Very well made pulp fiction with a fantastic cast - but still a historical whitewash.

Rating: 8/10 (10 October 2006)

A look back and look forward at how the Mafia don Vito Corleone gained his original power and the continuing saga of how a son (Michael) chooses to drive forward the criminal empire of his late father.
As the great American novel has not been written (an opinion just as popular in America as elsewhere) our cousins over the sea have no option but to over praise the work of better-than-average pulp writers. The vastly overrated Ernest Hemmingway, the junk master that was a Peter Benchley and the schlock with snobbery that is Thomas Harris. Don't get me wrong, all very readable - but great art? Great vision? Something you couldn't live a full and happy life without?
As the groundbreaking film maker Spaniard Luis Bunuel once said: "Today's culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling Nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like Hemingway. Steinbeck is important due to American guns. Had Dos Passos and Faulkner been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who'd read them?" The self-opinions of Mario Puzo (script and book) are probably in line with the above. Until he wrote the Godfather he even worried about keeping food on the table. How can you consider yourself an artist when you are writing rubbish like Earthquake? However, give him credit, he saw Hell's Kitchen for real and it shows.
With the Godfather saga many people mistake a heavy subject for heavy writing. However well done it is (production values are sky high and the casting is a dream) this isn't anything more than a thousand TV writers couldn't knock up. While simultaneously looking back and looking forward can be confusing (one of these things that you need to warned about) it leads you to believe that the ex don is a better person than the future don simply because he had so much pushed on to his plate and had to make tough decisions. However he kills to replace the corrupt and becomes equally corrupt himself. Only on a bigger scale.
Men of honour is nonsense - they beat/killed, threatened and bribed. They never made any money, they simply took money. If you are interested they took just as readily from criminals (like drug dealers) as they did from honest people. While this shows power being taken at the point of a gun - where are the goons beating the grocery store owner because he wouldn't pay the protection money? Such a scene would shatter this movie like it would a 1,000 foot drop would shatter a Chinese Ming vase.
Coppola doesn't like film editors - they want to cut out scenes of people looking in to the middle distance, waiting for people to arrive and generally repeating themselves. The Mafia is male world and the women don't have much of a life - they don't even get to bring in cups of tea. The men are not happy people, but if they paid their electricity bills and had a hobby it would help. The moral is an obvious one - money doesn't buy happiness. But it allows you to be miserable in (Long Island) comfort.
Director Coppola and writer Puzo had no choice but to write this as a tragedy. They lay it on too thick though, as they are trying to bring in higher morals to a story that doesn't have it and (as I said above) it doesn't want to kick over enough rocks. This accepted the cast is amazing - Robert DeNiro is on especially fine form - but the message(s) are uneven and dubious. All cons are full time liars and they even lie to themselves - in this little world the words mean little and we have too many of them.