
The Godfather. 1972. USA. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay by Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by Mario Puzo. With Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, John Cazale, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Sterling Hayden. 4K digital restoration by Paramount; courtesy Paramount. 175 min.
With appropriate ruthlessness, producer Robert Evans managed to secure Mario Puzo’s The Godfather at a discount before it became a literary phenomenon, thanks in part to the author’s gambling debts. Evans then leveraged American Zoetrope’s financial woes to convince Francis Ford Coppola to direct the adaptation. If Evan’s preference for an Italian-American at the helm proved instrumental to the film’s cultural relevance, Coppola’s vision turned it into an extraordinary saga of family ties, corruption, and patriarchal power, infusing it with the operatic-literary tradition of verismo to spur its emotional undertones. Despite Coppola’s casting decisions—an aging Marlon Brando, an unknown, soft-spoken Al Pacino—and Gordon Willis’s chiaroscuro cinematography being unpopular with studio executives, The Godfather was a tremendous popular success and quickly cemented itself as a major work in film history.