It goes without saying that Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is a masterpiece, a signpost in American film history that is essential viewing for anybody purporting to be culturally literate. There have only really been five other films that carry that sort of significance: The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Star Wars and Pulp Fiction. What distinguishes The Godfather from those other undisputed classics is its complete and utter refusal to appeal to children in any shape or form. The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars were, of course, originally intended for a child audience. Citizen Kane is so visually accomplished and dense that it’s hypnotic even for those too young to pick up on the complexities of the plot. Of course, it also infantilizes its title character; kids could relate to this even if it were only in a condescending manner. The scatological violence and over-the-top vulgarity of Pulp Fiction probably shouldn’t have any problem keeping the kids’ attention. The merits of Casablanca are probably more arguable, but there is a warmth and a humor to the tone of the thing that I think is able to cross age boundaries.

The Godfather, however, is for adults only. It’s not pornographic; as I suggested in the case of Pulp Fiction, kids love the porn or can at least react toward it with something akin to unease, horror or shock. Our culture’s use of “adults only” as a euphemism for obscenity is as inaccurate as it is simplistic. No, The Godfather is just very… sophisticated and nuanced, I guess you would say. If you haven’t done some growing up, soaked in the world around you and learned to sit still, the film is likely to be boring as fuck. Case in point: in December of 1993, I was approaching my twelfth birthday and distinctly remember telling my mother that I would like pretty much anything that she got me as long as it wasn‘t something boring like the Godfather trilogy. “Darn,” she joked, “we already got you the Godfather trilogy and wanted it to be a big surprise. Looks like we’ll have to take it back.”

Bill Chambers begins his review of the box set by ruthlessly observing, “Men love The Godfather; boys love Star Wars. Some guys claim to hold the two franchises in equal regard, but if he knows more of Darth Vader's dialogue by heart than Vito Corleone's, ladies, find a new mate, or compete against Lego for his affections for the rest of your life together.” (He goes on to write that if he ever lives to see the DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy, he’ll “most likely spin it, be impressed by the sound, giggle at Chewbacca, write the reviews, and never think about it again, except in the context of relief: no further ‘when's it gonna come out?’ reader e-mails.” In an irony too rich to ignore, when the trilogy finally was released his website was denied screener copies apparently out of retribution for Walter Chaw’s negative review of Episode II: Revenge of the Clones. Further evidence of the series’ inherent juvenilia needn’t be provided: I admit, you can’t get more petulant than that.)

Eh, so I don’t want to argue that the Star Wars trilogy is either better or worse than the Godfather trilogy. I’m kind of tempted to fall back on that ridiculously useless “apples and oranges” analogy. I am, as a matter of fact, able to recite more of Darth Vader’s dialogue than Vito Corleone’s, and while watching The Godfather for what is only the second time, I began to fully understand how utterly embarrassing that is to admit. I do feel confident enough to argue that mature art is not necessarily superior art, and in a certain sense Star Wars is the superior work in that it needn’t the secret decoder ring of maturity to have its virtues known. Great art is universal and can appeal on some level to children—read: those who have yet to experience a lifetime of socialization, don’t much care about artistic validity, and rather shamelessly judge a film on how well it can stimulate their senses.

Of course, there’s also a sense in which The Godfather is the superior work in that we needn’t feel embarrassed for canonizing it. Part of me would argue that some kind of sophistication is necessary in that as we grow as moviegoers, the movies we go to should grow as well. The first time that I actually saw The Godfather was a mere two or three years later at my grandparents’ house. By that time I had become a full-fledged movie buff and knew somehow that The Godfather had the goods. But it wasn’t exactly life-changing. This second time the film clicked into place for me and I began to realize that I had just gone through a major rite of passage into adulthood. I watched The Godfather and I dug it. In fact, I’m feeling kind of eager to move onto the sequel.

