The Godfather (1972): Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, John Cazale and Diane Keaton. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Screenplay by Mario Puzo, from his novel.

When I was growing up in the seventies, everything was "The Godfather", and rightly so, as the film has taken its place as one of the best American films ever made.

I recall reading in "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" by Peter Biskind, how William Friedkin rode past Francis Coppola and his friends on the street after winning his Oscar for "The French Connection", waving the statue out the window, shouting. I don't know if this served directly as an impetus to Coppola to make the best movie he possibly could, but he did.

Unlike "The French Connection", "The Godfather" is pure Hollywood. The camera is fixed or moves only very slightly most of the time. Coppola is filming a grand opera and he holds no bones about it, right up to the grande finale with organ music blaring amid the many deaths of the families that have dared back the Corleones into a corner. It's widely been said that Coppola didn't want the job, his close friends George Lucas and Martin Scorsese were making the kind of arty films that he wanted to make, but there seems to be a struggle within Coppola between the filmmaker and the businessman. The businessman won over in the case of "The Godfather", but the filmmaker emerged when it was time to shoot. If "The Godfather" is the result of Coppola's laziness, all filmmakers should be blessed with this kind of laziness, for his style is completely effortless, the way he methodically and meticulously plows through very complex material. Not bad for a guy who used to work for Roger Corman.

Unlike most films today, virtually every aspect of "The Godfather" is thought out in precise detail. The main story, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) returning to his "connected" family and refusing to become involved, is reflected in everything from locations to dialogue delivery, to colors. The opening scenes, cutting back and forth between Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) meeting in his dark study and his daughter's (Talia Shire) bright wedding, dark and light obvious references, but Coppola has Michael dressed in a green military uniform where everyone else is dressed in black and white. He is not part of the family. Pacino plays him, slouching, sulking, talking in a soft and quiet voice, unlike his loud and raucous brother, Sonny (James Cann). But as the story progresses, and Michael is drawn more and more into the family business, the settings become darker; he saves his father from an assassination attempt in a shadowy hospital, and then, outside, in the dark, has his jaw broken by Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden). From this point forward (apart from Michael's exile in Sicily), the settings are dark, Michael now wears dark clothes like the rest of the family, and speaks differently, in an affected, broken-jaw tone, like his father's strange speech patterns. He is becoming his father.

It's hard to find anything wrong with "The Godfather". The film is usually listed alongside "Citizen Kane" as the top films ever made, and Coppola, like Welles, seems to show the same out-of-nowhere genius in every frame of the film. The film is a classical tragedy, and you can feel that anguished lament throughout. When you meet Michael Corleone, you know that he is going to slide to the dark side and become part of something he doesn't want to become a part of, but all you can do is watch as the tragedy is realized.

"The Godfather" was a smash hit, the novel already a best-seller and wise businessman Coppola made a deal with Paramount that he would not do a sequel to the film unless they funded and released another film he wanted to make first called "The Conversation". They agreed and Coppola delivered both: a brooding drama about a surveillance expert who meets his match and a sequel to one of the greatest American films yet made that actually surpassed the original.

With the end of "The Godfather II", Coppola had taken the character of Michael Corleone as low as he possibly could (ordering the execution of his own brother) and the only way he could go lower would be for the filmmaker to go into Hell himself, which he did with his eight year shoot for "Apocalypse Now". The years following would show that Coppola could not top these three films, although he did try to wrap up the Corleone story with "The Godfather III", but too many years had passed and the story was already over. Seen "The Godfather"?