Day 3: The Godfather (cont.)

Movie #2 - The Godfather (1972) - 175 min, cert 15.

While I have seen this movie before, it was a long time ago, and I don't think I can have been concentrating because I remember very little about it. Watching it now, some of the more famous scenes - the horse's head, the restaurant shooting, etc. seemed familiar, but most of the rest did not. If yesterday's film seemed quite long, then this one at 5 minutes short of 3 hours seemed to run forever (and tomorrow's is even longer!). But the film moves along at an easy pace. It seems to move like the Godfather himself, slowly and deliberately. It doesn't rush, but then it doesn't dawdle unnecessarily either.


The film follows the progress of the Corleone family, a New York family of Sicilian mobsters, and its aging patriarch Don Vito (Marlon Brando). After he refuses to help a rival mafiosi he fall victim to an assassination attempt. He survives the attempt, but while he recovers his eldest son Sonny (James Caan) takes control of the organisation and triggers a gang war. Meanwhile his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino) who had been attempting to forge a legitimate career, also gets caught up in the escalating violence. And the film gradually and seamlessly shifts its focus from Don Vito to Michael as the balance of power shifts with it.


Overall, I did enjoy the film. Would I class it amongst my all-time favourites? Blasphemous, though some might consider it - no, I wouldn't. Although I can certainly see why it is revered so much within the genre. Coppola cleverly builds up a great deal of sympathy, and indeed empathy, for the Corleone family, particularly for Brando's character, despite the fact that they are clearly heavily involved in corruption, racketeering and murder. He does this by showing them to have virtues like integrity, loyalty, respect, a love of family values and an abhorrence of drugs. He never shows them killing, or even injuring, an innocent party. Indeed the only non-mobster  to suffer at their hands is a thoroughly corrupt cop. They are portrayed almost like vigilantes, fighting for justice and freedom, rather than the ruthless killers that they undoubtedly are.


Also, there are some great individual performances in this movie. James Caan & Robert Duvall probably did the best work of their careers here. Pacino's performance is a tour-de-force which catapulted him into public consciousness and effectively launched his own career. As for Brando himself, I must confess I'm not wholly convinced. I know it won him an Oscar and much critical acclaim, but to me he just seems to spend most of the film bumbling along, mumbling semi-coherently at the rest of the cast.  The most extraordinary thing about the performance to my mind, is that he could go immediately from playing this shambling old man, to playing the dynamic, sexually-charged part of Paul in Last Tango in Paris later that same year.


Overall I'd give the movie 8/10. I liked it, but I don't expect it to still be in my top ten by the time I get to #50 in the list.


Talking of which, I intend to try and keep track of my personal top ten movies from the ones I've seen so far, as I go along. So, as it stands now, I am in complete agreement with iMDb -

1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
2. The Godfather (1972)

Tomorrow night, I can move conveniently into the sequel, The Godfather Part II. At 3 hours and 20 minutes, it is (I think) the third longest movie in the list at the moment, so will inevitably take me two nights to complete it. It will be the first movie in the list that I have not seen before, so I will be approaching it with as much of an open mind as possible. But it has a reputation of being better that the original, so my expectations are already pretty high. We shall see.....