The Godfather (1972)¶

At a glance¶

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola, from Puzo's novel
Produced by: Albert S. Ruddy
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Editing: William Reynolds, Peter Zinner
Music: Nino Rota (additional music by Carmine Coppola)
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Premiere: March 14, 1972 — Loew's State Theatre, New York
Wide release: March 24, 1972
Runtime: 175 min
Budget: ~$6–7 million
Box office: ~$250–291 million (original run + reissues)
Studio: Paramount Pictures / Alfran Productions
Academy Awards: 3 wins from 10 nominations

I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse. Vito Corleone

A film about the American immigrant family as a corporation, and the corporation as a family — released in March 1972, when Paramount expected a modest genre picture and got the highest-grossing film made to that point.

50^th Anniversary trailer (2022), cut for the 4K restoration. — Paramount Pictures. More at Scenes & Trailers.

Its reputation has been stable for half a century in a way almost no other film's is. The AFI has ranked it either first or second among American films in every poll it has run since 1998. It entered the National Film Registry in 1990, its first year of eligibility. What is easy to forget is how close it came to not existing in this form at all: the studio wanted it cheap, contemporary, and shot on a backlot, and spent most of production looking for a reason to fire its director.

Plot¶

Story years: summer 1945 – 1955. New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Sicily.

The wedding¶

August 1945. Don Vito Corleone hears petitioners in his darkened study while his daughter Connie's wedding roars in the sunlight outside. By Sicilian custom, no Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day. The undertaker Bonasera wants two men who beat his daughter killed; Vito, offended by the man's transactional approach and his years of keeping his distance, extracts friendship instead of cash. The godson Johnny Fontane, a singer whose career is collapsing, wants a film role. Vito sends his consigliere Tom Hagen to Hollywood, where studio head Jack Woltz refuses — and wakes with the severed head of his prize stallion in his bed.

At the reception we meet the family: hair-trigger eldest son Sonny; weak middle son Fredo; and Michael, decorated Marine, in uniform, at a separate table with a girlfriend who is not Italian. He tells Kay Adams a story about how his father made a bandleader an offer he couldn't refuse, and adds the line the rest of the trilogy exists to disprove: That's my family, Kay. It's not me.

The war¶

Narcotics trafficker Virgil Sollozzo, backed by the Tattaglia family, asks the Corleones for political protection and financing. Vito declines: he judges that narcotics will cost the family the politicians and judges that are its real capital. Sonny, in the room, betrays a flicker of interest — and Sollozzo sees it.

Enforcer Luca Brasi is garroted. Vito is shot five times buying oranges from a street vendor and survives. Michael, visiting the hospital, finds it emptied of guards and moves his father's bed; on the steps outside he bluffs an assassination party away with the baker Enzo, and finds his own hands steady while Enzo's shake. The corrupt police captain McCluskey breaks his jaw.

Michael volunteers to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey. Nobody believes he means it. The family arranges a gun behind a restaurant toilet tank; Michael returns to the table, and the film holds on his face while a subway screams past outside, and then he shoots both men and drops the gun. He is exiled to Sicily.

Exile and attrition¶

Sicily: Michael walks the countryside with two bodyguards, is struck by "the thunderbolt" at the sight of Apollonia Vitelli, courts her formally, and marries her. In New York, Connie's husband Carlo Rizzi beats her; Sonny beats Carlo in the street; Carlo is used as bait, and Sonny is machine-gunned at a causeway tollbooth. In Sicily, a bodyguard's betrayal puts a bomb in Michael's car, and Apollonia dies in it.

Vito, recovered and broken by grief, calls a meeting of the Five Families and sues for peace, guaranteeing Michael's safe return. In private he understands what the meeting has told him: Barzini, not Tattaglia, has been behind everything.

The succession¶

Michael returns, marries Kay, and tells her the family will be completely legitimate in five years. He assumes operational control while Vito, now an old man among tomato plants, advises. Vito warns him that the man who comes to him with a proposal for a meeting will be the traitor. Then he dies playing with his grandson in the garden, and the film gives him a stumble, a spray of orange peel in his mouth, and no last words.

At Vito's funeral, Tessio proposes a meeting with Barzini.

The baptism¶

Michael stands as godfather to Connie and Carlo's son. As the priest asks whether he renounces Satan and all his works, Corleone gunmen kill the heads of the other four Families and Moe Greene in Las Vegas. I do renounce him. Tessio is taken away. Carlo, who set Sonny up, is told he's being sent to Vegas, confesses, and is garroted in a car.

Connie screams the accusation at Michael in front of Kay. Michael denies it. Kay, wanting to believe him, asks directly, and he lies to her face — the only time in the film he does. She watches through a doorway as capos file in and kiss his hand. Clemenza: Don Corleone. The door closes on her.

