"One of the Best Films of the Decade."

Rating: 10/10 (23 June 2002)

The "Godfather" is Frances Ford Coppola's best film. Marlon Brando gives the most memorable performance in film history as Vito Corleone. The Movie is based on the gripping and compulsive book, The Godfather. Al Pacino gives a legendary performances as Michael Corleone.
The beginning is set late in the summer of 1945. The films roots, however, are set in the gangster films of the early thirties. The plot is about rival gangs murdering each other, and now we see the inbred corrupt system of loyalty and terror, in which killing is a preferred way of dealing with the competition. We see how the gangs encroach on each other and why this form of illegal business inevitably erupts in violence. We see their subculture, based on a split between the men's conception of their responsibilities, which they keep dark form there families, and the false world the create to shelter the women and children.
The visual scheme is based on the most obvious life and death contrasts, the men meet and conduct their business in deep toned, shuttered rooms, lighted by lamps even in the daytime, and the story moves back and forth between this hidden, world and the sunshine that they share with the woman and children. The tension is in the meetings held in the underworld darkness and one gets the feeling that this secret life has its own poetry of fear. The dark and light contrast is so operatic and so openly symbolic that it perfectly expresses the basic nature of the material. Noting the Catholic background of the characters and the eternal battle of good and evil, of innocence versus knowledge, knowledge in this instance equates with shame nd guilt.
BRANDO
The enormous cast is lead by Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, the "Godfather" of a powerful Sicilian - American clan, with James Caan as his hothead son, sonny, and Al Pacino as the thoughtful, educated son, Micheal. Is Brando marvelous? Yes, he is, but then he often is, he was marvelous a few years ago in "On The Waterfront." He's shockingly effective in a current film, the "Score." The role of Don Corleone, a patriarch in his early sixties, allows him to release more of the gentleness that was so seductive and unsettling. Don Vito could be played as a magnificent old warrior, a noble killer, a handsome bull, but Brando manages to humanize him. Brando internalizes Don Vito's power, makes him less physically threatening and deeper, hidden within himself.
THE CAST
However, Brando isn't the whole show; James Caan is very fine actor , and so are Robert Duvall and many others in lesser roles. Don sons suggest different aspects of Brando, Caan's Sonny looks like the muscular young Brando, while his heir, Michael, and Al Pacino comes to resemble him in manner and voice. Like Brando in this film, Pacino is simple, you don't catch him acting, yet he manages to change from a small, fresh-faced, darkly handsome college boy into an underworld lord, becoming more intense, smaller, and more isolated at every step. Coppola doesn't stess the father and son links, they are simply there for us to notice when we will. In the end of the "Godfather" nothing is resolved, because the family business goes on. Terry Malloy didn't clean up the docks at the end of "On The Waterfront", that was a lie. The "Godfather" is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism.
I don't have to recommend this film. I give it a 15 out of 10.