Overview

The Godfather is a 1972 crime film directed and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola based on the the novel of the same name authored by the screenplay's co-writer Mario Puzo. The film starred Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton and James Caan. The film was subsequently followed with The Godfather Part II in 1974, The Godfather Part III in 1990, and a 2006 video game based on the film.

The film's story spans ten years from late 1945 to late 1954 and early 1955 as the leader of a New York mafia organization hands his family business over to his reluctant son. It is ranked as the third best American film in history by the American Film Institute and as the greatest film of all time according to the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 list with a 9.1/10 rating, despite the fact that The Shawshank Redemption has a 9.2 rating. It is also the number one movie on Metacritic's top 100 list.

Production

The film was released in 1972 and was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, whose several prior films had none of the same impact upon the public, although he had received an Academy Award for cowriting Patton in 1970.[1] Puzo helped in the making of the movie and its sequels and co-wrote the screenplay. Most of the shooting spanned from March 29, 1971, to August 6 of that year. A scene with Pacino and Keaton was shot in autumn. Due to skepticism about the film's expected success, a modest budget was set, forcing the crew to use regular lighting as opposed to production lighting, which resulted in a more realistic appearance to the film.

One of the movie's most shocking moments comes early, involving the real severed head of a horse. Animal rights groups protested the inclusion of the scene. Coppola, in audio commentary on The Godfather Collection DVD release, stated that the horse's head was delivered to him from a dog food company; a horse had not been killed specifically for the movie.

Italian director Sergio Leone was offered the chance to direct The Godfather, but he declined on the basis that he did not find the story interesting. He went on to direct his own gangster opus, focusing instead on Jewish-American gangsters in Once Upon a Time in America. There was intense friction between director Coppola (who was at least the third choice to direct[1]) and the studio, Paramount Pictures, and several times Coppola was almost replaced. Paramount maintains that its skepticism was due to a rocky start to production, though Coppola believes that the first week went extremely well. Paramount perceived that Coppola failed to stay on schedule, frequently made production and casting errors, and insisted on unnecessary expenses. The studio strongly opposed the casting of Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, insisting both perform in multiple screen tests and that Coppola consider other actors. Despite intense pressure, Coppola managed to defend his decisions and avoid being fired. The final cut seemed remarkably free of the changes the studio had previously demanded.

Awards

The Godfather won three Academy Awards:

Best Picture

Best Actor in a Leading Role (Marlon Brando refused to accept the award and sent actress Sacheen Littlefeather in his stead to the Oscars to explain why)

Best Writing (adapted screenplay) (Francis Coppola, Mario Puzo)

The film was also nominated for eight additional Academy Awards. Furthermore, it won five Golden Globes, one Grammy and numerous other awards.

Nino Rota's music score for the film was initially nominated for an Oscar, but was subsequently withdrawn when it was discovered that Rota recycled some of the music he had written for an obscure 1958 Italian film Fortunella.

The sequel The Godfather Part II also won an Academy Award for Best Picture, making the Godfather trilogy the only series of films to win multiple Oscars until The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won the Best Picture award in 2003. However, the first two films in the Lord of the Rings series won mainly technical awards, meaning that The Godfather and The Godfather Part II remain the only films in a series to have each won Best Picture. The Godfather Part III was nominated for seven Oscars but did not win.

Impact

The trilogy had a powerful impact upon the public at large. Don Vito's line, "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse" was voted as the second most memorable line in cinema history in a 2005 poll, called AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes by the American Film Institute, and it is often parodied.

Reports from Mafia trials and confessions suggest that Mafia families began a "real life" tradition of paying respect to the family don by kissing his ring, in imitation of the ending scene of The Godfather.

The image of the Mafia as being a medieval-style organization with a "royal family" doing favors for underlings is very popular. For example, in John Grisham's novel The Firm, the Mafia is depicted as having an organization wherein the top mobsters marry into the "royal family". However, this image bears little resemblance to the more sordid reality of lower level Mafia "familial" entanglements, as depicted in various post-Godfather mafia fare (e.g, the Martin Scorcese films, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, & Casino, & David Chase's HBO-TV series The Sopranos).

The Sopranos pays homage to The Godfather in a humorous episode where they discuss the feasibility of bootlegging copies of the DVD. Paramount returned the favor by including this clip as an Easter Egg on the Godfather DVD Collection.[6] Moreover, characters in The Sopranos sometimes discuss The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as both favorite films and images to live up to in the less glamorous real world of organized crime. In the series premiere of The Sopranos, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) says, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"—a line from The Godfather Part III. Often, the characters will refer to the movies as simply "One" and "Two".