Cast¶

The family¶

Actor	Role
Marlon Brando	Don Vito Corleone
Al Pacino	Michael Corleone
James Caan	Santino "Sonny" Corleone
Robert Duvall	Tom Hagen
John Cazale	Fredo Corleone
Talia Shire	Connie Corleone Rizzi
Diane Keaton	Kay Adams
Morgana King	Carmela Corleone
Gianni Russo	Carlo Rizzi
Simonetta Stefanelli	Apollonia Vitelli-Corleone

The organization and the opposition¶

Actor	Role
Richard S. Castellano	Peter Clemenza
Abe Vigoda	Salvatore Tessio
Lenny Montana	Luca Brasi
Al Lettieri	Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo
Sterling Hayden	Capt. Mark McCluskey
Richard Conte	Emilio Barzini
Al Martino	Johnny Fontane
John Marley	Jack Woltz
Alex Rocco	Moe Greene
Salvatore Corsitto	Amerigo Bonasera
Rudy Bond	Carmine Cuneo
Victor Rendina	Philip Tattaglia
John Martino	Paulie Gatto
Tony Giorgio	Bruno Tattaglia
Richard Bright	Al Neri
Tom Rosqui	Rocco Lampone
Joe Spinell	Willi Cicci
Corrado Gaipa	Don Tommasino
Franco Citti	Calò
Angelo Infanti	Fabrizio
Saro Urzì	Signor Vitelli

Uncredited: Sofia Coppola as the infant Michael Francis Rizzi at the baptism — the director's daughter, who would return as Mary eighteen years later and be crucified for it. Carmine Coppola appears as a piano player; Coppola's mother, wife, and sons appear as extras.

Full biographies: People · Supporting Cast

Production¶

The making of The Godfather has generated more folklore than almost any other American film, and a fair amount of it is unreliable — the participants have been retelling and improving these stories for fifty years. Where accounts conflict, this page says so.

Buying the book¶

Paramount bought the rights before the novel was finished. Puzo, deep in gambling debt, was shopping sixty pages; the studio optioned it for $12,500 against $80,000. His agent told him to refuse. He took it, and later noted with some bitterness that the book went on to spend 67 weeks on the bestseller list and sell over nine million copies in two years. It remains one of the great bad deals in publishing.

Paramount's own appetite was modest. Their 1968 Mafia picture The Brotherhood had flopped, and the working assumption was a cheap contemporary crime film — set in Kansas City, shot on the lot, budgeted around $2.5 million.

Nobody wanted to direct it¶

Sergio Leone passed (he was pursuing what became Once Upon a Time in America). Peter Bogdanovich passed. So did Peter Yates, Richard Brooks, Arthur Penn, Costa-Gavras, Franklin Schaffner, and Otto Preminger.

Francis Ford Coppola was 31, in debt to Warner Bros. for roughly $400,000 in overruns on THX 1138, and was suggested by Paramount executive Peter Bart largely because he was Italian-American and cheap. Coppola read the novel and hated it — "pretty cheap stuff," by his own account — then read it again and found the thing he could make: not a crime story, but a story about succession in a family business, and about capitalism, told with the King Lear structure sitting right there in the material.

He was announced on September 28, 1970, for $125,000 and 6% of gross rentals.

The war with the studio¶

Coppola won two enormous fights early: period (1945–1955, not contemporary) and location (New York and Sicily, not the backlot). He argued the period from the text itself — Michael's war service only makes sense if the film is set in 1945 — and won.

He then spent the rest of production nearly being fired. Costs ran to a reported $40,000 a day. Executive Charles Bluhdorn was furious; Paramount VP Jack Ballard was assigned to shadow expenses. Coppola believed his editor and assistant director were feeding the studio material to justify replacing him — possibly with Elia Kazan — and fired both preemptively. Brando reportedly said he would walk if Coppola went. Coppola has said he was certain he was days from dismissal for most of the shoot.

The performance that saved him, by most accounts, was the tollbooth. When the studio saw the Sonny assassination footage, the firing talk stopped.

Casting: the two long wars¶

Vito. Puzo had written the part imagining Brando and wrote to him directly. Paramount's president Stanley Jaffe was blunt: Brando would not appear in the picture. He was 47, considered box-office poison after a decade of flops, and notorious for on-set behavior.

Coppola engineered a screen test under the pretext of testing equipment at Brando's house. Brando, on camera, stuffed his cheeks with tissue, blacked his hair with shoe polish, rolled his collar, and dropped his voice into the wheeze he'd built from listening to recordings of Frank Costello's testimony. Coppola slipped the tape in among other auditions. Bluhdorn, watching, reportedly asked what wop he was looking at.

