"It's strictly business"

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 2010)

There was a time in Hollywood, mostly during the 1960s, where the great motion picture factory lost its way a bit. We saw the rise of the pretentious independent production, and what studio output there was might be eye-catching but lacking in the old magic. Above all they had lost touch with the professionalism that characterised the industry back in its heyday. At last, in the early 70s, the younger generation of filmmakers began to grow up and Hollywood started to get its act together again. The Godfather is one of its great comeback pictures.
Why has The Godfather become such a giant of cinema? Its story has no great emotional weight, no laugh-out-loud comedy, no rip-roaring action, no thrilling suspense. But it is, quite simply, a perfectly written drama. The screenplay adapted by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola from Puzo's novel is a great study of power because it takes a bunch of ruthless mob bosses going about their business, but shows their humanity through their reverence for the family, without ever once losing sight of their amoral coldness. It hooks us instantly with the power of that thought, so much so that it can afford to devote a major portion of its length (a full forty minutes of screen time, from the opening wedding to the notorious horse's head incident) merely introducing us to the way the Corleone world works, before even getting onto the real storyline. The fact that it can do this and still hold our interest shows the solidity of its ideas and characterisation.
The Godfather also sees director Coppola at his very best. Coppola has a lot in common with an ace director of the previous generation, the consistently brilliant William Wyler, especially in his approach to actors. Like Wyler, Coppola fully understands that an acting performance is comprised of many facets – voice, facial expression, body language, distance from the audience – and a director can choose which to show and which not to show, to varying effect. Take that masterful opening shot – we are introduced to the eponymous Godfather in a slow zoom out, gradually revealing his bulky figure dominating the foreground, his back to the audience. This establishes the character as an intimidating presence – no face to be seen as yet. When we do see his face the dimness of the interior makes his stern expression all the more formidable for how hard it is to read. Even when we see him in brighter surroundings with the other wedding guests it is from an objectively distant crane shot. It is only later in the picture that he becomes human to us, and we get to see a little true emotion and softness in his face.
Which of course brings us round to the sterling work of Marlon Brando. True to the gradual revelation of his character, he presents the Don as some kind of monster, with a face like a bulldog and a voice like an alcoholic with throat cancer. But, as over time we see the man showing tenderness for his offspring or torn up with grief, he manages to twist that ugly face into very real expressions. The effect is almost a little like the emoting of Boris Karloff as the Monster in Frankenstein. There is all-round good stuff from the rest of the cast as well. Al Pacino in particular has this brilliantly passive, steely air about him, and the dispassionate way he does everything is a sublime bit of understatement.
When it came to the Oscars, The Godfather of course scooped Best Picture, but it lost most of the awards to one of the other amazing pictures of the early 70s, Cabaret, for which Bob Fosse won the Best Director prize. It seems odd to me, as I feel had the two pictures (or their equivalents) been around twenty years earlier Cabaret, which gives the greatest all-out entertainment, would have been Best Picture, while Coppola would have got Best Director for his intelligent helming of The Godfather. I guess a lot of this has to do with the auteur theory effect, and a general forgetting of just what it is a director does. Thus Fosse's colourful choreographing of cast and camera won over Coppola's subtle thoughtfulness in framing and staging. Still, regardless of what awards it did and didn't get, The Godfather was a real prize for the industry, proving at last that Hollywood was back on top.