The Legacy of The Godfather--50-Year Anniversary

 

Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, James Caan, John Cazale

Photo Credit: Everett Collection

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Lost in the sheer madness during the 94^th Academy Awards on March 27, was an epic milestone in motion picture history.

The Godfather, the 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola celebrated its 50-year anniversary.

Sean "Diddy" Combs introduced Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino in a tribute to the Godfather Trilogy that was (in my opinion) much too brief for such a brilliant masterpiece.

During the 1973 Academy Awards, The Godfather was nominated for 10 awards, coming away with three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Marlon Brando).

Prior to the tribute, chaos and confusion took place at the Dolby Theatre, right in the heart of Hollywood, when actor Will Smith (who would later that night win an Oscar) approached comedian Chris Rock on stage and delivered a hard slap to his face for his insensitive joke about his wife's bald head. Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith (unbeknownst to Chris Rock) suffers from alopecia, a medical term for hair loss.

Whatever took place after the Will Smith slap, to many it’s just a hazy memory. The slap heard round the world took center stage and devoured the news cycle for days after the awards ceremony. It certainly overshadowed the milestone of the Godfather hitting its 50-year mark.

Despite The Godfather being released 50 years ago, so many of its memorable lines and scenes of the film are still very much with us and pop up in our everyday language. The Internet Movie Database, (IMDb) for example, lists more than three hundred films and television shows that have referenced “The Godfather.”

Imagine, 132 million people had seen the Godfather by January, 1975. The movie earned more than $250 million worldwide, a figure that continues to grow.

There’s a famous story that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo refused to see “The Godfather” for its depiction of Italian-American stereotypes which he found repulsive. Finally, Cuomo broke down and saw it and he considered it a masterpiece.

Singer Vic Damone had initially been cast in The Godfather for the role of Johnny Fontane, but reportedly bowed out. “As an American of Italian descent,” Damone said, “I could not in good conscience continue in that role.” The role of Johnny Fontane was filled by singer Al Martino.

Brendan Hennessey, Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Binghamton University, says Cuomo’s initial rejection of the film “was probably typical of Italian Americans of a certain age, definitely in New York state. That generation was still very close to the anti-Italian discrimination of their parents and grandparents who worked hard to distance themselves from stereotypes of Italian criminality and racial inferiority that were very common in the early 20th century through the end of WWII.” “More recent controversies,” Hennessey explained, “over serious representations like 'The Sopranos' or silly ones like 'Jersey Shore' and the non-controversy over renaming Columbus Day are all remnants of that era of assimilation.”  Hennessey contends that the current generation of Italian-Americans are not as outraged by these stereotypes as much as their parents and grandparents were.

Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola discuss a ‘Godfather’ scene on location in Little Italy.

Photo Credit: Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News via Getty Images

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So, exactly why is The Godfather considered such a cinematic masterpiece to this very day? 

Former New York Times op-ed columnist and currently writer-at-large for New York Magazine, Frank Rich, tells me “as King Lear exemplifies, classic drama so often involves a family battling over love and power. In The Godfather, Coppola wedded those basics to memorable, original characters, an epic shadow history of America, bravura filmmaking, and pitch-perfect casting that called on the talents of several generations of great American actors, among them stars in-the-making like Pacino.”

John Mosier, Professor of English (Emeritus) at Loyola University, New Orleans, thinks that The Godfather was a compelling Italian immigrant saga; one that chronicles the importance of family and loyalty when all other traditional levers of power in America fails them.

Additionally, “it told a story about two aspects of American life,” Mosier says, “that everyone knew existed, but had never been talked about: Sicilian culture here and criminal activity.  So, it used a typical story device—young idealistic man who’s drawn into a life of violence.  It did so in a way that was neither moralistic nor tragic—the ending was a very fine touch.  He should have stopped, basically.”

For serious film buffs, I compiled a selection of facts about The Godfather, along with a collection of original film reviews from 1972.

