GROSS/63 1972 - The Godfather - and an offer you really can't refuse
For Francis Ford Coppola's greatest work, an essay in three acts - and an opportunity to support the GROSS project
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE GODFATHER, director FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA; cast MARLON BRANDO, AL PACINO, JAMES CAAN, RICHARD CATELLANO, ROBERT DUVALL, DIANE KEATON; production PARAMOUNT, 1972, 175 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.
You sit and watch 60-odd movies - one for every year since 1913 plus a few extras - and then 💥 boom 💥 it’s The Godfather. I don’t like to be hyperbolic - and I don’t like to be too respectful of the big names either, I think you’ll agree - but this is a big one. I’m automatically classifying it, without really even thinking about it, up there alongside Gance’s Napoléon, Gone with the Wind, maybe a couple of others from this growing list of blockbusters. Without just ritually labelling The Godfather ‘great’ or ‘a masterpiece’ or whatever (and without spoiling my own verdict here), I know you won’t argue with me when I say that it’s an ambitious, morally complex work of art and that its influence - on cinema, on pop culture, on American life and, let’s face it, on life practically everywhere else - is vast.
There’s a plan?
There’s a plan. I’m subtly weaving Coppola’s The Godfather into my strategy for activating THE PAYWALL. I plan to cover The Godfather - for it is a big deal - in three parts and to ask three questions of this magnum opus:
Is The Godfather Shakespearean?
It’s a tragedy: it’s about family, violence in defence of wealth and power, inheritance, loyalty. There are many murders. Does it inherit - does it carry forward and develop - the moral and historical project of William Shakespeare?
Is The Godfather decadent?
Can I make a case that the movie’s about decay, about the loss of stature, about a retreat from seriousness and morality and masculinity? And that Michael’s project is to reverse the family’s decline, reinstate its grandeur and authority?
Is The Godfather conservative?
Well, is a family rigidly old-European in its ways - governed by loyalty to patriarchs and landowners and thugs - conservative? Is a movie that honours a family like that - transplanted into modernity, living and prospering - conservative? Did Coppola make a conservative film? Even a reactionary one?
Part three - which I think is actually the most serious question you can ask of The Godfather - will be the first post published in GROSS that is only available to subscribers. It’s the beginning of a new period for the newsletter and I’ll be asking you to come with me and support the project directly by helping to fund it. The monthly subscription will be set at £5 (or £50/year) and there’ll be special offers for you, loyal readers, who’ve been with me for a while - in some cases over two years! It’ll be an offer you can’t refuse.
I’ll publish the three parts as quickly as I can - although to be honest, this movie is kind of daunting. I’d honestly be quite happy to be flippant and dismissive about The Godfather but I think it demands a more serious response.
If you’re going to watch, The Godfather is on Amazon Prime, with the sequels, and there’s a Blu-Ray.
All these reviews, plus others from outside the GROSS sequence, are on Letterboxd.