Brando got the part on three conditions: a low salary against profit participation, a personal bond against cost overruns, and a screen test — which he had, technically, already passed. He was paid a reported $250,000 up front. He later sold his points back early and made a fraction of what the role was worth.

Rejected candidates included Ernest Borgnine (a genuine finalist), Orson Welles (who lobbied Puzo personally), George C. Scott, Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier, and Carlo Ponti.

Michael. Paramount wanted a star: Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Ryan O'Neal, Jack Nicholson. Evans pushed hard for Alain Delon, who studied the French translation, visited Evans's house repeatedly, and finally declined rather than fight an Italian-American accent.

Coppola wanted Al Pacino — a 31-year-old New York stage actor with one lead film credit, The Panic in Needle Park. The studio's objections were that he was unknown and that he was short. Coppola's counter-argument was that Michael is supposed to be the least imposing man in the room.

Pacino got it, contingent on Caan taking Sonny. Then he nearly lost it: his early dailies were flat and unreadable, and the studio agitated for his removal for weeks. What saved him was the same footage that saved Coppola — the restaurant murder, shot after the pressure peaked, in which Pacino's stillness suddenly reads as exactly what it is. Coppola has said the film's fortunes turned on that one scene twice over.

Everyone else. Robert Duvall was Coppola's choice for Hagen from the start; they'd worked together on The Rain People. Robert De Niro auditioned for Sonny, Michael, and Carlo, was cast as Paulie Gatto, and left when Pacino's move freed a role in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight — a swap that put him in position to play young Vito three years later. Diane Keaton was cast for her oddness; she hadn't read the book. Lenny Montana, who plays Luca Brasi, was a professional wrestler and real-life Colombo family associate; his visible nervousness rehearsing his speech to the Don was genuine, and Coppola kept it and built a scene around it.

The Italian-American Civil Rights League¶

Joe Colombo — boss of the Colombo family, and simultaneously founder of a genuine and popular Italian-American anti-defamation movement — organized against the production. Producer Albert S. Ruddy's car windows were shot out. Location permits evaporated. Union trouble appeared.

Ruddy negotiated directly with Colombo and his son Anthony, and reached an agreement in February 1971: the words Mafia and Cosa Nostra would be struck from the script, and proceeds from the premiere would go to the League's hospital fund. Coppola has consistently maintained the words appeared only twice in the script and their removal cost the film nothing. Paramount was furious that Ruddy made the deal public without clearance; Bluhdorn briefly fired him, then unfired him.

The wider claims — that mob figures got parts, that real wiseguys wandered onto set, that some of the extras were the genuine article — are partly true and impossible to fully verify. Lenny Montana is documented. Gianni Russo (Carlo) has claimed a great deal more than is documented. Colombo himself was shot and left permanently disabled at a League rally in June 1971, mid-production. See Real-World Mafia.

Writing¶

Puzo was hired on April 14, 1970 for $100,000 plus a percentage, and delivered a first draft of about 150 pages on August 10, 1970. He and Coppola then wrote separately — Puzo in Los Angeles, Coppola in San Francisco — mailing drafts back and forth. A second draft came March 1, 1971; the shooting script, 163 pages, on March 29, 1971, the day filming began.

Coppola's working document was not the script but his notebook: a fat binder holding the novel's pages, cut apart and pasted up, annotated scene by scene with what each scene was really about, what the tone was, what the pitfalls were, and what to steal. It is one of the most instructive documents in film, and it was published in facsimile in 2016.

Robert Towne, uncredited, was brought in to write the garden scene between Vito and Michael — the one where the old man apologizes for the life. It is the best-written scene in the picture and it is not in the novel.

Shooting¶

Principal photography ran March 29 – August 6, 1971, roughly 62 days.

Before it started, Coppola sat the cast down to a full Italian dinner in character, with Brando at the head of the table. Everyone has described it as the moment the family became a family.

About 90% of the film was shot in and around New York City — a reported 120+ locations — with the remainder in California and Sicily. The Corleone compound is on Longfellow Avenue in Todt Hill, Staten Island; the walls were styrofoam. Sonny's death was shot over three days in June at a purpose-built tollbooth on the former Mitchel Field in Uniondale, Long Island, for over $100,000. Sicily was Savoca and Forza d'Agrò, not the actual town of Corleone, which had modernized past usefulness.

The horse's head was real — sourced from a dog food supplier from an animal already destined for slaughter. John Marley's scream is John Marley's.

The look¶

Gordon Willis initially turned the job down, calling the production chaotic. What he brought when he took it was a discipline nobody in American features was practicing: top light, deep amber, and a willingness to let faces fall into total darkness.

