The Corleone family patriarch is Vito Corleone (the Don), whose surname represents the Sicilian town of his birth, Corleone. After selling all of the family's remaining businesses in New York, the Corleones permanently move to Las Vegas. This encompasses the murder of all of the Corleone family's enemies, including Michael's brother-in-law Carlo Rizzi, who played a part in Sonny's murder. Under his retired father's tutelage, Michael orchestrates a plan to exact revenge, while relocating the Corleone family's power base to Las Vegas in order to further his goal of legitimizing the family and getting them out of organized crime. Michael must return from hiding in Sicily to assume control of the family as the new Don. When Michael murders Sollozzo and his bodyguard, corrupt NYPD Captain Mark McCluskey, while meeting with them in a restaurant, the conflict escalates into a full-scale war which results in Sonny's murder. After Don Vito Corleone is shot by men working for drug kingpin Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo, Corleone's two sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, must run the family business with the help of consigliere Tom Hagen and the family's two trusted caporegimes, Peter Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio. However with how spectacular of a film it is overall, I'm not going to sit here and bitch about it any further.The Corleone family, one of the Five Families of the New York Mafia, fights the other four families in a brutal war in the years after World War II. Specifically the whole sequence involving Johnny Fontaine and the Woltz horse fiasco which has no real involvement in the over-arcing storyline. These cast members in particular stand out in their performances and convey a sort of detached emotion which makes the film so great (if you need clarification on this, the scene where Vito overlooks his own son's body in the morgue is a prime example).Īlthough it is by far the best instalment in the Godfather trilogy, the film itself does suffer from a few key points which I've never been able to reason out why they were included. As well as the fact that Coppola spared nothing when it came to deploying talented screen stars of the day to cast The Godfather, leading Marlon Brando to find international success once more with his portrayal of Vito Corleone, Al Pacino as the reluctant, but eventual successor to his father Vito, Michael Corleone, Diane Keaton as Kay Adams, Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, and of course, a pre-Rocky Talia Shire as Connie Corleone. There's so many ways this film just works so well the first is that Coppola always had a way of making the cinematography and direction style look both extravagant, but also bleak at the same time, partially through sun-faded cinematography (I'm just guessing) and also partially through the way the film itself was shot.
#GODFATHER 1 MOVIE LEGTH HOW TO#
I've always tried to keep a foot in both camps for the most part, but if a film like this doesn't make you at least sit there as the credits role, musing in thought like Indiana Jones after being given a clue by a recently-killed shaman or anti-Nazi spy the first time you watch it, then I'm not sure you really know how to appreciate films and movies as art and not just entertainment. It begins in celebration and ends as the first part of the trilogy in bitter-sweet victory and tragedy for the Corleones with Michael having slowly morphed into a totally different character by the end and the Corleone family itself having endured tragedy after tragedy.ĭepending on if you're selective to certain genres of movies - particularly crime and heist thrillers - the 1970s were either a fantastic time with the New Hollywood group of directors, or a pitiful time where the Anti-Hero was all the rage. Francis Ford Coppola went out of his way not to make the film one that glorifies the Mafia in anyway, but still realized what a magnificent project it was. The Godfather works so well because it isn't a film that kisses it's own ass on a variety of sub-levels. I first watched it back close to ten years ago as a 12 year old, never fully getting the story with the film falling into the "great film that I didn't appreciate" category until a month or so back when I got the Coppola restoration Blu-Ray and realized as an adult how fantastic of a film it truly was. Growing up as a film nut, I often heard of The Godfather as possessing a sort of mythic status which few films made after 1955 possess. I was roughly twenty years away from even being conceived when The Godfather came out.