NOVEMBER 2022:
HERE’S TO THE GOLDEN YEAR…
The Godfather was released 50 years ago on March 24, 1972. And in honor of this film milestone, Paramount Pictures has rereleased the film to commemorate its Golden Jubilee with a limited run of The Godfather trilogy back in theaters that started with the first film on February 25, 2022. The trilogy has also been restored and remastered in 4K and was rereleased on 4K Ultra HD and Digital on March 22, 2022, two days before The Godfather’s original release date back in 1972. This Critique is going to take you back 50 years to the release of what is widely considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time and changed the Hollywood standard for filmmaking forever. The film would go on to be nominated for 11 Academy Awards and win three of those awards at the 1973 ceremony, which included a win for Best Actor for Marlon Brando, Best Adapted Screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola, and Mario Puzo, as well as the highest honors of the awards show, Best Picture. So, get ready to take it all the way back to March 1972 and relive the birth of a landmark gangster genre film and one of the greatest and most influential films ever made!
THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM…
The month was March, and the year was 1972, and the 24th day of the month fell on a Friday, and it was the 84th day of the year according to the Gregorian calendar. On this day in historical events, the United Kingdom had just imposed direct rule over Northern Ireland, which was five years into their “Troubles” that would last 30 years. The President of the United States was Richard Nixon and he had just completed a successful state visit to the USSR and China but returned home to a pending storm, and was four months away from the Watergate break-in that would result in his resignation in 1974 to avoid impeachment and indictment for his culpability in the political scandal that would go on to define the 70s era in America. The war in Vietnam was also still three years away from ending and the American people were protesting it in the streets and learning that their government wasn’t as honest about their intentions in Vietnam when the war started in 1955 when Americans approved of our position over there due to the leaked Pentagon Papers and publishing of the breaking story in both The Washington Post and The New York Times in June 1971. America felt betrayed, and Americans felt they had been lied to by the very people they had trusted and given loyalty to through their votes. And it was still the calmest month in 1972 for the United States, but that was all about to change in a few short months.
THE BIRTH OF A FAMILY LEGACY…
The number one song playing on radios in the U.S. was “A Horse With No Name” by America, while “Without You” was filling the airwaves across the pond in the U.K. as the number one song by Nilsson. On television, everyone who wasn’t watching the news about updates about the failing war in Vietnam and worrying about a loved one returning home safely was tuning in every week to watch the number one show, All in the Family. If you avoided the dismal outlook of Vietnam on TV or were a kid growing up in the 70s and you were a fan of video games, you were probably at the arcade playing Pong. And if you were neither a fan of television nor video games and preferred a good book, you were probably in the middle of reading the best-selling book of 1972, Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. But if you were a fan of going to the movies, you were witnessing the birth of a family legacy, as well as a soon to be film classic phenomenon that was about to change Hollywood forever. I’m talking about the Corleone family of course, and the crime saga film adapted from the 1969 crime novel of the same title by Mario Puzo, The Godfather directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Ten days before the film’s official release in theaters on March 24, 1972, the film had its premiere at the Loew’s State Theatre in New York City on March 14, 1972, and also debuted in five theaters in N.Y.C on premiere night. This early debut would help the film set a record for the highest-grossing film in history, taking in $87,500,000 in that week, and between $250 and $291 million at the box office in total. This record would stand until 1975 when a little film about a big shark terrorizing a community on Amity Island would bite that record away from The Godfather. Jaws was released on June 20, 1975, and became not only the highest-grossing film in history beating The Godfather’s 1972 record, but it would also be the highest-grossing movie of the year and change Hollywood once more and forever as The Godfather did before it, when the film became the first movie to earn $100 million in the U.S. and Canada and set the standard for future blockbusters. Steven Spielberg may have beat the record for the film, but he could never take away the legacy that was the Corleone family, and with the release of The Godfather Part II in 1974, that legacy only grew stronger, and the Corleone family only grew bigger with the addition of Robert DeNiro as a young Don Vito Corleone arriving in America for the first time from Italy to begin the birth of a family legacy in New York City.
50 YEARS LATER…
In 2022, not only is The Godfather regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made, but it was also selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1990, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the film registry as a reason for its induction. The film is also ranked the second greatest film in American Cinema, behind Citizen Kane, by the American Film Institute. Some cinephiles and film historians have even argued it deserves to be ahead of Citizen Kane as the greatest film being it’s more popular among film viewers who simply think it to be a better movie than the Orson Welles film classic. It is still a highly contested debate 50 years later, and no film has stood the test of time, past or present, to compete on the stage for the greatest. Since its release in 1972, the film has become a trilogy classic as well, with the sequels that followed in 1974 with The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III in 1990. The third film in the trilogy has faced the most criticism as being the worst of the three gangster films, but Francis Ford Coppola tried to redeem the film in December 2020, when a recut version of the film that included a different ending for Michael Corleone, where everything was set up the same, but Michael was denied an on-camera death, and Coppola changed the length of the film and narrative pacing, the recut was released to coincide with the 30th Anniversary of the original version and the title was also changed to The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.
MY GODFATHERLY CRITIQUE…
50 years later, The Godfather is deserving of its celebrated rerelease due to the ways it fundamentally changed how films were made in Hollywood and brought Paramount Pictures back from the brink of death, which is ironic being it was a violent gangster film where more people died than lived, but filmgoers and critics alike have and still do praise the legacy of the Corleone family and Francis Ford Coppola’s contribution to the film society. The importance of the film in history will live on long after we’re all gone, but it will remain in the hearts of movie lovers everywhere for eternity. If I were Francis Ford Coppola, I would think about retiring from making films and quitting while I was way ahead, buy a winery with my The Godfather profits, and sit and drink everyday to celebrate. Oh, wait…
The Godfather is available to stream in 4K on all streaming platforms and can be purchased at your preferred retail store.