A commentary on the American Dream, The Godfather trilogy, which is releasing in theatres in restored 4K version, became one of the greatest crime family sagas that subsequently influenced several gangster films
When Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, which is back in theatres in its 4K restored avatar this week, premiered at Loew’s State Theatre on March 14, 1972, a freak snowstorm had brought New York City to a standstill. Broadway marquees were half-hidden behind blocks of ice, traffic crawled, and most of the city stayed indoors. But the blizzard could not quell the buzz about the movie.
Hours before the screening, Paramount Pictures’ prodigiously self-confident boss Robert Evans, the actor-turned-producer-turned-studio chief, who had taken over the reins of the moribund studio as its production head at the age 36 in 1966, was nervous. The film was long, slow, and saturated with Catholic ritual and Sicilian dialects. Studio executives wanted a flashy crime flick, but Coppola had given them a dark family saga that offered a sharp commentary on Italian mafia and the American Dream.
Evans arrived at the premiere with his third wife, the svelte Ali MacGraw, on one arm and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the other. A master of seduction and a legendary womaniser who would go on to marry seven times in total, Evans had reasons to be anxious. He had fought bitterly to get this movie made, and a lot was at stake for him, both personally and professionally.
Also read: Gene Hackman obit: How the everyman actor became a reluctant Hollywood icon
Even as the orchestra swelled with Nino Rota’s funereal score, Evans wondered if his gamble would sink him. When the lights finally came up nearly three hours later, there was no applause, but a deafening silence. Evans panicked: had the film bombed? To his immense relief, Kissinger leaned over, and whispered into his ear. “Bob,” he said, “when you can sit and watch a gangster who’s killed hundreds of people, and yet when he dies the audience is crying, you’ve made yourself a masterpiece.”
The rest, as they say, is history. The Godfather went to be nominated for 11 Oscar awards, and eventually won three: Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando (who sent Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it in protest of Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans), and Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola and Mario Puzo, on whose novel it was based.
The making of a blockbuster
Within six months, The Godfather had outgrossed the 36-year tally of Gone With the Wind (1940) and became the highest-grossing film of the year. “It opened on 400 screens, unprecedented at the time, and became the first true blockbuster that was also a work of art,” writes American journalist Mark Seal in his book, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather (2021). Evans couldn’t be happier. After had had taken control of Paramount, and resuscitated its flagging fortunes with hits like Rosemary’s Baby and Love Story, he was looking for a story that could prove to be a game-changer and bought the rights to Puzo’s pulpy bestseller for a modest $80,000 before it had even hit stores for precisely the same reason.
When the novel was brewing in his mind, Mario Puzo was broke. By the late 1960s, he had two novels behind him (The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim), and a mountain of gambling debt. His Hell’s Kitchen childhood — among butchers, hustlers, and neighbourhood gangsters — had given him plenty of material, but the literary marketplace wasn’t paying. Out of desperation, he turned to what he once dismissed as “trash writing.”
Also read: James Bond: As Amazon MGM takes control, will 007 still have a license to thrill?
Puzo wrote a novel about the Mafia, a “commercial book” to pay off debts, but in its pages he poured his childhood, his Catholic guilt, and his fascination with power. He claimed he invented most of it; in fact, he had little direct knowledge of organised crime. What he did have was the memory of his formidable mother, Maria, whose mixture of ruthlessness and devotion informed Don Corleone more than any gangster.
Published in 1969, The Godfather became a phenomenon. The paperback rights alone broke records. The public, who had consumed decades of press about Mafia trials and FBI hearings, suddenly had a story that made mobsters attractive. Puzo had done what he had promised to himself about 15 years ago. On Christmas Eve 1955, in pain from a gallbladder attack, he collapsed on a New York curb and thought, ‘I’m dying like a dog.’ That night, he swore he would become rich and famous. The Godfather fulfilled that vow.
The movie and the Mafia
Paramount’s first instinct was to set it in modern Kansas City, cut out the Italians, and make it quick. Coppola, barely 30, was also not their first choice as director; he was broke himself, recovering from the flop of Finian’s Rainbow (1968). The studio wanted a big-ticket director, maybe someone like Elia Kazan, who had directed a good host of classics like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). Other top-tier filmmakers such as Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood), Peter Yates (Bullitt), Franklin J. Schaffner (Planet of the Apes), and Otto Preminger (Fallen Angel) were also approached and declined the project.
Peter Bart, Evans’s assistant, then suggested Coppola because he was of Italian-American heritage and affordable. His 1969 road drama, The Rain People, was promising and had premiered to decent reviews and won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival. The studio wanted Ernest Borgnine as Don Corleone and Robert Redford was floated as Michael. “The fighting,” Evans later sighed in an interview to Seal, “tremendous fights.” But it was Evans who held the line against studio executives who wanted the film to be cheap, quick, and marketable. His stubbornness gave Coppola the space to turn pulp into one of the greatest films in the history of cinema.
