is a little bit overstretched since not every person has the same taste, but it shows that a very high number of people agree that it is a great film—and if not the best, then at least among the best. This dark epic about the mafia as the symbol for family that cares for its members won numerous awards, and for a reason because everything in that film was done in an excellent way. As one unwritten film rule says, it is good to introduce all the characters at once in the opening on a big gathering, and "The Godfather" establishes many of them in the wedding sequence that opens the film, already depicting the web of their hierarchy. Brando's Don Vito Corleone is portrayed already in the opening shots, as a symbolic center character with huge power and influence who is a catalyst of everything; he accepts to grant the wish of an undertaker who wants revenge for two men beating up his daughter, and adds; "Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, consider this justice a gift on my daughter's wedding day." By helping the undertaker, the gangsters surprisingly perform justice. Don Vito knows that he is famous and influential, so he only takes pictures together with his son Michael (Al Pacino).

The mafia is given integrity and honor, but it is not glamourized, and still shown as a criminal organization that uses dirty methods and violence to achieve their goals; when a horse-loving film producer rejects their offer, Vito ("I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse!") arranges that the latter wakes up in his bed in blood, with a head of a dead horse. But although a criminal as a mafia boss, Don Vito also possesses a moral and caring side, since he refuses to have any business with heroin smugglers, no matter how profitable it is. Although Michael was disgusted by the mob business, he will inevitably become just like his father with time, which was brilliantly shown in a metamorphosis by destiny, concluding his character arc. So many moments are memorable, from the uncertainty in which Michael takes the hidden gun in the restroom, but hesitates to perpetrate an assassination of a rival at a restaurant, up to the murder on the toll plaza. Coppola has a conventional visual style and some characters are irritating, but he knows how to transform a simple crime film into a story about maturing and growing up of a son, Michael, and how he joined his family, depicting how fatalism is inevitable in the legendary finale with the closing doors—and that the scramble for power is an underlying human vice. If there was a formula how to make a great film, everyone could have been able to make one like "The Godfather". But there isn't any. Actually, even the same crew that made "The Godfather" wasn't able to repeat its formula in the sequel "The Godfather II", which, although excellent, was still not as good or as fresh as the original in the series. That is why "The Godfather" is a slow-burning masterpiece that was made just the right way completely spontaneously.

Grade:++++