It’s a gangster movie, a family drama and a film about the corrupt American dream, all rolled into one masterpiece. By Tom Ward
Happy 50th birthday to the great Godfather
AF ARCHIVE / ALAMY
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arly one morning in January 1971, a young film director sat waiting nervously with a skeleton film crew in a sitting room on Mulholland Drive. Everyone was silent – the target of their mission, they had been told, did not like noise. A camera had been set up, a few bits of prosciutto and cheese placed on a table. Finally, the owner of the house entered, wearing a long Japanese robe. Without acknowledging anyone, he sat down. As the camera began to whirr, he tied his long, blond hair up in a pigtail, applied black shoe polish to it and filled his cheeks with cotton wool. ‘This man is a bulldog,’ he murmured to himself, with a strange, hoarse rasp. Muttering wordlessly, he picked at the food, stared up at the ceiling, scratched his cheek, gestured at imaginary people. The phone rang. He answered. He wheezed incoherently for a few seconds, then hung up. Whoever was at the other end, puzzled as they no doubt were, was a small part of film history. The director, Francis Ford Coppola, had just recorded the first screen manifestation of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. By the end of the year, Coppola would have created one of the most acclaimed and influential films ever made; and Brando, after a lost decade of self-indulgence both off and on the screen, would have restored his shattered reputation and once again be called the greatest actor in the world. Watching The Godfather now, 50 years after its première at Loew’s State Theatre, New York, on 14th March 1972, it seems completely 16 The Oldie April 2022
‘Grazie, Godfather’: Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone
self-assured – a tour de force of confidence and virtuosic swagger. But for Coppola, making it was ‘the most miserable part of my life’. From development to the final cut, via the script, casting, cinematography and score, all of which are considered today to be more or less flawless, he fought continual battles with the studio and his own crew. Incredibly, for such an unproven director, he won on almost every front. Coppola had not wanted to make the film. He had given up on Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling source novel after 50 pages, finding it vulgar. A self-confessed ‘arty’ director, he was
part of a new generation who wanted to get away from old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking, and here, as Walter Murch, his longtime sound editor, put it, ‘was Hollywood at its Hollywoodiest’. But he was in debt: his friend George Lucas urged him to take the money and then pursue more personal projects. Finally, he agreed – he had begun to see something in the story that appealed. Paramount Studios wanted a sensational gangster movie steeped in gore and violence. Coppola saw it differently – both as an archetypal family drama about a king and his three sons and as a metaphor for the corruption of
