It’s the most iconic shot in Francis Ford Coppola’s oeuvre: a young boy named Vito stares expectantly through the window of the Ellis Island immigration bureau, that radiant monument of hope and prosperity — Lady Liberty — standing proud across the river.

Coppola’s Godfather trilogy is a chronicle of many things — the irresistibility of criminality, the inevitability of betrayal — but it’s foremost an account of the immigrant experience in its most extreme form. Three of Coppola’s four grandparents moved to the United States from Italy and the cautious aspiration of a newcomer in a strange land runs through his work. If Vito’s arrival in Ellis Island is the destination of the immigrant dreamer, then the journey is truly captured in the opening titles of Coppola’s near-forgotten 1968 adaptation of the Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, a soaring tapestry of the mountains, lakes, valleys and rainbows that link the poor market towns of Ireland and the skyscrapers of America.