All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood

There's probably no better testament to the iconic status of Thunder Road (1958) than the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. Not because 'Thunder Road' and Thunder Road have anything to do with each other: one's a proto-carsploitation thriller about moonshiners, the other a lament of lost youth tied to 'one last chance to make it real'. What matters is that Springsteen saw the poster to Thunder Road when the film was making the rounds on the drive-in and grindhouse scene, and was so inspired that he wrote a signature song without even watching the whole thing.

The other bit of trivia I'll pretend to know about before watching Thunder Road: Robert Mitchum wanted Elvis Presley to play the role of his character's younger brother. 'Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch,' Ian Johnston drily notes of their meeting. Nothing came of it, since Elvis's notorious manager demanded a sum of money that would have exceeded the film's entire budget. And thus did the world come to enjoy the spectacle of Mitchum's son pretending to be his brother.

World War II veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) has returned to the East Tennessee holler where he grew up. There, he is the best driver in the dangerous business of evading the FBI while running moonshine from the mountains to Memphis. A gangster from the city, Carl Kogan (Jacques Aubuchon), attempts to muscle in and bring the moonshiners, including Luke's father (Trevor Bardette), under his thumb. After he refuses to be swayed by Kogan's offers, Luke is in increasing danger, while also trying to keep his mechanic younger brother Robin (James Mitchum) from joining in his life of crime.

Mitchum's assured movie star performance helps sell all this, and the film works hard to make him the epitome of cool. It works, in a very fifties way: Mitchum strikes matches on the soles of his boots, wears leather jackets, and humiliates his enemies by repeatedly crushing their hats. There are not one but two women madly in love with him, femme fatale singer Francie Wymore (Keely Smith) and wholesome girl next door Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight). But since dialogue bluntly establishes Roxanna is all of eighteen years old, her unrequited longing also points to a central problem: Mitchum was plainly about a decade too old for the role, and casting his son as Luke's fool brother makes it worse.

On the plus side, though, Thunder Road is jolly entertaining. The story of working-class underdogs facing down a wealthy bully is hardly original, although the fact that all parties involved are criminals gives it an edge. The younger Mitchum's performance is no great shakes, and that causes undeniable problems in the film's last act; but his father's swagger holds it all together. What really makes the film click, though, is the action. Largely eschewing the rear projection that still dominated driving scenes in the fifties, Thunder Road has some outstanding car chase scenes that prefigure the carsploitation mania of the seventies, complete with terrific stunt driving and excellent fluid camera work from director Arthur Ripley.

It's a perfectly good low-key crime thriller, and it's no wonder it became a staple of grindhouses in later decades. Its outsized legacy elevates Thunder Road to a status it doesn't necessarily earn. Without this film, it's hard to imagine about half the oeuvre of the Drive-By Truckers, or the current deluge of country-rock bands with 'whiskey' or 'still' in their name. Mitchum's obsession with the project may not have paid off financially or critically, at least not in the short run. But it proved, in case that needed proving, the enduring appeal of cool.

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Don't go against a friend of the friends

In case recent reviews of Django (1966) and Il mercenario (1968) didn't make it sufficiently clear, this blog likes Franco Nero quite a lot. So the realisation - which, granted, I made roughly a year after every other spaghetti western fan on this earth - that Nero is in Django Unchained was met with great rejoicing. And here we come to an odd intersection. For by sheer coincidence I've recently blogged my way through the Godfather series, and left eager to watch far more gangster films than any sane person should. And guess who starred in a number of Italian Mafia pictures?

Like many Italian directors of his generation Damiano Damiani was a workhorse, directing films from documentaries and serious dramas to spaghetti westerns.While he continued genre-hopping throughout his career, in the late sixties Damiani hit his stride with a series of Mafia films starring Nero. It's the first of these, 1968's Il giorno della civetta - titled Mafia during its 1970 theatrical run in the United States, but since then generally known as The Day of the Owl - to which we now turn.

One morning in the Sicilian countryside, a contractor is ambushed by a hitman. The wounded man flees towards the nearest house, but is shot again and killed. The scene is witnessed by the owner of the house, a man called Nicolosi - who, by the time the contractor's body is discovered, has gone missing too. Police Captain Bellodi (Franco Nero), a hotshot Northerner, attempts to trace the murder back to the local Mafia boss, Don Mariano Arena (Lee J. Cobb), who he suspects had the contractor killed because he refused to participate in his racket of awarding construction contracts to his friends. But the investigation is hindered by the fact that none of the locals, not even police informer Parrinieddu (Serge Reggiani), is willing to testify against Don Mariano - least of all Rosa Nicolosi (Claudia Cardinale), whose husband is still missing and suspected murdered.