Star Wars and The Godfather are both integral to an appreciation of film and both are lacking in the same way. Star Wars is really the perfect gateway drug. The Godfather will never initiate a love for cinema like Star Wars can. At the same time, I very much agree with Chambers. If you don’t, at some point, move onto The Godfather you’re going to forever be stuck in a bubble of juvenilia. Rather than lauding one film over the other, I think I would prefer to just say that Coppola‘s 1979 Apocalypse Now is superior to either of them. It takes the best of both Star Wars and The Godfather and can appeal to novice and hardened cineastes alike.

Upon its release in 1972, The Godfather went on to become the highest grossing movie of all time. This, despite the fact that it ends on a bummer of a note, with “white sheep” Michael Corleone taking on the family business, cleaning out his enemies during his godson’s christening, executing his brother-in-law shortly after, and then finally alienating his WASP girlfriend Kay Adams. Michael’s downfall is in staying out of the shit as long as he did. Had he worked alongside of his father like Sonny had, there’s the possibility that he could have handled his eventual position of power with more wisdom. Vito Corleone knows when to hold them and when to fold him, and decides that Sonny’s death is a time to fold them. He calls a truce, but as soon as Michael comes into power he avenges Sonny’s death: bad for Michael -- the kill order blackens his soul and alienates him from Kay -- and bad for the Corleone legacy. This is not what father Vito would have wanted.

The Godfather is often said to be Shakespearean, but it’s difficult to exactly pinpoint which of the Bard’s plays it’s meant to mirror. The essential ingredients are there—powerful men losing their power through their own fallible humanity, but the specific direction that it moves through seems relatively unique. Call it the Shakespeare play that Shakespeare never wrote. Of course, William Shakespeare plundered the work of Thomas Kyd and squeezed the shit out of Mestrius Plutarchus’ Parallel Lives and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles for all of his most lasting works and blah blah blah. For our purposes, however, calling The Godfather “the Shakespeare play that Shakespeare never wrote” is just about as good as saying that it’s a film made from whole cloth.

Coppola is no stranger to the kind of montage filmmaking practiced by his peers Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma. His mediocre but technically impressive Roger Corman thriller Dementia 13 is every bit as blatant an homage to Psycho as De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. I’m again reluctant to really prefer the original filmmaker to the montage filmmaker or vice versa, but certainly Coppola is not very good at cobbling new movies out of the old. His homage to The Battleship Potemkin (he has some gangsters killed on a concrete staircase) feels rather perfunctory whereas under De Palma (I’m guessing, having yet to see The Untouchables) it would feel merely smartass. Similarly, Coppola’s “’30s-isms” like using newspaper headlines to deliver plot information are downright self-conscious and trite. Really, they serve only as a reminder of how distanced The Godfather is from the gangster movies of the past. Simply by evoking these visual clichés, we’re reminded anew of how they are visual clichés. They’re remnants of a bygone era that is now definitively subjugated in the wake of The Godfather. Coppola hasn’t built upon film history with The Godfather; rather he’s demolished it and built it up anew.

It’s very informative and very surprising to read Roger Ebert’s original 1972 review of the film. He writes:

We know from Gay Talese's book Honor Thy Father that being a professional mobster isn't all sunshine and roses. More often, it's the boredom of stuffy rooms and a bad diet of carry-out food, punctuated by brief, terrible bursts of violence. This is exactly the feel of The Godfather, which brushes aside the flashy glamour of the traditional gangster picture and gives us what's left: fierce tribal loyalties, deadly little neighborhood quarrels in Brooklyn, and a form of vengeance to match every affront.

Wow, huh? The review makes sense if you watch the film with those observations in mind, but it doesn’t at all gel with how we perceive the film today or indeed what the film is, i.e an undisputed classic that we can bandy about adjectives like “Shakespearean” with. You couldn’t quite see it in 1972, but The Godfather is the first masterpiece of the Secular Seventies. During the seventies, you see, flashy glamour of any kind had become obsolete. In the midst of the joint failure of both Vietnam and the sixties counterculture, we weren’t in the mood to build up any new ideals. We were too wise to buy into that traditional dichotomy between good and evil; we knew that man was really neither one but rather a weak, fallible little creature. What we see in The Godfather is this lack of idealism being codified.

