These days when someone suggests a night in with a movie trilogy, it feels like they’ve made you an offer you can’t refuse. We’re all well versed now when it comes to bingeing on series, content with sustaining our interest over drawn out periods and across lingering parts. But The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola began the first American film with a tripartite structure, the saga of Vito Corleone and his three very different sons.
Paramount Pictures never wanted Marlon Brando or Al Pacino for this. Instead they lusted after Roscoe Arbuckle and Robert Redford. But Coppola persevered and far from being made to look ridiculous, just look at how he was rewarded by his picks.
Brando, just forty-seven at the time of shooting, brought to the role of the ageing Don a mumbling gravitas, drawing on his method background by sticking cotton wool in his cheeks and orange peel underneath his lips. Vito Corleone’s movements might be sluggish and his words sometimes slurred, but his vision remains undimmed. It somehow seems as though Brando had been inhabiting this role his whole life, films from A Streetcar Named Desire to Viva Zapata! and Julius Caesar mere preparations so that even at such a tender age, he could allow the Godfather to unfold on the silver screen.
James Caan is a livewire as Sonny, John Cazale suitably wet as Fredo the middle son, Talia Shire as sister Connie ditsy but with a tough streak, and Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen a discrete yet subtly desperate consigliere. Whether planning betrayal or cooking up a mighty fine meatball, Abe Vigoda and Richard S. Castellano as Tessio and Clemenza make for an utterly indelible lanky and large.
The scenes in Sicily and in the family garden carry an easy grace, and even assassination attempts on the streets of New York burst forth in golden-hued colour. The Godfather, part one, is sometimes criticised for romanticising the Mafia. But if you were finally wealthy having spent years killing for a living, wouldn’t you too desire more than a little romance?