The film is largely constructed as a game of chess between Don Mariano and Captain Bellodi, whose office is just across the city square from the Mafia boss's residence. The men regularly observe each other through binoculars (hence the film's title) while talking shop with their subordinates - who are largely dimwitted thugs in Don Mariano's case, while Bellodi's men, being more experienced than their practically foreign superior, lack his optimism about taking down the Mafia. Nero, a fantastic fit as the nihilistic, self-amused gunslinger Django, is less natural here as a brash, overconfident white knight, although his embrace of deceit and corruption in the pursuit of justice makes for an interesting protagonist.

Regarding Cobb's Don Mariano, then: if you thought, quite naturally, that casting an American character actor as a Sicilian crimelord might cause some problems, you haven't seen either Cobb's work or the great Italian facility with overdubbing. His Mariano is ruthless and brutal without once getting his hands dirty. A man who makes his friends rich and is feared by the community, he has a veneer of Christian respectability that he knows doesn't need to be convincing. He's mesmerising to watch without even a hint of the fatherly charm that Marlon Brando brought to the role, and I rather like the prosaic reality of his operations: receiving public contracts and handling them cheaply to the cost of the community, in exactly the way the Camorra does with waste disposal.

As presented by The Day of the Owl, the Sicilian Mafia's strength comes from silence. Throughout the film, the locals keep quiet and look the other way. Who could blame them? Bellodi offers them appeals to principle, when what they need is protection from Mafia vengeance. Cardinale, billed above Nero and theoretically the film's protagonist despite the fact that her storyline never quite gels with the rest of the film, has the information that could see Don Mariano convicted - but she fears for her daughter's life, knowing that her husband may well have been murdered. In one of the film's strongest scenes, she attends a lunch with the local caporegimes, who praise her for her good judgment. She storms off, disgusted by her reliance on the men responsible for so much evil - but she can't go against them armed only with sentiment.

As a procedural The Day of the Owl is shot in a far more down-to-earth style than much Italian genre cinema of its time, but Damiani is not above fancy direction, including a penchant for using fisheye lenses to focus on and distort the faces of Mafia elders. Among the film's signature scenes is the opening murder and a late showdown between Bellodi and Don Mariano, in which the former finally believes himself triumphant. The score by Giovanni Fusco (Hiroshima, mon amour) relies heavily on strings, going to the same well of Sicilian folk music that Nino Rota would mine so successfully for The Godfather. It's a rare romantic flourish in a film that, as is characteristic of the Mafia films from Italy vis-à-vis their American counterparts, is hard-nosed and nasty - but still jolly entertaining.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in

Sixteen years passed between the universal acclaim of The Godfather Part II and its belated epilogue. In the meantime, Francis Ford Coppola struck gold again with Apocalypse Now, but at the price of an infamously gruelling shoot. In the eighties, the director suffered a long string of flops and misfires, bottoming out with Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Exhausted and close to bankruptcy, Coppola finally accepted Paramount Pictures' long-standing offer to direct a third film in the series that had put him on the map.

The circumstances surrounding that film, finally released in December 1990, were a recipe for disaster. The Godfather Part III was a blatant cash grab. It was missing Robert Duvall, who declined to return after being offered too small a fraction of Al Pacino's salary. Most ominously, Coppola wanted the film to be a smaller-scale epilogue titled The Death of Michael Corleone, but the studio insisted on the Part III title.

The film's reception was far less glowing than its predecessors', but it was usually considered flawed, tacked-on and inessential rather than a true disaster: the first film in the series to include real, substantial misjudgments, but not bad per se. The temptation is to declare that if only it wasn't a part of the Godfather series and derived unearned canonisation from them, we should hail it as a pretty good gangster picture. But that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Like Michael Corleone himself Part III is obsessed with the events of the previous films and derives all its substance from them. It's a mood piece that meditates on the first two films, exploring how they resonate two decades down the line and whether there is any escape from the cycle of violence. I'm partial to that.

It certainly doesn't help, though, that The Godfather Part III opens with its worst scene, and therefore the weakest scene in the whole franchise. In 1979 Michael (Al Pacino, barely recognisable), pushing sixty and still at the head of the Corleone family, receives an award from the Catholic Church in return for a donation of a hundred million dollars for the needy of Sicily. His ex-wife Kay (Diane Keaton) wants him to allow his son Anthony (Franc D'Ambrosio) to quit his law degree and become a professional singer, but Michael is reluctant. Meanwhile, he has to settle a dispute between crime lord Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) and Vincent Mancini (Andy García), a choleric low-level mobster and illegitimate son of Santino Corleone.

