Retrospective Film Review

The Godfather (1972) • 50 Years Later

The first instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy charts the rise to power of Michael Corleone, scion of a Mafia family.

The beginning of The Godfather isn’t really the beginning of its story, for as soon as the undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) starts describing his problems with his daughter, we have the feeling we’ve entered a complete world which already has a long history behind it; and as the camera slowly pulls away from Bonasera and over the desk in front of which he sits, so the audience is pulled further and further in.

Eventually, the screen reveals the man to whom Bonasera is making his entreaties: Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). But this six-minute scene reveals much of the flavour of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece — cynical but romantic, epic but intimate and even understated, concerned with immense and violent power wielded in conservative domestic settings — and, of course, one of its central themes too. Bonasera is eager to emphasise that he acts like a “good American”, and sees nothing un-American…