The Godfather
Coppola and the immigrant family epic
Description
In March 1972, a film opened that almost no one inside Paramount had expected to be released in the form it took. The Godfather had been directed by Francis Ford Coppola, a thirty-two-year-old filmmaker hired largely because every more established director Paramount had approached had passed. The novel by Mario Puzo had been bought for $80,000 and was considered, by the studio, a piece of disposable pulp. The film Coppola eventually delivered, after constant fighting with the studio over casting, budget, length, and tone, became the highest-grossing film in American history within a year and reset what Hollywood would call a serious commercial picture for the rest of the century.
The film’s commercial success has, for fifty years, been the easiest thing to say about it. What is harder to describe, and what the film actually accomplished beneath the box-office numbers, was a particular kind of cultural translation. The Godfather took a story about Italian-American organized crime material that had previously belonged to genre films of modest ambition and treated it as if it were an immigrant family epic in the mode of nineteenth-century European fiction. The treatment dignified the material in a way that no previous Hollywood film about ethnic Americans had done. The result was a film that read, depending on the viewer, as a gangster movie, as a tragedy about the cost of American assimilation, or as a meditation on family obligation that happened to be told through the iconography of organized crime.
The cultural reception, over the half-century since the release, has settled into something specific. The film is now read less as a crime drama than as a foundational text about a particular American experience: the immigrant family that arrives, builds power within an institution the dominant culture treats as illegitimate, and then has to manage the costs of that power across generations. The Corleone story, in this reading, is not really about the mob. It is about what assimilation costs and what it does not buy. The reading has aged better than most readings of films made in the 1970s, partly because Coppola was working with material that turned out to be unusually durable.
The question we’re asking: what did Coppola actually make at Paramount in 1972, what did the film accomplish beyond commercial success, and how has the immigrant epic aged after fifty years?
What we’ll see: the production fight that shaped the film, the formal craft Coppola developed, the thematic argument the film made, and the legacy.
Table of contents
01A young director Paramount tried to fire
Coppola had directed three films before The Godfather, none of them commercial successes, and was in significant personal debt. Paramount hired him on the strength of his Italian-American background and on the assumption that, as a relatively inexperienced director, he could be controlled. The assumption proved wrong almost immediately.
The casting fights came first. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando for Vito Corleone. The studio, which considered Brando difficult and commercially over, refused. The compromise required Brando to do a screen test humiliating for an actor of his stature and to accept a reduced salary against a percentage of the gross. Brando did the test in his bathrobe with cotton stuffed in his cheeks and produced a performance the studio admitted was unanswerable. Coppola then fought for Al Pacino as Michael Corleone. The studio wanted Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal. Pacino was hired only after the production was already running.
02The form the cinematographer and the score built
The visual language of The Godfather was distinctive enough to become its signature. Gordon Willis shot the film with significantly less light than American studio cinema of the period typically used. Faces were often partly in shadow. The Corleone offices and home interiors had the visual texture of old paintings, with light coming from single sources at oblique angles. The exteriors, particularly in the Sicily sequences, used a different palette warmer, more saturated, with daylight that felt nostalgic rather than realistic. The contrast between the dark interior world of the family business and the bright pastoral world of the Sicilian past gave the film a visual argument that the dialogue did not have to make explicit.
The score by Nino Rota did similar work. The main theme, played on solo trumpet, became one of the most recognized musical figures in American cinema. The melody was simple, unmistakable, and emotionally specific. The score recurred at key moments with a thematic logic that was unusually careful for a Hollywood film. The opening wedding sequence, the murder of Apollonia in Sicily, the moment Michael accepts the role he has spent the film trying to refuse each of these moments was scored with motifs that reinforced what the visual language was already doing. The combination of cinematography and music produced an emotional texture that the film’s actual dialogue, which was often spare, could not have produced alone.
03The immigrant epic, and what it was really about
The thematic argument of The Godfather, which the contemporary reviews mostly missed, was about the cost of American assimilation for the families that had paid it. The Corleones were not, in the film’s careful framing, a criminal aberration in an otherwise legitimate America. They were a family that had been forced to build power within institutions that the dominant culture treated as illegitimate, because the dominant institutions had been closed to them. Vito Corleone had come to America as a child, lost his entire family to the Sicilian mafia, and built, over half a century, an organization that protected the Italian-American community he lived among. The organization was criminal by the standards of the American legal system. It was also, in the film’s framing, a structurally necessary response to a country that had not been willing to extend its protections to the people Vito served.
04Fifty years on, and the long retrospect
The Godfather has settled into the position of an unusual artifact: a commercial film that has been read as serious literature for half a century. It is taught in film schools as a master class in craft and studied by sociologists as a record of Italian-American culture at a specific historical moment. The combination of commercial success and durable cultural respect is unusual enough to be worth noting.
The sequel, The Godfather Part II, released in 1974, deepened the structural argument. The parallel narrative Vito’s rise in early-twentieth-century New York, intercut with Michael’s deterioration in the late 1950s was even more ambitious, and many viewers consider Part II the better of the two. The sequel ended with Michael alone in the family compound, looking out at the lake where Fredo had been murdered on his orders.
05Conclusion
Francis Ford Coppola spent the rest of the 1970s producing a body of work The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, the second Godfather that has rarely been matched by any subsequent American director. He spent the 1980s and 1990s in commercial and personal difficulties from which his career never fully recovered. The fight he won at Paramount in 1972 was, in many ways, the high point of a particular kind of director-driven American cinema that the success of his own film helped to end.