The Godfather (1972) review

Every gangster film made since has been in conversation with this one, and most of them have been losing. What they miss is that Coppola was never really making a crime film — he was making a film about a family business, and the crime is just the industry it happens to be in.

A Family Story Wearing a Crime Story's Clothes

The Godfather opens on a wedding and ends on a baptism, and the entire arc of the film lives in the gap between those two ceremonies. Connie's wedding introduces the Corleone family as a social organism: the hierarchy, the obligations, the way outsiders are handled, the way daughters are treated as diplomatic instruments. It is nearly thirty minutes of exposition delivered as celebration, and it is one of the most efficient openings in American cinema.

Coppola and Puzo understood that the mafia material was never the point. The point was a specific kind of American success story — the immigrant enterprise that becomes legitimate by acquiring the trappings of legitimacy, and the moral cost of that acquisition. Vito Corleone is not a monster in the film's framing. He is a patriarch with a code, and the tragedy is that the code does not survive contact with the son who inherits it.

Read more about crime cinema in our Drama genre hub, explore the work of Francis Ford Coppola in our directors section, or see where this film lands in our ranked film lists.

Michael's Transformation

The film's real subject is Michael, and the transformation is engineered with almost surgical precision. He begins as the one Corleone who chose a different life — Dartmouth, the Marines, Kay, a girlfriend who finds the family stories charming because she does not understand them. He tells Kay at the wedding, 'That's my family, Kay, it's not me.' The film then spends three hours proving him wrong.

Pacino plays the shift physically before he plays it psychologically. Watch his face in the restaurant scene: the decision registers in his eyes several seconds before his hand moves. By the final act, the same features have hardened into something that resembles his father but is colder, and the film is careful to show that this is not an improvement. Vito was feared and, in his own way, loved. Michael is only feared.

Craft: Light, Sound, Structure

Gordon Willis' cinematography is the film's most imitated element and its least reproducible. He deliberately underexposed the interiors so that faces emerge from shadow rather than sitting in light, which gives the film a moral texture that a conventionally lit version would lack. The famous orange-gold tone of the wedding sequences contrasts with the near-black of the office scenes, and the palette quietly signals which world is the real one.

Nino Rota's score is doing something more interesting than period atmosphere. The main theme is a waltz, and the film repeatedly sets it against violence, which forces the audience to associate elegance with brutality. The baptism sequence — intercutting sacred ritual with the execution of the other families — is the clearest statement of the film's thesis: that these are not separate systems but the same one, run by the same man.

What It Gets Wrong, and Why It Still Works

The film is male to the point of claustrophobia. Kay and Connie exist to register what the men are doing to them, and Apollonia exists for roughly ten minutes before being removed to make Michael suffer. That is arguably the point — the Corleone world is one in which women have no standing — but the film does not interrogate it so much as illustrate it, and a modern viewer will notice the absence of any female interiority.

It also romanticises its subject in ways that Puzo's novel did not. The film is much more willing to grant Vito dignity than the book, which is considerably more sordid. That choice is what made it a classic rather than a genre exercise, and it is also the reason the film has been accused, fairly, of making organised crime look like a matter of taste and etiquette. Both things are true at once.

Themes and ideas

• Inheritance
• American capitalism
• Family as institution
• The corruption of the reluctant heir