Paul Schrader mentions that he was horrified when he watched Pulp Fiction because it meant that he had become obsolete. His era, the era of the existential hero, has ended. We’re now in the wake of the ironic hero, where everything is in quotes. Tarantino had apparently internalized the nihilism of the seventies (and the post-war forties that the seventies filmmakers recycled) and had grown comfortable with it, enough so that he could put it in quotes. This is natural; it suggests that both filmmakers are jaded but Tarantino has evolved more in his jadedness. In The Godfather we see a nihilistic mindset that that still has some heat to it. The nihilism is still fresh enough for Coppola to eulogize it. The Godfather is not an ironic film.

A scene early in the film lucidly illustrates the ambiguity we feel toward Vito and the Corleone clan as a whole. Vito’s godson, a transparent Frank Sinatra clone named Johnny Fontane, comes to him in tears. A movie producer is denying him a plum role that will be sure to make him a star. “I don’t know what to do,” he cries. Vito erupts in rage. “You could act like a man!” He slaps him. “What’s the matter with you? Is this how you turned out? A Hollywood finocchio (roughly translated from Italian as “fag”) that cries like a woman?” Particularly from a modern perspective, we see how many of the values that inform the Corleone clan are, well, frankly diseased. Sex columnist Dan Savage pointedly argued in a recent interview in The Onion AV Club that homophobia is essentially rooted in misogyny. When straight men express fear of being gay, they’re really expressing fear of being made women, because being a woman is the worst possible thing to be. The machismo of The Godfather is back-breakingly heavy. Women are regarded in the film, when they are regarded at all, as objects to either fuck or protect. They birth babies and continue the family name, and to keep them healthy and alive is essential to proving your manhood, but certainly they don’t exist outside of the context of their husband’s family. Mama Corleone--a case in point.

And yet, it only takes a smidgen of moral relativism to detect the affection behind Don Corleone’s slapping of Johnny and calling him a “Hollywood finocchio.” We could easily cluck our tongues at the Old World patriarchy of the Corleone clan, but it would be dishonest to claim that there isn’t something comforting about a Godfather figure that values family, honor and tradition. The patriarchy and return to post-World War II “family values” is really a return to a period in which people still held values. The patriarchy is seen as a form of theism, as a belief in some power greater than the collective all of us. It’s something to rely on during the ideological vacuum of the Vietnam era.

What I think helped The Godfather slip by the radar of America’s progressive watchdogs is the fact that the Corleone family is a family of gangsters. While we never really see the damage that they do to society, the gangsterism lends the film a built-in sense of moral ambiguity. The film has genuine cross-over appeal across the generation gap. The hippie dippies could see the film as an indictment of decades of white male oppression while their parents could see it as a simple unilateral evocation of a time when men were men and the American family was not yet obsolete. The film is nostalgic towards the late forties and early fifties, a reactionary work of sorts; and yet the nostalgia is imbued with melancholy and coldness. Coppola doesn’t puff up the finocchio mention, he regards it straight on and without any kind of judgment or feeling or irony, and this helps to make the film all things to all people.

Most of us have gotten it in our heads that The Godfather is timeless and for the most part this is very much true. As a period piece the film effortlessly bypasses most mise-in-scene indicators of its year of origin; you know, we accept that the hairstyles and automobiles are going to be stuck in the forties. Even more importantly, the stark hyper-realistic nihilism of the picture helps to divorce it from the time-sensitive stylistic trends of any specific period. It’s not in black-and-white, it’s not in garish Technicolor, people bleed, people cuss, people fuck. It looks rather insensitively and coldly at real people doing real life things.