It's a clusterfrak of poor choices, beginning with the copious use of footage from the first two films. Generally, the things wrong with this scene will continue to bog down the film, but nowhere else are they present in such concentrated form. There's the infodumping introduction of new characters (George Hamilton as family lawyer B.J. Harrison, John Savage as Andrew Hagen, Eli Wallach as affable ageing gangster Don Altobello), the pointless cameos from Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) to Enzo the baker (Gabriele Torrei) - who actually refers to himself as 'Enzo the baker', for goodness' sake - , and the awful acting and dialogue: the worst in the whole film, in fact, from Keaton's worst work as Kay to a gut-churning 'flirting' scene between Vincent and Mary Corleone (Sofia Coppola).

The film picks up in a tense, profane confrontation between Vincent and Zasa that ends with a savaged ear instead of the peace Michael demands. From there, it gets better: Vincent, attacked in his flat by thugs who threaten his girlfriend Grace Hamilton (Bridget Fonda) and backed by Michael's sister Connie (Talia Shire), champs at the bit to be allowed to strike back at Joey Zasa. At a meeting of the Commission in Atlantic City, Michael pays out his partners' shares in the casino business and dissolves his relationships between them but Joey Zasa, who receives nothing, leaves in anger. Shortly after, the meeting is attacked and most senior gangsters machine-gunned. Michael, who survives uninjured, suffers a diabetic stroke from stress. While he's recovering, Vincent assassinates Joey Zasa with the endorsement of Connie and Al Neri (Richard Bright).

In the film's third act the family relocates to Sicily, where Anthony is due to give his operatic debut in a performance of Cavalleria rusticana. Michael, eager to invest in legitimate enterprises, sees his efforts to control the board of a European real estate company blocked by a shadowy cabal of gangsters, bankers and senior churchmen, and feels forced to order one last round of blood-letting that he no longer has the strength for. He offers Vincent leadership of the family, on condition that the latter end his romance with Mary. But the enemy behind all the machinations against him has ordered a Sicilian assassin (Mario Donatone) to go to the opera and take Michael out once and for all.

At its heart The Godfather Part III is about redemption. Michael Corleone makes one last attempt to make the transition from crime to legitimate business and atone for ordering his brother's death, and he fails. The theme of being unable to shake off the sins of the past no matter how hard one tries explains and, I at least would argue, justifies the film's obsession with its predecessors, its modest ambition to be no more than an epilogue. It also accounts for the sheer amount of religious themes and Catholic iconography strewn all over the film: religion played a part in previous installments, but it is here, between rosaries, Madonnas and important scenes set in the Vatican, that Catholicism is really foregrounded.

In the film's signature scene - in which, unfortunately, we can see the actors' breath, making it tremendously obvious it was filmed somewhere rather colder than southern Italy in the summer - Michael visits Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone) because he needs his assistance against Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly). Overcome by the compassion of a man he later calls 'a true priest', Michael tearfully confesses his sins, but realises he will not repent. 'Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer,' Lamberto says: 'Your life could be redeemed, but I know that you don't believe that. You will not change.' And then, with an infinite sadness, he does his job: 'Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris...'

Michael tries to atone for the sins of his past, but he also wants to ensure a future for his family free of that evil. He struggles with the unconditional love Anthony and Mary display towards him, and tries to repair his relationship with his ex-wife, who loves and dreads him. The problem is that all this material, much of which is the heart of the film, does not work at all. Keaton has the worst dialogue in the film - again, one might say after Part II. Her job has always been to state the films' message in no uncertain terms, at the expense of a character that has sounded increasingly self-righteous and whiny. Saddled with the sort of material she's served here, Keaton gives her worst performance in the franchise.



The other infamous piece of acting is of course Sofia Coppola, cast by her father after Winona Ryder dropped out at the last minute. Coppola, unfortunately, is quite as awful as her detractors say. The film pretty much dies every time she's onscreen, which spells trouble since the climax hinges on her relationship with Pacino. The problem, though, isn't merely nepotism - the Godfather series had always provided gainful employment for the whole Coppola family, not generally to the films' detriment. Sofia Coppola is simply saddled with having to portray the weakest character in the weakest script of the series. Ryder would almost certainly have been better, but I cannot imagine a good performance of this character.

Two facts negate the obvious assumption that the Puzo-Coppola team simply cannot write women. Firstly, D'Ambrosio's Anthony is also a poor character. Secondly, there's Talia Shire, the director's sister and living refutation of the theory that the series' problems are caused by rampant nepotism. Shire had always given strong performances, but in Part III she moves to the centre of the cast, and Connie becomes magnificent as a result: passionate about the family, she has gained an austere ruthlessness that leads her to back the brutal Vincent. The script also makes her Don Altobello's goddaughter, which lends intense poignancy to the scene in which she gives him a box of cannoli for his birthday.* ('Sleep, godfather.')