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Robert Duvall holds cue cards for Marlon Brando to read 

Source: Paramount Studios

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The Godfather: Facts, Feats, and Historic Firsts

• Mario Puzo was born in 1920 in Hell’s Kitchen (West Side of Midtown Manhattan), the son of Italian born parents.
• His first two novels, “Dark Arena” and “Fortunate Pilgrim” though critically acclaimed, earned him only $6,500. At age 45, he owed $20,000 in gambling debts, so he wrote a ten-page book outline-entitled Mafia, hoping for more commercial appeal. The Godfather was a pulp novel about sex, violence and crime. Eight publishers turned him down.
• The Godfather book was a rousing success, spending 67 weeks on the New York Times' Best Sellers List
• On March 5, 1967, Paramount bought the rights to Mario Puzo’s book, “Mafia,” later renamed “The Godfather.”
• In 1969, according to Robert Evans (head of production at Paramount), "there wasn’t a single Italian director with any credibility to be found.”
• 12 directors turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather.
• September 27, 1970: Francis Ford Coppola was officially announced as The Godfather director with an anticipated release at Christmas, 1971.
• The final draft of the screenplay ran 158 pages and was dated March 29, 1971.
• Coppola reportedly made The Godfather because he was Italian and desperate for work. He was offered and accepted $125,000 and 6% of the profits.
• Hollywood heavyweights, Anthony Quinn, George C. Scott, Laurence Olivier, and Ernest Borgnine were rumored to be vying for the part of Don Corleone.
• Anne Bancroft was briefly considered for the part of Carmella “Mama’’ Corleone.
• Al Pacino failed his screen test, he forgot his lines.
• Ryan O’Neal, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Frank Langella, Martin Sheen, and David Carrradine, were all considered for the role of Michael Corleone before settling on Al Pacino. For a short time, James Caan was the frontrunner to play Michael Corleone.
• Casting for The Godfather formally began in New York at THE GODFATHER Production Offices on the 28^th floor #1 Gulf and Western Plaza on November 20, 1970.
• Pacino was 31 years old when he finally secured the role of Michael Corleone.
• At 5:30 a.m. on March 23, 1971, filming for The Godfather began.
• The Godfather was shot in 120 New York area locations over 67 days.
• Gianni Russo (who played Carlo Rizzi in the Godfather) claims that he worked in organized crime early in his life, serving as an errand boy and mob associate for Frank Costello.
• Marlon Brando was 47 years old when he was cast in the Godfather. He was viewed in the industry as washed up. Prior to The Godfather, Marlon Brando was in a series of flops and was considered box office poison.
• Brando was paid $50,000, plus $10,000 a week in expenses during his contractual six weeks of shooting, and a percentage after the picture brought in $10 million.
• Coppola was certain he was about to be fired. His insistence over casting Pacino and the rest of his chosen cast member had earned him the hostility of almost all the top executives at Paramount.
• New York crime boss, Frank Colombo assembled tens of thousands of protestors to march through the streets of New York, to protest the making of The Godfather and its distorted depiction of Italian-Americans.  A benefit concert was organized, headlined by Frank Sinatra, and raised roughly $600,000—which he used, according to Al Ruddy (The Godfather producer), for “the sole express purpose of stopping the filming of The Godfather.”
• At the request of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, all references to the Mafia and Cosa Nostra from its screenplay, were eliminated.
• In The Godfather, Coppola sought to express how Americans as a whole must rely on their family for what America fails to provide them, and in the case of the movie that family is Don Corleone.
• Among the most pressing obstacles facing Coppola was financing: the film’s budget, originally set at $2 million, quickly leaped toward $6 million.
• The gruesome scene with the dead horse’s head was a real horse, obtained from a rendering plant in New Jersey, where they located a horse ready for slaughter. The horse’s head was smeared with Karo blood. The horse’s head in blood stemmed from Sicilian folklore: they nailed your favorite dog’s head to your door if you didn’t pay up.
• For Marlon Brando, the production crew created “dental plumpers,” flesh-colored blobs of acrylic that fit into the sides of Brando’s mouth and flush up against his teeth. To hold the appliances in place, a metal band attached to the plumpers was wrapped around the base of his teeth, with the ends wrapped around his molars like a piece of bridgework. On each foot, Brando wore a ten-pound weight to slow his movements, and padding was added around his waist for a belly grown fat from sumptuous eating.
• The name of Tony Soprano’s strip club in the HBO series, The Sopranos. “ Bada-bing” came from a line in The Godfather spoken by James Caan.
• Sonny (James Caan) beating of Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo) for harming his sister was filmed on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem.
• The assassination of Sonny was considered a technical masterpiece; 200 bullet holes were drilled into the car and filled with squibs—tiny explosive rounds that could be remotely detonated—and another hundred were attached to the tollbooth. 
• A suite in the Americana of New York, on Sixth Avenue, served as a substitute for Las Vegas.
• Vegas casino chief Moe Greene (Alex Rocco,) the Jewish gangster, was based on the real-life American gangster, Bugsy Siegel. 
• The Godfather opened nationwide on March 24, 1972.
• The Godfather brought in $465,148 in its first week alone from just the five Manhattan theaters, considered (at the time) the largest one-week total ever for a motion picture.
• By the following week, the movie had racked up $7,397,164 across 322 theaters in the US and Canada. In less than a month after the opening, The Godfather was grossing $1 million a day, the first film ever to break the magical million-dollar mark.
• During the 1973 Academy Awards, The Godfather was nominated for ten awards: Best Picture; Brando as Best Actor; Coppola for Best Director; Coppola and Puzo for Best Adapted Screenplay; Pacino, Caan, Duvall each for Best Supporting Actor; along with nominations for costumes, editing, and sound.
• The Godfather met with so much box office success, a sequel was quickly worked out with a release date of April, 1974.
• Francis Ford Coppola eventually became a five-time Oscar winner and the recipient of the Academy’s 2010 Irving G. Thalberg Award.
• The Johnny Fontane character is thought to be inspired by Frank Sinatra.
• Francis Ford Coppola and James Caan were classmates at Hofstra University.
• Pacino and Caan signed onto the Godfather for $35,000. Robert Duvall made $36,000 in the Godfather