One of the most offensive legends about The Godfather is that producer Robert Evans pressed to cast the bankable Robert Redford in the role of Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino, who Evans termed “The Midget.” Evans fought tooth and nail to get Redford, but he eventually lost and Pacino, who had signed onto The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight out of frustration at how long the battle had taken, had to be bought out of his contract. Evans’ defenders maintain that he was responsible for finding the material, getting the film written and hiring Coppola, but those bone-headed decisions sure do stick, don’t they? Evans was working pretty damn hard to turn The Godfather into a piece of shit, and the story serves as a glaring rebuttal to Leonardo DiCaprio’s assertion in last year’s Oscar roundtable issue of Entertainment Weekly that “the director was king” in the seventies.

Pacino is not movie star material. Those only familiar with his post-Scarface work will be surprised to discover that the infamous show-boater was once a shy kid with a weaselly lisp. (See also Scarecrow and Dog Day Afternoon.) He’s perfect for the character, of course; he allows for a range of responses in the audience. The shyness and the lisp help to accentuate his vulnerability and human warmth in the beginning, and they help to accentuate his hardness and reptilian coldness by the end. It’s a fine, subtle performance aided by very fine, subtle filmmaking. You can never quite pick out the transition point between the two halves--the change between old Michael and new is drastic and yet the performance is never anything other than holistic. We could easily say the same thing about Marlon Brando’s famous/infamous performance as Don Vito Corleone. Brando’s mumbling is never as affected as you remember it being, but it still acts to demystify the character while simultaneously alienating the audience from what is essentially a closed system.

The Godfather has no “movie stars,” only “character actors.” This is true of the principal cast and it’s doubly true about the supporting players. The casting of professional wrestler Lenny Montana as low-level thug Luca Brasi was a brave move. Montana was so nervous about acting aside the legendary Brando that he had difficulty delivering a competent performance. In an inspired bit of directorial improvisation, Coppola left in Montana’s stilted, nervous performance, understanding that it was right for the scene and would serve to warm us up to the big lug. When we first see Abe Vigoda’s lanky Sally Tessio, he’s dancing with a little girl on his feet and the image reminds us somewhat unfavorably of Diane Arbus’ Man and a boy on a bench in Central Park, N.Y.C. Coppola doesn’t try and steer us away from the association, but he doesn’t emphasize it either. This is what it is. Vigoda is creepy, but like Montana he has a Frankenstein’s monster quality to him too. When Michael finds out that Tessio has betrayed him, he orders the family lawyer Tom Hagen to take him in. The fear and guilt in Tessio’s plead for clemency with Hagen is poignantly pathetic: “Tom. Can you get me off the hook? You know, for old time’s sake?”

There is old school movie artifice to Sterling Hayden’s crooked police captain Mark McCluskey, but of course Hayden has made a career of slyly subverting old school movie artifice. His McCluskey is handsome and respectable, but aggressively dim-witted. In one of the film’s best-known scenes, Michael invites rival gang leader Virgil Sollozzo and McCluskey, who is on Sollozzo’s bankroll, over to a quiet Italian restaurant. The joke is that McCluskey has a tin ear to the delicate subculture of manners between the two powerful men. As Michael and Sollozzo talk business, McCluskey puts on a bib and begins gobbling down his meal. Michael asks for permission to go use the bathroom, where he has a gun hidden to execute both men. Sollozzo says that that’s fine. They ask McCluskey, who looks up from his food and shrugs. “You gotta go, you gotta go.”

Has there ever been a more limited actor used as fruitfully as Hayden? Johnny Guitar, Prince Valiant, Zero Hour!, Dr. Strangelove: there was always some right angle to that square jaw. Hayden was a lousy actor by most formal definitions of the word, but that was all right because he knew he was a lousy actor and he had the brains and the sense of humor to spin it into gold. So did the filmmakers and the studios. Paramount studio publicity billed him as “The Most Beautiful Man in Movies” and “The Blond Beautiful Viking God.” The best thing about Hayden is that he’s not a greedy actor and his satirical performance as McCluskey never feels atonal. Coppola controls him; the part is a crucial but small one, but there is something intrinsically restrained and focused about Hayden’s silliness. Watching him, one is tempted to reflect that it’s a good thing Johnny Depp wasn’t around in the seventies.

