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The Godfather Part I (1972)
The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty in postwar New York City transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant youngest son.
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Writers
Mario Puzo(screenplay by)
Francis Ford Coppola(screenplay by)
Stars
Marlon Brando
Al Pacino
James Caan
The Godfather Part I (1972) – Trailer
The Godfather Part I (1972) – Reviews
“The Godfather” is told entirely within a closed world. That’s why we sympathize with characters who are essentially evil. The story by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola is a brilliant conjuring act, inviting us to consider the Mafia entirely on its own terms.Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) emerges as a sympathetic and even admirable character; during the entire film, this lifelong professional criminal does nothing of which we can really disapprove.During the movie we see not a single actual civilian victim of organized crime. No women trapped into prostitution. No lives wrecked by gambling. No victims of theft, fraud or protection rackets. The only police officer with a significant speaking role is corrupt.
The story views the Mafia from the inside. That is its secret, its charm, its spell; in a way, it has shaped the public perception of the Mafia ever since. The real world is replaced by an authoritarian patriarchy where power and justice flow from the Godfather, and the only villains are traitors.There is one commandment, spoken by Michael (Al Pacino): “Don’t ever take sides against the family.”It is significant that the first shot is inside a dark, shuttered room. It is the wedding day of Vito Corleone’s daughter, and on such a day a Sicilian must grant any reasonable request.A man has come to ask for punishment for his daughter’s rapist. Don Vito asks why he did not come to him immediately.“I went to the police, like a good American,” the man says. The Godfather’s reply will underpin the entire movie: “Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first? What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you’d come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.And if, by chance, an honest man like yourself should make enemies . . . then they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you.”As the day continues, there are two more scenes in the Godfather’s darkened study, intercut with scenes from the wedding outside. By the end of the wedding sequence, most of the main characters will have been introduced, and we will know essential things about their personalities. It is a virtuoso stretch of filmmaking: Coppola brings his large cast onstage so artfully that we are drawn at once into the Godfather’s world.The screenplay of “The Godfather” follows no formulas except for the classic structure in which power passes between the generations. The writing is subtly constructed to set up events later in the film. Notice how the request by Johnny Fontane, the failing singer, pays off in the Hollywood scenes; how his tears set up the shocking moment when a mogul wakes up in bed with what is left of his racehorse. Notice how the undertaker is told “someday, and that day may never come, I will ask a favor of you. . .” and howwhen the day comes the favor is not violence (as in a conventional movie) but Don Vito’s desire to spare his wife the sight of their son’s maimed body. And notice how a woman’s “mistaken” phone call sets up the trap in which Sonny (James Caan) is murdered: It’s done so neatly that you have to think back through the events to figure it out.
Now here is a trivia question: What is the name of Vito’s wife? She exists in the movie as an insignificant shadow, a plump Sicilian grandmother who poses with her husband in wedding pictures but plays no role in the events that take place in his study. There is little room for women in “The Godfather.” Sonny uses and discards them, and ignores his wife. Connie (Talia Shire), the Don’s daughter, is so disregarded that her husband is not allowed into the family business.He is thrown a bone–”a living”–and later, when he is killed, Michael coldly lies to his sister about what happened.The irony of the title is that it eventually comes to refer to the son, not the father. As the film opens Michael is not part of the family business, and plans to marry a WASP, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton). His turning point comes when he saves his father’s life by moving his hospital bed, and whispers to the unconscious man: “I’m with you now.”After he shoots the corrupt cop, Michael hides in Sicily, where he falls in love with and marries Appolonia (Simonetta Stefanelli). They do not speak the same language; small handicap for a Mafia wife. He undoubtedly loves Appolonia, as he loved Kay, but what is he thinking here: that he can no longer marry Kay because he has chosen a Mafia life? After Appolonia’s death and his return to America, he seeks out Kay and eventually they marry.Did he tell her about Appolonia? Such details are unimportant to the story.What is important is loyalty to the family. Much is said in the movie about trusting a man’s word, but honesty is nothing compared to loyalty. Michael doesn’t even trust Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) with the secret that he plans to murder the heads of the other families. The famous “baptism massacre” is tough, virtuoso filmmaking: The baptism provides him with an airtight alibi, and he becomes a godfather in both senses at the same time.Vito Corleone is the moral center of the film. He is old, wise and opposed to dealing in drugs. He understands that society is not alarmed by “liquor, gambling . . . even women.” But drugs are a dirty business to Don Vito, and one of the movie’s best scenes is the Mafia summit at which he argues his point. The implication is that in the godfather’s world there would be no drugs, only “victimless crimes,” and justice would be dispatched evenly and swiftly.