Not everyone wanted The Godfather made though. The first among them was the Mafia, for obvious reasons. Joseph Colombo Sr., the powerful head of one of the organised-crime families in New York during the 1960s and the 1970s, was known in the public as the founder of the Italian American Civil Rights League and didn’t want the stereotyping of Italian Americans in popular entertainment. The League picketed, threatened boycotts, and pressured the studio. Coppola’s producer, Al Ruddy, negotiated directly with the League.
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone.
They compromised and the makers decided to remove the word “Mafia” from the script — it appeared only once anyway — and make a donation to the League. The protests ended, and suddenly, mobsters who had sworn to bury the film were offering cars, restaurants, and even themselves as extras. Hollywood’s greatest movie about the Mafia, thus, ended up being made with the blessing of the Mafia.
Once on board, Coppola argued for an Italian-American cast, for keeping the 1940s period setting, and for shooting in New York and Sicily. When he insisted on casting Al Pacino — a then-unknown theatre actor derided as “too short” and “not photogenic” — Paramount tried to fire him. There were also arguments between the studio and the director over the casting of Brando, Al Pacino’s height, and the film’s running time. What emerged from this war of attrition was a film that substantially changed the crime genre. The ‘family business’ became an allegory for American capitalism itself. Vito Corleone (Brando) was rendered as a patriarch who believed in rules, honour, and survival. And Michael (Al Pacino) — college-educated, uniformed war hero — became the American son seduced into the machinery of violence.
The tragic denouement
Two years later, Coppola went bigger with The Godfather Part II (1974), which was at once a sequel and a prequel: Michael consolidates power in the late 1950s, and young Vito (Robert De Niro) arrives in New York half a century earlier. American cinema had never seen a studio film this ambitious. De Niro, speaking almost entirely in Sicilian dialect, studied Brando’s physical tics until he seemed to have made them a part of his persona. Pacino delivered a performance so controlled it seemed to reveal Michael to the audiences from the inside out.
If the first film had been about Michael’s descent, the second revealed its cost. His mother (Morgana King) dies, his wife (Kay Adams-Corleone, who secretly aborts their unborn child as she doesn’t want him born into their world of crime and violence) leaves, and most brutally, his brother Fredo (John Cazale) is executed on his orders. “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!” Michael’s parting words to his brother as the kiss of death still echo in our minds whenever betrayal is discussed.
By 1990, Coppola had sworn he was done. He considered the first two films complete. But deep in debt after the failure of One from the Heart, he relented. The Godfather Part III became an uneasy finale. Michael, now gray and weary, seeks legitimacy through the Vatican’s finances, a story uncomfortably entangled with real-life scandals in the Church. Sonny’s illegitimate son Vincent (Andy García) rises as heir. Michael’s daughter Mary (played by Coppola’s daughter Sofia, disastrously received by critics) becomes both his hope and his undoing.
Also read: How Pixar’s Elio turns childhood loneliness into an intergalactic adventure
Though the final instalment in the trilogy film was mauled on release, its final sequence, set against Pietro Mascagni's one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), is among Coppola’s greatest achievements: a montage of assassinations intercut with Mary’s death, Michael’s scream, and finally his lonely collapse in Sicily. Where Vito died surrounded by family, Michael died in silence, slumped on a chair. The saga ended with a sense of desolation. Coppola later insisted it was not a “third part” but an epilogue, a requiem for Michael, and for the myth itself. Seen that way, its flaws deepen rather than diminish the whole.
Marriage of crime and politics
As for Evans, The Godfather was both his crowning achievement and his undoing. The producer who fought Paramount brass to let Coppola make the film later confessed it “ruined my whole life, personally”: his obsession helped cost him his marriage to Ali MacGraw, who left him for Steve McQueen. Professionally, the triumph was followed by a series of scandal; he pled guilty to cocaine possession in 1980, was tainted by association with the Cotton Club murder case (though never charged), and watched his fortune evaporate from millions to virtually nothing. The same film that saved Paramount and enshrined Evans as a Hollywood legend also cast the shadow that haunted the rest of his career. “When the lights went down and Nino Rota’s music swelled, my whole life seemed to pass before me. Watching this epic unfold, I felt that everything my life was about had led up to this moment,” Evans wrote in his 1994 memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, reminiscing the premiere night.
The 4K version of The Godfather Part II and Part III will be released in PVR INOX on October 17 and November 14, respectively. Even if you have watched and re-watched these films numerous times before, if you are a fan you will find it difficult to miss Brando whispering through cotton-stuffed cheeks or Pacino’s eyes hardening from son to don or De Niro cradling a pistol under a towel or Diane Keaton watching a door close in her face. The crime drama has inspired films like Goodfellas, The Sopranos or, back home, Gangs of Wasseypur Part I and II.
More than half a century since the premiere of its first part, the fans of the trilogy’s grammar have only grown. Watching them all over again, watching Pacino’s eyes go cold, or Brando letting a sentence trail into silence, you will realise that what seemed like a story of mobsters was, in truth, an anatomy of America; its faith in family, its bargains with power, its willingness to confuse violence with legitimacy. Coppola, Puzo, and Evans created a monument to the marriage of crime and politics that outlasted its era and will continue to be revisited in every age.
