Legacy & Influence¶

What the trilogy did to films, to television, to the American language, and — genuinely — to organized crime.

To the film industry¶

It changed what a hit could be. Before March 1972, a serious, slow, three-hour, R-rated, subtitled-in-places period drama with a difficult ending was not a blockbuster. The Godfather was the highest-grossing film ever made, and it was those things.

The immediate consequence was the New Hollywood period's peak: for roughly five years, American studios funded difficult films by young directors because the most profitable film in history had been one. The Conversation, Chinatown, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter all exist in the space The Godfather opened.

The other consequence was the opposite one. The Godfather also invented the wide-release-plus-saturation-marketing pattern that Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) perfected — and which ended New Hollywood.

It invented the numbered sequel. Part II was the first major American film to use the convention, over Paramount's objection. Every Part II since exists downstream of that argument.

It made the prestige sequel possible. Before 1974, a sequel was a cash-in by definition. After Part II won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, it wasn't.

To the gangster film¶

The genre had existed since Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), and the pre-1972 model was consistent: crime is a fever, the gangster rises fast, and the film ends with him dead in the street as a warning.

The Godfather replaced it with something else entirely: crime as a family business with a succession problem. The gangster is no longer an outsider who breaks in; he is a manager with a portfolio. Nobody dies in the street as a moral lesson. The ones who die are inconvenient.

Almost every crime film since has had to position itself relative to that:

Goodfellas (1990) is the explicit rebuttal — Scorsese's argument that the life is squalid, funny, and stupid rather than operatic, and that the Corleones' dignity is the lie.
Once Upon a Time in America (1984) — Leone finally making the film he passed on The Godfather to make.
Carlito's Way, Donnie Brasco, A Bronx Tale, Road to Perdition, Gomorrah, The Irishman.
Scarface (1983) — Pacino again, doing the opposite: all appetite, no restraint.

To television¶

The Sopranos (1999–2007) is the largest debt in television, and it is paid explicitly. David Chase's characters quote the films constantly, argue about them, and measure themselves against them — Silvio does the Michael impression, and the show's whole comic engine is men who learned how to be gangsters from a movie.

But the deeper inheritance is Part II's structure: the dual timeline, the past commenting on the present, the refusal to explain, the willingness to let a protagonist become unlikeable. That grammar runs through The Sopranos into Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Peaky Blinders, and Better Call Saul.

Personnel, too. Dominic Chianese (Johnny Ola) became Uncle Junior. Tony Sirico, uncredited as a Rosato hood in Part II, became Paulie Walnuts.

To the language¶

Phrases that entered general English from a 1969 novel and a 1972 film:

"An offer he can't refuse" — AFI's #2 movie quote of all time
"Going to the mattresses"
"Sleeps with the fishes"
"Leave the gun, take the cannoli" — improvised on set by Richard Castellano
"Consigliere" — the office is real; its use in English business slang is the film's doing
"Godfather" as a term for any dominant figure in a field
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"

See Quotes and Glossary § What Puzo invented.

To organized crime¶

This is the strangest part of the legacy and it's documented.

Puzo had never met a gangster. He built the Mafia in the novel from newspaper files and the Kefauver and Valachi hearing transcripts. And then the real organization began performing the fiction.

FBI surveillance recordings from the 1970s onward capture members using Puzo's phrasing, referencing the films, and in some cases explicitly citing them as models of how a man of respect should conduct himself. Prosecutors and agents have described a measurable shift in how mobsters presented themselves after 1972 — more formality, more talk of honor and family, a self-image borrowed wholesale from a film.

The cleanest illustration remains Joe Colombo, who ran a crime family and simultaneously ran the anti-defamation campaign against the film depicting one.

The town of Corleone, which Puzo named in 1969, went on to produce the faction that dominated Cosa Nostra through the 1980s and murdered the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino. It now has an anti-Mafia museum and a permanent public-relations problem it did not choose.

To food, business, and everything else¶

The cannoli. One improvised line has kept a pastry in the American vocabulary for fifty years.

Business writing. The Godfather is one of the most-cited films in management literature — succession planning, delegation, negotiation, and the phrase "an offer he can't refuse" appear in seminars, and there have been multiple books explicitly framing Vito Corleone as a leadership model. This is either evidence for Coppola's thesis about capitalism or the single most complete failure to understand a film in modern history, and possibly both.

The Fujita cover. S. Neil Fujita's marionette-strings design went from a book jacket to the film's poster to a permanent piece of visual shorthand.

Parody. The Simpsons has returned to it dozens of times. You've Got Mail has a whole running argument about it. The Freshman (1990) cast Brando as a Vito parody. Analyze This (1999) is a Godfather joke with Robert De Niro in it. The Godfather is one of a very small number of films that a general audience can be assumed to have seen, which is what makes it parody-able at all.

The standing¶


AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies	#3 (1998), #2 (2007)
AFI 10 Top 10 — Gangster	#1
National Film Registry	1990 (first year of eligibility) and 1993
Sight & Sound directors' poll	Part II at #2 in 2002
Writers Guild of America	The Godfather #2 greatest screenplay ever
Metacritic	100/100 — one of very few

Its reputation has been stable for fifty years in a way almost no other film's is. That is itself remarkable: the canon churns constantly, and The Godfather has been at or near the top of it since the decade it was released.