My argument is taking this form because I want to point out how cleverly Coppola structures his film to create sympathy for his heroes. The Mafia is not a benevolent and protective organization, and the Corleone family is only marginally better than the others. Yet when the old man falls dead among his tomato plants, we feel that a giant has passed.Gordon Willis’ cinematography is celebrated for its darkness; it is rich, atmospheric, expressive.You cannot appreciate this on television because the picture is artificially brightened. Coppola populates his dark interior spaces with remarkable faces. The front-line actors–Brando, Pacino, Caan, Duvall–are attractive in one way or another, but those who play their associates are chosen for their fleshy, thickly lined faces–for huge jaws and deeply set eyes. Look at Abe Vigoda as Tessio, the fearsome enforcer. The first time we see him, he’s dancing with a child at the wedding, her satin pumps balanced on his shoes.The sun shines that day, but never again: He is developed as a hulking presence who implies the possibility of violent revenge. Only at the end is he brightly lit again, to make him look vulnerable as he begs for his life.The Brando performance is justly famous and often imitated. We know all about his puffy cheeks, and his use of props like the kitten in the opening scene. Those are actor’s devices. Brando uses them but does not depend on them:He embodies the character so convincingly that at the end, when he warns his son two or three times that “the man who comes to you to set up a meeting–that’s the traitor,” we are not thinking of acting at all. We are thinking that the Don is growing old and repeating himself, but we are also thinking that he is probably absolutely right.Pacino plays Michael close to his vest; he has learned from his father never to talk in front of outsiders, never to trust anyone unnecessarily, to take advice but keep his own counsel.All of the other roles are so successfully filled that a strange thing happened as I watched this restored 1997 version: Familiar as I am with Robert Duvall, when he first appeared on the screen I found myself thinking, “There’s Tom Hagen.”Coppola went to Italy to find Nino Rota, composer of many Fellini films, to score the picture. Hearing the sadness and nostalgia of the movie’s main theme, I realized what the music was telling us: Things would have turned out better if we had only listened to the Godfather.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism
Film Credits
The Godfather Part I (1972)
Rated R
175 minutes
Cast
Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone
Richard Costellano as Clemenza
Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen
Alex Rocco as Moe Green
James Caan as Sonny Corleone
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone
Sterling Hayden as McClusky
John Cazale as Fredo Corleone
John Marley as Jack Woltz
Diane Keaton as Kay Adams
Richard Conte as Barzini
Talia Shire as Connie Rizzi
Gianni Russo as Carlo Rizzi
Lenny Montana as Luca Brasi
Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone
Al Martino as Johnny Fontane
Tony Giorgio as Bruno Tattaglia
Al Lettieri as Sollozzo
Morgana King as Mamma Corleone
John Martino as Paulie Gatto
Sterling Hayden as McCluskey
Talia Shire as Connie
Abe Vigoda as Tessio
Alex Rocco as Moe Greene
Richard S. Castellano as Clemenza
Rudy Bond as Cuneo
Cinematography by
Gordon Willis
Produced by
Albert S. Ruddy
Screenplay by
Francis Ford Coppolla
Mario Puzo
Coppola
Based on the novel by
Puzo
Music by
Nino Rota
Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola
Edited by
Peter Zinner
William Reynolds
Photographed by
Gordon Willis
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The early life and career of Vito Corleone in 1920s New York City is portrayed, while his son, Michael, expands and tightens his grip on the family crime syndicate.