Vito's eyes are in shadow for most of the film — a decision Willis made so you cannot read him. Paramount's technicians repeatedly complained the dailies were underexposed and unusable; there are stories of lab personnel offering to "fix" it. Willis and Coppola held.

The other rule was stillness: no zooms, no handheld, no helicopters. Willis composed in what he called a tableau format — locked, symmetrical, painterly — so that the few moving shots land like events. Interiors are dark and warm; the Sicilian exterior is blown out and golden; the two never mix. See Cinematography.

Willis received no Academy Award nomination for this film. He would not receive one for any of the six pictures he shot between 1970 and 1977 that collectively drew 39 nominations. He got an Honorary Oscar in 2009.

Score¶

Nino Rota — Fellini's composer — wrote the score in Rome. Robert Evans hated it on first hearing, thought it too "highbrow," and pushed for a replacement; Coppola fought him and won. Rota's contribution is essentially three ideas: the solo-trumpet main theme, the "Love Theme" (Parla Più Piano), and the Sicilian waltz.

The Academy nominated the score, then withdrew the nomination on discovering that the Love Theme had been adapted from Rota's own music for the 1958 Italian comedy Fortunella. Rota won two years later for Part II. See Music.

Carmine Coppola — the director's father — wrote the wedding band music. Diegetic music does heavy lifting throughout: the Sicilian folk song C'è la luna mezzo mare at the wedding, Bach's organ works under the baptism.

Release and reception¶

Box office¶

Paramount took over $15 million in advance rentals before a frame was shown publicly. The film opened in five theaters on March 15 and expanded to 316 within five days.

It broke essentially every record available to it: biggest week, biggest month, fastest to $10 million, fastest to $50 million. It held the number-one position for months and finished as the highest-grossing film released to that point, before Jaws and Star Wars reset the scale. NBC paid a then-record $10 million for two network broadcasts in November 1974.

Precise totals are unrecoverable — 1970s reporting mixed rentals with gross, and the film has been reissued repeatedly. The commonly cited range is $250–291 million worldwide across all releases. See Box Office.

Critics¶

The reviews in March 1972 were strong but not unanimous, and the specific reservations are worth remembering, because they're the same ones critics still raise:

Pauline Kael (The New Yorker) was an early and unqualified champion, calling it the biggest hit ever made by an American studio and meaning it as praise for its ambition, not its receipts.
Vincent Canby (The New York Times) admired it while noting how much of its power was borrowed from the novel's pulp engine.
Roger Ebert gave it four stars and singled out Brando and the "wedding-cake elaborateness" of the storytelling.
The dissent, then and now, was that the film is seductive about its subject — that it launders the Mafia into an aristocracy. Coppola's answer, consistently, is that the film is about American business and the audience's willingness to admire it is the point being made.

Modern aggregates: 97% on Rotten Tomatoes; 100/100 on Metacritic, one of a very small number of films to hold a perfect score there.

Awards¶

Three wins from ten nominations at the 45^th Academy Awards:


Best Picture	Won — Albert S. Ruddy
Best Actor	Won — Marlon Brando (declined)
Best Adapted Screenplay	Won — Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
Best Director	Nominated — Coppola (lost to Bob Fosse, Cabaret)
Best Supporting Actor	Nominated — Al Pacino
Best Supporting Actor	Nominated — James Caan
Best Supporting Actor	Nominated — Robert Duvall
Best Costume Design	Nominated — Anna Hill Johnstone
Best Film Editing	Nominated — William Reynolds, Peter Zinner
Best Sound	Nominated

Three of the film's own actors split the supporting vote; Joel Grey won for Cabaret. Pacino, who is on screen more than Brando, was nominated in supporting — a category placement he publicly objected to, and reportedly boycotted the ceremony over.

Brando declined his award. Sacheen Littlefeather appeared in his place to refuse it, citing the film industry's treatment of Native Americans and the ongoing standoff at Wounded Knee. She was booed and cheered in roughly equal measure, and the Academy formally apologized to her fifty years later, in 2022, shortly before her death. Her Apache heritage was itself publicly disputed after her death by her own family — a controversy the Academy has not revisited.

Full tables: Awards.

Standing¶

AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies: #3 (1998), #2 (2007)
AFI's 10 Top 10: #1 gangster film (2008)
AFI's 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes: #2 — "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse"
AFI's 100 Years…100 Heroes & Villains: Vito Corleone, #10 hero — a placement that says something about the film's seductiveness
National Film Registry: inducted 1990
Sight & Sound critics' poll: has appeared in the top 25 in every edition since 1992