From 28 February to 2 March, a restored version of The Godfather, the film directed by Francis Ford Coppola that was first shown in cinemas 50 years ago, returns to theatres. The saga, which continued with The Godfather Part 2 (1974) and The Godfather Part 3 (1990), evolved the crime genre like no other film before it, portraying characters who are not just ruthless gangsters but complex, selfish creatures, victims of the fate they impose on everyone around them.
For the 50th anniversary, Paramount, together with American Zoetrope (Coppola’s production company), has begun restoring the three Corleone family films, with the aim of making it known “to the younger generations who still find it relevant and to those who are discovering it for the first time”, as the director himself declared.
Paramount, meanwhile, has not hesitated to define the film as “the most beloved in the history of cinema“, capable of winning three Oscars and remaining in popular culture thanks to sayings that have become commonplace and to one of the most famous soundtracks in the history of cinema, the one composed by Nino Rota.
We don’t know if The Godfather is to all intents and purposes the most beloved film of all time, there is less doubt about the importance it had in the context of the 1970s, succeeding in representing Mario Puzo’s beautiful novel from which it is based by depicting mafia mythology as the best image of the contemporary epic.
Coppola, Marlon Brando’s performance that allowed him to win the Oscar for Best Actor – but then he did not show up at the award ceremony in protest – and a young Actor Studio star like Al Pacino changed the way violence could be represented in Hollywood. A Godfather Syndrome arose around the film which did not please the public, who accused Coppola – an Italian-American – of romanticising a criminal organisation like the Mafia, highlighting how it persisted in American society. “My father is no different from any other powerful man,” Michael Corleone tells Diane Keaton in one of the film’s most famous scenes.
It is therefore the combination of mythical elements, of magnetic and complex characters and others uncomfortable for the institutions that is one of the reasons that allowed the creation of a successful film representation and made the fortune of Francis Ford Coppola and Paramount.
In a wave of cultural relativism The Godfather offered an emotional figure of the gangster, a complex piece of writing that relies on the magnetic alternation between contempt and empathy, making us feel like well-dressed villains and fierce accomplices. Paramount knows that The Godfather is one of the greatest films of all time, in some ways even less so than the second film, capable of adding other elements to the story and launching actors like Robert De Niro.
