Made from a series of fortuitous choices, today, 50 years later, The Godfather is of predictable historical importance. This is probably the briefest way to explain The Godfather’s phenomenon. Yet The Godfather is one of those films that are larger than history.
When a film not only becomes iconic, but in the decades to follow its importance and influence keep growing, then we are the witnesses of a rare phenomenon in cinematic history. In order to get to the fundamental issue of The Godfather and its two sequels, one needs to wade through the various layers of information, myths, urban legends, anecdotes, know-it-all sayings… The greatest phenomenon of The Godfather is that the film seems to have been “born” with that patina in 1972, recognizable in the last 50 years. On the other hand, regardless of the differing tastes of film critics and film historians, The Godfather is one of those monolithic films that does not require anything to be taken away – even less added: scenes, editing, and costume or scenography solutions, least of all rhythm in the direction or a musical note in the soundtrack. All these elements in The Godfather are worthy of a modern ancient drama in celluloid format, where the saga of the mafia family is just an accidental, but precisely because of this, the most suitable choice.
The Godfather won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Brando) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Coppola, Puzo), and was nominated in 8 other categories.
The Godfather’s reputation among critics and film aficionados kept growing through the decades and the film has been included in the US Library of Congress National Film Registry as a work of art of particular significance, while the American Film Institute ranks it second, after the eternally best-ranked Citizen Kane, 1941, by Orson Welles.
Two years after The Godfather’s huge success, in 1974 Paramount invested double the amount (the budget was 13 million dollars) in the sequel, while the film earned less than 50 million dollars. In Godfather 2 Coppola and Puzo take the story back to the beginning of Don Vito Corleone’s life and his move to the US as a child trying to escape vendetta in Sicily, as a prelude to the great story of the new mafia godfather Michael Corleone and the challenges of the new era in his business and family, while still keeping the thread of ancient tragedy. The narrative structure and the superior parallel editing make The Godfather 2 a natural whole with the prequel, so critics and film historians consider The Godfather a film in two parts, differentiating the third, final part, as a completely separate and different film.
The Godfather 2 won six Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Robert De Niro, Best Adapted Screenplay – Dean Tavoularis, Angelo P. Graham, George R. Nelson – Best Music – Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola (Francis’s father), and was nominated in five other categories. In The Godfather 2 two acting icons play for the first time, Pacino and De Niro, yet they don’t have scenes together; the film world will wait for more than 20 years to see these two names in the opening credits of Michael Mann’s Heat.
The third part of the saga about the Corleone family was released in 1990, and chroniclers note that it was, once again, a result of prosaic reasons – money. Coppola was successful as a director, but equally disastrous as a producer and often went bankrupt, so even though he thought that the two parts of The Godfather made a whole, he could not refuse the budget of 54 million dollars. Coppola and Puzo thought that the third part should be the finale under the title The Death of Michael Corleone, but for the practical producers the number in the title was a more logical solution for selling a film.
The Godfather 3 earned decent 136 million dollars at the box office and 30 years later Coppola released his version under the title The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, which had a short theatre release and ended on DVD and Blu-ray. The third part had 7 Academy Award nominations – for the first time for the brilliant cinematographer Gordon Willis, but did not win any. Critics were focused on the director’s daughter, Sophia Coppola, who said that she was awful as Mary Corleone, which added oil to the fire in the “war” with F.F. Coppola.
The Godfather saga has long been considered a reference in film history, a sort of genre data base and parameter for success. Or simply put, a masterpiece.