Italian phrases in The Godfather

Caporegime is a Mafia term for a lieutenant, or second in command.

            Strunz is derived from an Italian term, stronzo, the vulgar translation for which is “a piece of shit.”

            Lupara is a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun that is often homemade. It’s a traditional Cosa Nostra weapon in Sicily.

            Pezzonovante means someone who is powerful, a big shot.

Michael calls Apollonia (the young Sicilian woman) “pazzo,” meaning “crazy”.

• Pacino sprained an ankle ligament when he raced out of the Louis Restaurant (after gunning down Mark McCluskey, the corrupt Irish-American police captain and Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo, the top narcotics man, who became associated with the Tattaglia family) to catch a getaway car in a scene that never made the final cut. Pacino was sidelined for a few days and had to rely on crutches and a cane when shooting resumed along with plenty of painkillers.
• Pacino’s grandparents were genuine Sicilians. He was born in East Harlem but moved to the Bronx at a young age.
• After Marlon Brando passed away (2004), his own annotated script of “The Godfather” fetched $312,800 at a New York auction, which is believed to be the highest amount paid for a film script.
• The baptism scene in The Godfather was filmed at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Mulberry Street, Manhattan. The exteriors of the baptism scene were filmed at Mount Loretto Church in Staten Island. The church burned down in 1973.
• Filming for the shootings during the baptism: (the barbershop, the revolving doors, and the walk up the stairs) was filmed at the St Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Moe Greene’s massage took place in the steam room in the McBurney YMCA, West 23^rd Street, Manhattan.
• On March 15, 1972, five New York theaters screened the world premiere of The Godfather for the public. That night, the film took in a record $57,000. In the first week, the take was $465,000, also a record.
• Paramount pre booked The Godfather in 350 theaters. The film, which costs $6.2 million to make, earned $13.8 million from those bookings alone before the film hit all theaters nationwide.
• In 1972, the average ticket price in the United States was around $1.60. With the high demand over The Godfather, Paramount boosted ticket prices to $3.50, then weekend prices went up to $4.00
• In the film’s initial release, Paramount made $85.7 million. It was the first movie in motion picture history to gross an average of $1 million a day. It was the highest-grossing film of all time, until Jaws surpassed it in 1975. To date, it has grossed nearly $135 million domestically, and an estimated $250 million worldwide.
• NBC paid $10 million to air “The Godfather” over two nights in November of 1974. An estimated 42,400,000 households watched a slightly abridged version of the movie.
• Brando worked on the Godfather for six weeks.
• The Godfather won three Oscars.
• There are 16 hugs, kisses, and squeezes in the Godfather.
• 132 million people had seen the Godfather by January, 1975.
• The Godfather ran for two hours and fifty-six minutes.
• The Godfather film opens in August, 1945

