“When did going to the cinema start taking three hours?” has become a popular grumble over recent years. In 2022 alone, films ranging from blockbusters to Oscar botherers have come close to gobbling up entire afternoons and sternly tested our bladders, from No Time To Die (2 hours and 43 minutes) and Dune (2 hours 35) to House of Gucci (2 hours 38) and West Side Story (2 hour 36).
But they’re all shorter than the The Godfather, released in 1972, which turns 50 this year and is being re-released in cinemas to celebrate. Watching it again, I was struck by how its 2 hours and 55 minutes felt, if anything, a little brief. Francis Ford Coppola was considered a no-hoper by Hollywood when he reluctantly agreed to make the film – as were most of his cast – but somehow he produced a perfectly proportioned masterpiece in which no scene feels superfluous or overdone, something close to the way Anthony Burgess described the Hemingway novella The Old Man and the Sea: “Every word tells and there is not a word too many”. It is what Marvel, Disney and auteurs like Tarantino and (whisper it) Scorsese think they’re doing with their bloated modern epics, but in reality don’t come close.
It may be that all films created since The Godfather aspire to its unique combination of length and quality, but you might also say it’s had an even greater impact on TV. To deal with the most obvious first: The Sopranos, a show that has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in recent years. The greatest film and the greatest TV show ever made share obvious subjects and themes, and David Chase filled the story of Tony Soprano with no shortage of reverential nods (“I believe in America” is the iconic opening line of The Godfather; ‘Made in America’ is the title of that famous final episode). But perhaps the most pertinent comparison between the two is how they bestowed humanity and sympathy on ‘bad guys’, paving the way in their respective media for golden eras of the onscreen anti-hero.
Speaking of which, there’s no greater example of a character ‘breaking bad’ than Michael Corleone, who tells the biggest whopper in cinema history in the opening scenes of The Godfather. After telling his girlfriend about his father’s ability to ‘make people an offer they can’t refuse’ – i.e. coercing them with violence – he mutters the immortal line “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” By the end of the film, he’s not only taken over the family business but ruthlessly executed the head of five rival families in a single hour. Walter White could never.
Even the latest example of prestige TV owes a debt to The Godfather. Don Corleone is an ailing patriarch whose children believe him to be falling behind the times by refusing to enter the burgeoning heroin trade of 1940s New York, just as the Roys encourage their father to modernise his media business and embrace social media, the great narcotic of our times. In hothead Sonny, pathetic Fredo and quiet, cunning Michael we have a loose prototypes for Kendall, Roman and Shiv, and the question of stepping out of a father’s long shadow is as central to Succession as it is The Godfather, even if – so far at least – none of the siblings get killed over it.
The Godfather part 2 – famously the only sequel to break the golden rule by being better than the original – will turn 50 itself in 2024. It made a star of Robert De Niro in the same way part one launched the career of Al Pacino (and revived that of Marlon Brando). It says something that most people even today, when pressed to name a great actor, will go to one of those two names. Perhaps The Godfather was a high-water mark for masculine cinema, whatever that means; it certainly underserved its female characters, like almost every other film from that era, although a compelling case has been made that part 2 helped inspire Mamma Mia! 2, so we might say it did more than shape gangster films.
In funny kind of way, the lasting influence of The Godfather may be less about its epic, historical sweep or the character blueprints it left for saga TV than at the level of individual scenes. Everyone has a favourite ‘bit’ from The Godfather, the one that stirs them in a special way. There’s the famous horse-head-in-the-bed, which always made me ponder the logistics (did Tom climb up the wall and slide it in there himself? Surely not). There’s Sonny being gunned down by the side of sun-kissed road, his body flapping like a fish as it’s riddled with Tommy Gun bullets.
Then there’s Michael’s returning from the restaurant toilet with a smuggled pistol in his pocket; those unbearably tense seconds before he starts shooting. Coppola knew that each big moment in The Godfather had to be constructed like a mini movie in itself, that that was how iconic cinema was made. If The Godfather was somehow released today, you could imagine many of them taking on a life of their own in the endless shuffling pack of social media: people posting Michael’s dry mouth and panicking eyes with the caption ‘me when my boss requests a catch up’.
My favourite scene, for what it’s worth, is that sweetest and saddest of all cinema deaths: Don Corleone himself, playing blissfully with his grandson among his tomato plants, when his heart decides to give way. Life, The Godfather dares suggest, can have a sudden but happy ending, leaving the complicated business of settling our legacy in the hands of others.