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Writers
Francis Ford Coppola(screenplay by)
Mario Puzo(screenplay by)
Stars
Al Pacino
Robert De Niro
Robert Duvall
The Godfather Part II (1974) – Trailer
The Godfather Part II (1974) – Reviews
Moving through the deep shadows and heavy glooms of his vast estate, Michael Corleone presides over the destruction of his own spirit in “The Godfather, Part II.” The character we recall from “The Godfather” as the best and brightest of Don Vito’s sons, the one who went to college and enlisted in the Marines, grows into a cold and ruthless man, obsessed with power.The film’s closing scenes give us first a memory of a long-ago family dinner, and then Michael at mid-life, cruel, closed, and lonely. He’s clearly intended as a tragic figure.
The Corleone saga, as painted by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo in two films totaling nearly seven hours, has been a sort of success story in reverse. In a crazy way, “The Godfather” and its sequel belong in the same category with those other epics of immigrant achievement in America, “The Emigrants” and “The New Land.” The Corleone family worked hard, was ambitious, remembered friends, never forgave disloyalty, and started from humble beginnings to become the most powerful Mafia organization in the country.If it were not that the family business was crime, these films could be an inspiration for us all.Coppola seems to hold a certain ambivalence toward his material. Don Vito Corleone as portrayed by Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” was a man of honor and dignity, and it was difficult not to sympathize with him, playing with his grandchild in the garden, at peace after a long lifetime of murder, extortion, and the rackets. What exactly were we supposed to think about him?How did Coppola feel toward the Godfather?“The Godfather, Part II” moves both forward and backward in time from the events in “The Godfather,” in an attempt to resolve our feelings about the Corleones. In doing so, it provides for itself a structural weakness from which the film never recovers, but it does something even more disappointing: It reveals a certain simplicity in Coppola’s notions of motivation and characterization that wasn’t there in the elegant masterpiece of his earlier film.He gives us, first of all, the opening chapters in Don Vito’s life. His family is killed by a Mafia don in Sicily, he comes to America at the age of nine, he grows up (to be played by Robert De Niro), and edges into a career of crime, first as a penny-ante crook and then as a neighborhood arranger and power broker: a man, as the movie never tires of reminding us, of respect.This story, of Don Vito’s younger days, occupies perhaps a fourth of the film’s 200 minutes. Coppola devotes the rest to Michael Corleone, who has taken over the family’s business after his father’s death, has pulled out of New York, and consolidated operations in Nevada, and has ambitions to expand in Florida and Cuba.Michael is played, again and brilliantly, by Al Pacino, and among the other familiar faces are Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, the family’s lawyer; Diane Keaton as Michael’s increasingly despairing wife Kay; and John Cazale as the weak older brother Fredo.
Coppola handles a lot of this material very well. As in the earlier film, he reveals himself as a master of mood, atmosphere, and period. And his exposition is inventive and subtle. The film requires the intelligent participation of the viewer; as Michael attempts to discover who betrayed him and attempted his assassination, he tells different stories to different people, keeping his own counsel, and we have to think as he does so we can tell the truth from the lies.Pacino is very good at suggesting the furies and passions that lie just beneath his character’s controlled exterior. He gives us a Michael who took over the family with the intention of making it “legitimate” in five years, but who is drawn more and more deeply into a byzantine web of deceit and betrayal, all papered over with code words like respect, honor, and gratitude.By the film’s end he has been abandoned by almost everyone except those who work for him and fear him, and he is a very lonely man.But what was his sin? It was not, as we might have imagined or hoped, that he presided over a bloody enterprise of murder and destruction. No, Michael’s fault seems to be pride. He has lost the common touch, the dignity he should have inherited from his father. And because he has misplaced his humanity he must suffer.Coppola suggests this by contrast. His scenes about Don Vito’s early life could almost be taken as a campaign biography, and in the most unfortunate flashbacks we’re given the young Vito intervening on behalf of a poor widow who is being evicted from her apartment. The don seems more like a precinct captain than a gangster, and we’re left with the unsettling impression that Coppola thinks things would have turned out all right for Michael if he’d had the old man’s touch.The flashbacks give Coppola the greatest difficulty in maintaining his pace and narrative force. The story of Michael, told chronologically and without the other material, would have had really substantial impact, but Coppola prevents our complete involvement by breaking the tension. The flashbacks to New York in the early 1900s have a different, a nostalgic tone, and the audience has to keep shifting gears. Coppola was reportedly advised by friends to forget the Don Vito material and stick with Michael, and that was good advice.
