How We Were All Blessed By The God Father

Francis Ford Coppola is not just a man who knows how to make good wine. He also knows how to make good films. And by good, I am in fact referring to The Godfather and its sequels. And this little old film is only known as one of the greatest of all time. So yeah, he definitely knows how to make good films ( but seriously also try his wine, Copolla, he really does know his grapes as well).

Yes, I know I have proclaimed myself to be a snobby cinema major who has the best taste in films, and you would be correct in thinking that (wink), despite my excellent taste in filmmaking, I had yet to see The Godfather.

And a big part of it was because 1. as a child my parents wouldn’t let me see it,  which honestly, looking back was extremely good parenting 2. I had heard it painted the Italians in a poor light, as basically a bunch of violent mobsters, and that was something I didn’t find myself desiring to see.

I was a tween (and not a cute one at that) when The Jersey Shore was big on MTV. One year for Halloween, I even dressed as Snooki, as you can see photographed. That show was one of the major reasons that Chris Christie lowered the tax incentive for filming in New Jersey in hopes to end the show and try to prevent the bad reputation it was giving our State and prevent others from coming in and trashing our beaches and boardwalks. The cast and their uncouth behavior were also making a terrible name for the Jersey Italians.  This was true despite the fact that a majority of them weren’t even from New Jersey, it was still a bad look.

So for a while, I put off seeing the film. But in college, my professors discussed it a lot as a film for us to study for many reasons.  And now that I have seen it, I am fully ready to nerd out over the making of this 1972 classic, especially with the 50th anniversary of the film coming up this March 24th.

For starters, if you take a look at the cast itself, from Pacino to Keaton to Brando, it had some of the major names in Hollywood starring in it. It also gave other young actors their start, and they later became some of the greats.

Brando even won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in 1973 but actually refused to attend the award show in retaliation and protest of Hollywood's poor portrayal of Native Americans. This is pretty ironic since it really cast Italians in a bad light but people were less worried about that back then.

In any event, he also only appears in less than half of the film, making it crazy for him to have won Best Leading Actor, considering he was only on screen for about 40 minutes out of the 3-hour-long film.

On top of the phenomenal cast, the storytelling aspect of the film is some of the best along with the character development that would go on to inspire so many other stories. Goodfellas, The Departed, The Irishman, and many others likely would not have been made if not for the success and compelling story first depicted by The Godfather and its sequels. 

As you watch the film you see how the family's life has been impacted by this life of organized crime or crime in general. This concept of a good family man turning bad for the sake of supporting the family is something we have seen in a repeatable format now. Most notably, it’s seen in The Sopranos with Tony Soprano and in Breaking Bad with Walter White, two award-winning television shows I was often taught about in my cinema classes for their story and character development. It also went on to change how gangster movies in Hollywood were portrayed and allowed the characters to be viewed as people with normal problems, not just the stereotypical gangsters you were constantly seeing on your TV prior.

Lastly, the cinematography and lighting aspects of the film were some of the best for the time and still are aspects we learned about in college courses.

Notably, the director of photography, Gordon Willis, better known as The Prince of Darkness, changed the look of cinema in the 1970s. His use or better yet, lack of use of light, was what really invoked the emotions the director and cast were trying to prevail.

Keep in mind this was also all done prior to post-production editing being online with a computer, so what he did was not only extremely difficult but mainly done at the moment. He later went on to be the director of photography for all the Godfather movies, many Woody Allen films (including Annie Hall) All the President's Men, and many other films.

Essentially, The Godfather blessed us in so many ways by changing the gangster film genre,  by the influence it had on cinematography, its introduction to the great actors in the film, and all of the other TV shows and movies that ever tried to mimic that movie magic feeling that Coppola and his team were able to accomplish. So yes, we’ve all been blessed by The Godfather, by Francis, and of course, with his wines too.