Quite simply the finest gangster film ever made, although morally disturbing in its presentation of the Mafia as, if not exactly the good guys, then at least worthy of our admiration. What, specifically, we are asked to admire are their sense of family and their loyalty to each other. Bearing in mind that the Mafia take care of their families and each other by means of organised crime and murder, this is a most specious argument, but in The Godfather it is put across with such brazen confidence that one finds oneself nodding agreement.
What we are shown here is the dark side of the American Dream, a glamorous, ruthless group of people whose aspirations are precisely the same as those of legitimate big business, only their methods are a little different. Paramount (in the person of Robert Evans) chose the hitherto not particularly successful Francis Coppola to direct the film because he was of Italian origin and more likely to understand the society he was trying to depict. It was an excellent choice because Coppola delivered an extraordinary movie, a portrait of American free enterprise gone mad. Every scene, from the opening set piece to the massacre on the cathedral steps, teams with life (or death); the characters are vividly drawn and, yes, we do admire them and mourn with Marlon Brando and Pacino at the murder of Sonny (James Caan). Now, very well, deep down this is mere pulp fiction, but it's raised to epic proportions by a director who, at his best, is a genuine artist of the cinema.
The grainy realism of the photography and Nino Rota's distinctive music - whose Oscar nomination was withdrawn when it was later learned that part of the score had been used in the 1958 Italian film Fortunella - merely add further dimensions to what is already a masterly work.
Before the shoot began, Brando arranged to have a ritualistic "family" dinner in New Jersey with a mobster dynasty.
Shooting began in October 1971, down on Mulberry Street, and continued all over Manhattan and Staten Island.
Brando's cue cards were all over the place on the set, pasted on desks, on the fruit in the bowl on Don Corleone's table; sometimes he wrote his lines on the back of his hand or on his sleeve.
They shot at Filmways Studio on 127th Street.
5 STARS OUT OF FIVE
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