There’s also some evidence in the film that Coppola never completely mastered the chaotic mass of material in his screenplay. Some scenes seem oddly pointless (why do we get almost no sense of Michael’s actual dealings in Cuba, but lots of expensive footage about the night of Castro’s takeover?), and others seem not completely explained (I am still not quite sure who really did order that attempted garroting in the Brooklyn saloon).What we’re left with, then, are a lot of good scenes and good performances set in the midst of a mass of undisciplined material and handicapped by plot construction that prevents the story from ever really building.There is, for example, the brilliant audacity of the first communion party for Michael’s son, which Coppola directs as counterpoint to the wedding scene that opened “The Godfather.” There is Lee Strasberg’s two-edged performance as Hyman Roth, the boss of the Florida and Cuban operations; Strasberg gives us a soft-spoken, almost kindly old man, and then reveals his steel-hard interior. There is Coppola’s use of sudden, brutal bursts of violence to punctuate the film’s brooding progress.There is Pacino, suggesting everything, telling nothing.But Coppola is unable to draw all this together and make it work on the level of simple, absorbing narrative. The stunning text of “The Godfather” is replaced in “Part II” with prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism
Film Credits
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
Rated R
200 minutes
Cast
Bruno Kirby as Young Clemenza
Talia Shire as Connie
Robert DeNiro as Don Vito Corleone
Abe Vigoda as Tessio
G.D. Spradlin as Senator Geary
Michael V. Gazzo as Frankie Pentangeli
Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth
Diane Keaton as Kay
John Cazale as Fredo Corleone
Produced by
Gray Frederickson
Fred Ross
Screenplay by
Mario Puzo
Coppola
Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola
Music by
Nino Rota
Cinematography by
Gordon Willis
The Godfather: Part III (1990)
Follows Michael Corleone, now in his 60s, as he seeks to free his family from crime and find a suitable successor to his empire.
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Writers
Mario Puzo
Francis Ford Coppola
Stars
Al Pacino
Diane Keaton
Andy Garcia
The Godfather: Part III (1990) – Trailer
The Godfather, Part III (1990) Reviews
“The Godfather, Part III” continues the Corleone family history in 1979, as the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. Despite every attempt to go legit, to become respectable, the past cannot be silenced. The family has amassed unimaginable wealth, and as the film opens Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is being invested with a great honor by the church.Later that day, at a reception, his daughter announces a Corleone family gift to the church and the charities of Sicily, “a check in the amount of $100 million.” But the Corleones are about to find, as others have throughout history, that you cannot buy forgiveness. Sure, you can do business with evil men inside the church, for all men are fallible and capable of sin. But God does not take payoffs.
Michael is older now and walks with a stoop. He has a diabetic condition. He has spent the years since “The Godfather, Part II” trying to move the family out of crime and into legitimate businesses. He has turned over a lot of the old family rackets to a new generation, to people like Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), who is not scrupulous about dealing dope, who is capable of making deals that would offend the fastidious Michael.It is Michael’s dream, now that he senses his life is coming to a close, that he can move his family into the light.But the past is seductive. Because Michael knows how to run a Mafia family, there is great pressure on him to do so. And throughout “Godfather III” we are aware of the essential tragedy of this man, the fact that the sins that stain his soul will not wash off – especially the sin of having ordered the death of his brother Fredo.Michael is positioned in the story between two characters who could come from “King Lear” – his daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola), whom he loves and wants to give his kingdom to, and Sonny’s son, Vincent (Andy Garcia), who sees the death of his enemies as the answer to every question. Michael is torn between the futures represented by the two characters, between Mary, quiet and naive, and the hot-blooded Vincent. And when Vincent seduces Mary and makes her his own, Michael’s plans begin to go wrong.There is also Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton), of course, still the woman Michael loves, and the mother of his children. He wants their son, Anthony, to join the family business. She defends his ambition to be an opera singer. They face each other like skilled opponents.Perhaps she even still loves him, too, or would if she did not know him so well.She is the only person who can tell Michael what she really thinks, and in one of those dark, gloomy rooms, she lets him know that it doesn’t matter what grand order he is invested in by the church, he is at heart still a gangster. The best scenes in “Godfather III” are between these two, Michael and Kay, Pacino and Keaton, fiercely locked in a battle that began too many years ago, at that wedding feast where Michael told Kay he was not part of his family business.
