On March 15, 1972, The Godfather—a three-hour epic chronicling the lives of the Corleones, an Italian-American crime family led by the powerful Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando)—is released in theaters.
The Godfather was adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Mario Puzo, a novelist who grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and got his start writing pulp stories for men’s magazines. Controversy surrounded the film from the beginning: Soon after Paramount Pictures announced its production, the Italian-American Civil Rights League held a rally in Madison Square Garden, claiming the film would amount to a slur against Italian Americans. The uproar only increased publicity for the movie, which Paramount was counting to become a big-money hit after the success of Puzo’s novel.
The studio’s production chief, Robert Evans, approached several directors—including Sergio Leone and Costa Gavras—about The Godfather before hiring the relatively unknown Francis Ford Coppola, who was only 31 years old at the time. As an Italian American himself, Coppola strove to make the film an authentic representation of the time period and the culture, and to do justice to the complex relationships within the Corleone family, instead of focusing primarily on the violent crime aspect of the story. He worked with Puzo on the screenplay and persuaded Paramount to increase the budget of the film, which the studio had envisioned as a relatively meager $2.5 million.
Perhaps most importantly, Coppola and Puzo fought to cast Marlon Brando in the coveted role of Vito Corleone. At the time, Brando’s career had been in decline for a decade, and he had become notorious for his moody on-set behavior, most notably during the filming of 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty. When Paramount insisted that Brando do a screen test, the legendary actor complied because he wanted the role so badly. Reading his lines from hidden cue cards, Brando turned in a phenomenal, intuitive performance as the Godfather, winning an Academy Award for Best Actor (which he declined to accept). Combined with Coppola’s meticulous direction and memorable performances by the rest of the film’s cast, including Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, Brando’s star turn propelled the film to record-breaking box-office success, as well as three Academy Awards, for Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Godfather has remained a perennial choice on critics’ lists of the all-time best films in history. In 2007, it ranked second on the American Film Institute (AFI)’s list of the greatest movies of all time, behind Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Its sequel, The Godfather: Part II, was released in 1974 and won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. A third installment, The Godfather: Part III (1990), received some positive reviews but was generally considered to be the weakest of the three films.
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If you have Paramount+, I highly recommend The Offer. It’s the story about the making of the Godfather.
Never understand why everyone raves about this self-indulgent yawn fest. It was the first of the mafia chic movies, glorifying some of the worst people on the planet. It did cure my insomnia, though.
Always someone has gotta piss in the punchbowl. You sound like a real joy to be around.
He’s right. We’re too riveted by entertainment – as opposed to art. Acting is lying. Even Shakespeare is ultimately only a highbrow soap opera.
“The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Just stirring the shit, which is TBP’s mission, Nescafe pas? (I just beat Auntie Acid to “Nescafe pas” – pardon mah French.)
I tell my family they are just good at pretending. They respond as if acting is a high art form. Most seem to have embraced the spirit of the age and are not good people so I respect very few actors / actresses. Those that I do truly respect are the ones that either don’t take themselves too seriously and those that use their ability to present important ideas, real heroic figures, etc.
When actors meet The Lord in person, they won’t be asked about their latest movie. They’ll have to answer for their behavior and will probably wish they were more generous, better husbands, fathers, mothers, etc., just like the rest of us.
For you odin worshippers on this site, it won’t be odin judging you. You might want to look into the teachings of Jesus before it’s too late.
It has always occurred to me that acting is just lying, like anon said. This is part of the reason it was historically considered a trade of vagabonds with lower social status than prostitution.
It absolutely is a joke to consider it aesthetic art.
I’m with Steve. The glorification of mobsters (of any kind) for entertainment disgusts me. I have in-laws from a New York Italian background and they seem to love this stuff, even though they are not themselves mobsters. (Well, most of them are not, however I suspect 1-2 may be) I cannot understand the mentality.
America has a deep-seated thread of hucksterism. The hustler has always held a fascination here. The snake-oil salesman, the carny, magicians, clowns, jugglers. The Ponzi schemer, the real estate flipper, the multi-level marketing charmer, who really only cares about having a hundred suckers in his downline, who each are trying to move fifty units a week: Amway, for example.
We love pimps, gamblers, stock speculators; in short, folks who try to get over without producing, but by imaginative parasitism. And here we are, in the financial endgame, the Ponzi complete, the substance eaten out, as the Founders wrote in the Declaration. We like liars and thieves, as long as they’re colorful, artful dodgers. Actors are that, and usually very handsome, too.
Great flick, everything a movie should be. Great cast too.
“Kay, I need you Kay.”
(Barf)
#1 was good
#2 was better
#3 was absolute crap
I had cousins who lived in Bensonhurst Brooklyn NY. The whole neighborhood was Mafia run. The place was spotless beautiful used to buy fire works from “Ritchie his whole house stacked with all kinds “.the salumeria on 15th Ave and bath was so awesome until two mobsters got killed outside in 1987.Best part no blacks that I can recall.
“The Godfather” was a foretelling of how the world is run and will be run, if you paid attention. Key was the “we are going legit” by way of corporations. There is scarcely a country on Earth today that is not run completely by organized crime cartels/mafias. You can vote til you turn blue while the “Good Fellas” laugh their ass off at you for being a sheep. It is mafia that wants to run every facet of your life for a buck, jooish being the most pervasive.
It is part and parcel of the long running plan for (((them))) to have it all while most of us get our tickets punched and enjoy a long dirt bath. Killing off competition is their thing, never forget that.
At least in 60’s, 70’s & 80’s movies were mostly made using actors, natural settings, interesting characters, plot lines, etc. I’m sure there are still some of those out there, but they’re rarer. Even the local art house theater shows blockbusters now. They’re all about comic book superheroes and full of CGI. They’re fucking inane. I got dragged along to the animated “Lightyear” last year and it was the biggest bunch of woke homo bullshit I could imagine.
They don’t make movies for people like me, though. I’ve never seen a single Star Wars movie, for example. It looked too fucking stupid. One of my favorites was The Name of The Rose, and it was a flop. It had all of the essential movie elements, though: Sean Connery, monks, tonsures, a monastery, murder, mystery, a Grand Inquisitor, burning at the stake and even a hot peasant girl who was mute.
I agree. Have no appetite for CGI. Great example: Watch the original “Gone in 60 Seconds” (with the yellow ’71 Mustang). Every car stunt in that movie was real cars doing real things with real drivers behind the wheel.
Best example would be “Bullit”. They left all the mistakes in the final cut and it’s still the greatest car chase ever filmed. No CGI.
CGI is psy-conditioning. A handful of people on Earth know no aircraft hit on 9/11, and a handful won’t believe it when UFOs arrive or Jesus “returns” over every country, one of these days.
The original 3 Star Wars movies weren’t bad. Everything else since has been little more than a vehicle for action figure sales. And NO CGI (well, they came back and added shit to the originals), just very hard work by creative animators that produced great special effects for the time. Not that your life would be worse by never seeing them.
We’ve become so infantilized by Hollywood’s Emerald City. It’s so unreal. I can’t believe what putative adults find fascinating today – including gaming, weird hair, tats, retarded clothes, etc.
It’s the film that made every Italian a mobster. A good movie, glorifying arch criminals sells. It’s what makes it interesting.