‘The Godfather’ at 50: A cultural artifact

As Francis Ford Coppola’s classic celebrates a special milestone, Aroonav Das writes why the gangster film is celebrated as one of the greatest of all time

A chance to watch ‘The Godfather’ on the big screen? Now, that’s an offer film lovers can’t refuse.

A landmark of the second golden age of Hollywood, the triple Oscar-winning film turned fifty on March 14. Paramount Pictures is commemorating the occasion with a series of theatrical re-releases: a biographical drama about the making of the film, remastered DVDs, a coffee table book, and a new interview with director Francis Ford Coppola, cementing the film’s status as an elite cultural artifact.

“Thirty years will have to pass before we can know if the film’s appeal is momentary or lasting” – Gavin Lambert, the British-born film writer, had written after its premiere. Five decades later, it has stood the test of time and is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential American films ever made.

‘The Godfather’ heralded a new era in American cinema, through its fixation on violence - both physical and psychological, and its dispassionate, sociological account of the workings of the Cosa Nostra (mafia). It emerged from the fertile creative period between the dying gasps of the censorial Hays Code and ‘Star Wars’, which marked the onset of the new era of blockbuster obsession existing to this day.

The film viewed corruption from a corrupt vantage point. It was wistful about its conviction that corruption is an inescapable part of American life in general and the American dream in particular. With its portrayal of all-pervading corruption, an amalgamation of crime, market capitalism and government, and situating the family above society— ‘The Godfather’ proposed a new national narrative in which white ethnic immigrants took America as they found it. The gangster film eventually replaced the Western as the genre to exemplify America.

Revolutionizing the portrayal of organized crime by conflating it with family, the film provided prime national nostalgia for an idealised version of the past, harking back to more courtly forms of criminal behaviour with Marlon Brando’s performance as the aging patriarch Don Vito Corleone (described aptly by Pauline Kael as a ‘primitive sacred monster’). ‘The Godfather’ was released to an America convulsed by the ill-fated Vietnam expedition, economic tumult, racial tension, and a sense of political ferment.

Taking the heightened post-Vietnam cynicism after the publishing of the Pentagon papers and the unraveling of Watergate for granted, it compared organized crime with the US government and proposed a thesis of America as a criminal enterprise. By the end of the film, the protagonist Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino), an erstwhile war hero, replaces duty to the country with tribal loyalty and builds a metaphorical wall around himself.

This substitution suits America’s contemporary reality, as the promised chimera of unlimited growth comes into conflict with the experience of limited mobility, or rather mobility for the ruthless or lucky few, with opportunities gated against outsiders.

With ‘The Godfather’, Coppola sold the studios on a new profile of a filmmaker- young, with outsized vision, and obsessed with film history. The exquisite wedding ceremony sequence that opens proceedings was indebted to the remarkable, protracted ball in Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ (1963).

The operatic finale, crafted by cross-cutting between the calm of the church and the violence of the murders, had nods to Sergei Eisenstein’s celebrated Odessa steps montage sequence in ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925). Gordon Willis’s virtuoso cinematography, with “Rembrandt” lighting, made it acceptable for studio-made colour films to be shadowy and moody.

Mario Puzo’s lurid pulp book was elevated to high art. It influenced the work of a generation of new filmmakers. Martin Scorsese, John Woo, Spike Lee, in their diverse ways, took inspiration from Coppola’s invention of a new rhythm and scene density.

As the apotheosis of the gangster film, with characters torn between fierce family loyalty and anarchic social destruction, it became a catalyst for the production of numerous other gangster sagas, including David Chase’s acclaimed TV series ‘The Sopranos’ (1999), and films like Martin Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas’ (1990) and Mani Ratnam’s ‘Nayakan’ (1987).

Cultural critic Umberto Eco stated that a film becomes a cult object by providing a “completely furnished world” for fans to revisit. Watching ‘The Godfather’ is to embark on a darkly satisfying journey - a descent from youthful possibility to a morbid state of decadence and moral defeatism - into a world of burly men, guns, pasta sauce, loyalty, revenge, and omertà.

(The author is a cybersecurity consultant by day, moonlighting as a cinephile by night)