The Godfather passes the Howard Hawks test. Hawks defined a good movie as having three good scenes and no bad ones. I can’t recall a single bad scene in The Godfather and the good scenes need only listing: the restaurant scene, the death in the orange grove, the baptism massacre, the tollbooth shooting, the horse head, the cannoli scene, the first shot, the last shot. One of my favorite sequences is rarely mentioned. The Corleone daughter Connie is throwing a tantrum after her husband Carlo refuses to eat the dinner he ordered her to make and callously confesses to his infidelities. To set her in line and lure her hotheaded brother Sonny into the tollbooth, he beats her. This is such a harsh scene. Coppola is as clinical and cold as a serial killer, standing on the sidelines as this poor girl gets the shit beat out of her. When I first saw the film, it stuck in my craw that for both the characters’ and the movie’s purposes, the only reason that we are seeing this is so we can get to Sonny getting shot at the tollbooth. This is the film’s most lucid and frightening reflection of this subculture’s disregard and hatred for women.

Violence in The Godfather is fast and meaningless. Killing a man is so simple in this world; you pull a trigger, the gun goes pop, and that’s the end of it. Michael’s murder of Sollozzo and McCluskey is still potently bloody, but it’s that snap near the end of the scene that always appealed to me. Michael quickly walks out and with a quick flick of the wrist tosses the gun away behind him. I love the end of the orange grove scene. Vito’s grandson wanders around oblivious to the fact that grandpa just keeled over, giggling even, the warmth of the old man’s body dissipating out into outer space. There’s no afterlife, no legacy to be passed on, the guy is worm food.

The only flaw in the film, and it’s a fairly minor one, is in Coppola’s evocation of Italian-Americana. Coppola sees it as rather novel that he’s putting Italian-American culture on the screen and while at the time it probably was, circa 2006 that is no longer the case. The film contains a lot of ethnic slurs against Italians by non-Italians. You know, they’re called stuff like “wop” and “guinea.” Coppola transparently wants to introduce something gritty and raw. The film glows a little with the heat of those words; you sense that this is probably one of the first times that those words were pronounced on-screen. Unfortunately, it would also be the last. Coppola wants to accentuate the Italian-ness of his characters by placing them within the sidelines, but it strikes a false note. Even for the 1940s, the anti-Italian sentiments seem twenty to thirty years out of date. You just don’t see Italians facing that kind of vocal discrimination in other films. While there is still a recognizable subculture, Italians have integrated themselves pretty successfully into the mainstream culture.

The line “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” works brilliantly within the context of the movie, capping a cold murder out in the meadowlands with a warm semi-joke, reminding us that these are human beings behind the trigger. You could argue that the line illustrates their jadedness, but the line always gets a laugh, indicating that we can relate to these killers and kind of like them. As an evocation of Italian-Americana however, it calls attention to itself in a way that Goodfellas never did while ultimately lacking the self-reflexivity of The Sopranos. It comes off as a shade naïve as to the sophistication of its audience. This is, of course, a case of the film’s enormous influence coming back and biting it in the ass. Goodfellas assumes that we’re familiar with The Godfather, so it can go ahead knowing that we have a working knowledge of the world of Italian-American gangsters. The Sopranos assumes that we’re familiar with The Godfather and so it can play on, deconstruct and rebuild our perceptions of Italian-American gangsters. The Godfather does neither. The film does not and cannot assume that we’re familiar with The Godfather because, well, it IS The Godfather! Still, not a bad for a classic if that is the only really negative thing you can say about it.