The plot of the movie, concocted by Coppola and Mario Puzo in a screenplay inspired by headlines, brings the Corleone family into the inner circles of corruption in the Vatican. Actual events – the untimely suddenness of John Paul I’s death, the scandals at the Vatican Bank, the body of a Vatican banker found hanging from a London bridge – are cheerfully intertwined with the Corleone’s fictional story, and it is suggested that the Vatican lost hundreds of millions in a fraud.We eavesdrop on corrupt Vatican officials, venal cardinals scheming in the vast Renaissance palaces that dwarf them, and we travel to Sicily so that Michael Corleone can consult with Don Tommasino, his trusted old friend, to discover who is plotting against him within the Mafia council.They are so seductive, these byzantine intrigues. Alliances are forged with a pragmatic decision, betrayed with sudden violence.Always there is someone in a corner, whispering even more devious advice.This trait of operatic plotting and betrayal is practiced beautifully by Connie Corleone (Talia Shire), Michael’s sister, who has turned in middle age into a fierce, thin-faced woman in black, who stands in the deepest shadows, who schemes and lobbies for her favorites – especially for Vincent, whom she wants Michael to accept and embrace.In the “Godfather” movies Coppola has made a world.Because we know it so intimately, because its rhythms and values are instantly recognizable to us, a film like “The Godfather Part III” probably works better than it should. If you stand back and look at it rationally, this is a confusing and disjointed film.It is said that Coppola was rewriting it as he went along, and indeed it lacks the confident forward sweep of a film that knows where it’s going.Some of the dialogue scenes, especially in the beginning, sound vaguely awkward; the answers do not fit the questions, and conversations seem to have been rewritten in the editing room. Other shots – long shots, into the light, so we cannot see the characters’ lips — look suspiciously like scenes that were filmed first and dubbed later.The whole ambitious final movement of the film – in which two separate intrigues are intercut with the progress of an opera being sung by Anthony — is intended to be suspenseful but is so confusing, we are not even sure which place (Sicily, Rome, London?) one of the intrigues is occurring. The final scene of the movie, which is intended to echo Marlon Brando’s famous death scene, is perfunctory and awkward.
And yet it’s strange how the earlier movies fill in the gaps left by this one, and answer the questions. It is, I suspect, not even possible to understand this film without knowing the first two, and yet, knowing them, “Part III” works better than it should, evokes the same sense of wasted greatness, of misdirected genius. Both Don Vito Corleone and Don Michael Corleone could have been great men. But they lacked that final shred of character that would have allowed them to break free from their own pasts.Or perhaps their tragedies were dictated by circumstances. Perhaps they were simply born into the wrong family.And so here we are back again, in the rich, deep brown rooms inhabited by the Corleone family, the rooms filled with shadows and memories, and regretful decisions that people may have to die. We have been taught this world so well by Francis Ford Coppola that we enter it effortlessly has there ever before been a film saga so seductive and compelling, so familiar to us that even after years we remember all of the names of the players?Here, for example, is a new character, introduced as “Sonny’s illegitimate son,” and, yes, we nod like cousins at a family reunion, yes, he does seem a lot like Sonny.He’s the same kind of hotheaded, trigger-happy lunatic.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism
Film Credits
The Godfather, Part III (1990)
Rated R
162 minutes
Cast
Eli Wallach as Don Altobello
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone
Diane Keaton as Kay
Talia Shire as Connie
Andy Garcia as Vincent Mancini
Joe Mantegna as Joey Zasa
Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone
Edited by
Walter Murch
Lisa Fruchtman
Barry Malkin
Music by
Carmine Coppola
Photographed by
Gordon Willis
Written by
Francis Ford Coppola
Mario Puzo
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Author: Mohammed A Bazzoun
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