--Bill Lucey

April 7, 2022

[email protected]

Source: “The Annotated Godfather” By Jenny M. Jones; “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather” by Mark Seal; “The Godfather: A Pictorial History” By Gerald Gardner; “The Godfather Legacy” by Harlan Lebo

 

Original Movie Reviews of The Godfather (1972)

• “Far from surviving …as the Gone with the Wind of gangster movies, my guess is The Godfather will be as quickly forgotten as it deserves to be.”

--William F. Buckley, The New York Post, March 14, 1972

• “The Godfather is as good as the novel—and essentially as immoral and therefore in its new incarnation and availability to the illiterate, far more dangerous…The whole function of this film is to show us that Hitler is a grand sort of family man, gentle with children, daring and ruthless with enemies, implacable in the matter of honor and so loyal to the ties of blood that even a brother-in-law, to a sister’s sorrow, must go (juicily garroted) if he happens to have betrayed a son of the house.”

--Judith Crist, New York Magazine, March 20, 1972

• The Godfather” rediscovers the marvelous possibilities existing in the straightforward narrative movie that refuses to acknowledge it's about anything more than its plot, and whose characters are revealed entirely in terms of events. The Godfather moves so quickly, in such a tightly organized series of interlocking events, that the film, like its characters (who are not the sort to muse very long about their fates), doesn't have time to be introspective—to betray the excitement of the immediately felt emotion or of an explicit action by somehow commenting on it.

--Vincent Canby, The New York Times, March 12, 1972

•  “Coppola has found a style and a visual look for all this material so “The Godfather” becomes something of a rarity: a really good movie squeezed from a bestseller. The decision to shoot everything in period decor (the middle and late 1940s) was crucial; if they’d tried to save money as they originally planned, by bringing everything up-to-date, the movie simply wouldn’t have worked. But it’s uncannily successful as a period piece, filled with sleek, bulging limousines and postwar fedoras. “

--Roger Ebert, January 1, 1972, Chicago Sun-Times

• “It’s an extraordinary achievement: a new classic in a classic American film genre: a richly ironic example of how crude popular fiction maybe be transformed into great popular art; a fresh source of both legend and optimism, reviving the career of Marlon Brando and probably making the career of Marlon Brando and probably making the careers of young actor Al Pacino, young screenwriter director Francis Ford Coppola, and several others. And last but hardly least, it is a product of almost limitless commercial potential.”

--Gary Arnold, The Washington Post, March 22, 1972

• “Director Coppola, whose Hollywood record so far has been undistinguished, tells The Godfather with a kind of brilliant low-keyed virtuosity, with one particularly effective use of symbolism: the underworld dealings are conducted in thickly darkened rooms, usually in murmurous tones, and these scenes are contrasted with the pastoral, open-air semi-freedom of Corleone family life.”

--Kevin Kelly, The Boston Globe, March 23, 1972

• “The Godfather is a baptism in blood, a ripping, tearing blockbuster of a movie, as charged with excitement as a hoodlum using a machine gun, as shocking as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,”

--Joyce Haber, Los Angeles Times, 1972 

• “This is a curious film. One comes to understand, even to condone, the activities of the Godfather and his clan. And even though it frankly portrays the underworld’s influence in the sacrosanct worlds of Hollywood and Las Vegas, there is the feeling that, with young Michael there, these will be better worlds. Essentially, The Godfather is the projection of a myth, not a fact. But it is myths — not facts — that make a fortune. “

--Arthur Knight, The Hollywood Reporter, March 8, 1972

• “It takes a masterful presentation of a gripping story to hold a man in his seat for 2 hours and 55 minutes with a minimum of squirming. This is what The Godfather does.”

--Emerson Batdorff, The Plain Dealer, March 23, 1972