Tuesday, March 14, 1972. Release of The Godfather

The Godfather, one of the greatest American movies ever made, premiered on this day in 1972.  We briefly, very briefly, reviewed the movie here in 2016:

Movies In History: The Godfather

Somehow I managed to review The Godfather, Part II, but not the Godfather.  I think that's because when I originally started doing these, the criteria was a bit different.  It'll be noted that my entry on the second movie is extremely short (at least right now, it's likely to be added to at some time).

The Godfather, of course, was the first of this three part series of films and perhaps is the best, although the second film is excellent.  The third film, The Godfather Part III, is lousy and not worth watching. 

This 1972 film presents the story of a New York mafia family.  Based on some discussion with a friend of mine who knows the mafia quite well, this movie, based on Mario Puzo's novel, is very closely based on real mafia characters and events and presents a highly accurate look into the Sicilian American mafia. 

The film takes place in New York, Sicily and Las Vegas, giving a fictionalized account of the spread of the mafia into narcotics and Las Vegas gambling.  It shows in detail the mafia culture of the time and its activities, including how various mafia families looked at different topics, such as the introduction of the illegal narcotics trade.  Very well done, the film presents 1940s New York, so naturally it doesn't seem to be a period piece.  That it is a period piece is more obvious in the portions of the film set in Sicily, but then they'd have to be.

This film is an excellent film in every way, including in cultural and material details.  It's also an acknowledged masterpiece of American film making and worth seeing for that reason alone.

Later reviews of films generally tended to be much longer than this, and with good reason.  This does give a snippet of the movie, which is what we tended to do at the time, but it doesn't state much more than that.

It's interesting to note that this film was released in 1972.  Richard Nixon was President.  The Mafia was still very much a thing.  The Vietnam War was still going on.  The Country was reeling from the turmoil of the 60s.  Inflation was ramping up.

And along comes this heartwarming family drama. . . 

Well, not so much, but oddly enough, to some degree, that's actually what's tended to make the film an enduring classic.  The Corleone family depicted in this movie are involved in prostitution, gambling and vice. They kill to keep their position in the New York crime scene, and they're involved in a protracted set of relationships with other killers.  But the center of their life revolves around their family, which not only incorporates their immediate family, but those who have been drawn into their crime family.

It's warped and compelling at the same time.

It wasn't really meant to be viewed that way.

Indeed, according to at least one source, the actual screenplay, coming when it did, was meant to be a sort of Marxist critique on American capitalism.  "It's only business" was the line that showed up in the film as an excuse for the horrors that were being met out, and that line is emphasized in the sequel.  But that's not how the American public took the film at all.  It was a crime drama, to be sure, but in some weird sort of way, the family aspect of it was uniquely compelling.  For that reason, one television channel actually runs the show over and over again over the Christmas season, as odd, and as warped, as that is.

And it is warped. Having read the book, and viewed the movie, what I think it does, and another reason it's so compelling, is that it illustrates the line from Baptisms, a line which in fact shows up at the end of the movie which features a Baptism.  The movie illustrates "the glamour of evil".