García is very good too, with the exception of his leaden romance scenes with Sofia Coppola. A murderous thug and little else, his Vincent Mancini is a crucial element in the process of self-demythologisation that began with The Godfather Part II. He's difficult to like and admire, but tremendously easy to fear. Similarly, the shady Don Lucchesi (Enzo Robutti) doesn't look like a film character: he resembles the 'important' people my overly status-conscious bourgeois grandparents used to invite to family functions. He's more accountant than glamorous gangster, but no less pitiless and deadly for that.

The film's direction is a tick less good than its predecessors' and Carmine Coppola's score makes me miss Nino Rota, who was unable to return on account of being dead. But as pure spectacle The Godfather Part III still doesn't disappoint. For starters, the production design is absolutely gorgeous. Art director Alex Tavoularis, joining his brother and series veteran Dean Tavoularis, leaves the somewhat realistic look of Part II far behind and goes for Baroque spectacle: red curtains, gold, daggers, and religious imagery. That pays off in the climactic opera scene, an aural and visual feast that is not the series' most effective sequence but certainly its most spectacular. It almost manages to make you forget a clumsy dénouement marred by abysmal old-age make-up.

The fact of the matter is that I kind of love The Godfather Part III. Yes, it has some fairly horrendous flaws, unlike its near-perfect brethren. And no-one could accuse it of being essential: without it, the saga of Michael Corleone would be no less complete. But beside the spectacle, the film is marked by a deep human yearning for peace, an end to a seemingly neverending cycle of violence. It isn't optimistic in that sense, but it doesn't need to be: the hope for peace itself matters. As long as we have that (as Vincent and Connie do not), all is not lost.

*The last time I watched The Godfather Part III with friends who hadn't seen it before, I made and brought cannoli. I recommend doing that.

In this series: The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)

One by one, our old friends are gone

Despite a three-star Roger Ebert review that has angered fanboys for four decades, The Godfather Part II is, if anything, even more critically acclaimed than its predecessor. But among audiences, Coppola's sequel has never been able to catch up with the then highest grossing film of all time. Virtually all the franchise's famous lines and characters are from the first installment. A large segment of the moviegoing public, convinced it's all about Vito Corleone, is unable to strike up a connection to the Marlon Brando-less sequels.

But that's hardly the result of the first-year university student's favourite bugbear, the stupidity of the common man. It's all in the material. The Godfather Part II is brilliant, but it's much harder to like than its predecessor. Detached and critical where the first film is engrossing, Part II functions as a deconstruction of The Godfather's oft-criticised glamorisation of the Cosa Nostra. In Al Pacino's cold, calculating Michael Corleone it has a protagonist only in the technical sense: it's virtually impossible to root for him.

In 1901, Antonio Andolini is murdered by the Mafia don of Corleone, Sicily. His funeral procession is disturbed by shotgun blasts that signal the murder of Andolini's oldest son, Paolo, who had gone to seek revenge. Heartbroken, Paolo's mother (Maria Carta) goes to see Don Ciccio (Giuseppe Sillato) to plead for the life of her only remaining son, nine-year-old Vito (Oreste Baldini), but the don refuses. Vito's mother is killed, but Vito manages to flee Sicily and make it to the United States. There, an immigration official mistakenly writes down his name as Vito Corleone.

At Lake Tahoe in 1958, the Corleone family and their many friends celebrate the first communion of Don Michael's son Anthony Corleone. There's trouble in the family, though. Michael's sister Connie (Talia Shire), still wounded by the murder of her husband in Part I, is neglecting her children and cavorting with a man the family disapproves of. Fredo (John Cazale) is unhappy in his marriage, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) is increasingly shut out by Michael, Nevadan senator Geary (G.D. Spradlin) is causing trouble for the casino business, and New York caporegime Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) is dissatisfied with Michael's refusal to let him strike at his rivals. When Michael and his family barely survive a hit that same night, it's hardly a surprise.

The rest of the film is about Michael's attempt to uncover and defeat the conspiracy against him. Somehow involved is the reptilian Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). An elderly Jewish gangster living in Miami, Roth has organised a coalition of American business interests to carve up the Cuban economy with the full cooperation of Fulgencio Batista's government. While publicly declaring his intention to turn over his business to Michael after his death, Roth is angered by Michael's reticence in providing an agreed cash investment. After the little matter of the Cuban Revolution foils Roth's plans, the relationship of the two men turns openly hostile.

Vito's mother mourns her oldest son while Vito watches from background right.

Meanwhile, the film flashes back to a younger Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) struggling to make a living in Manhattan's Little Italy in the 1910s and 1920s. After acquiring a rug that really ties the room together as a thanks from petty criminal Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), Vito begins to supplement his income with theft and burglary. Inevitably this puts him on a collision course with Fanucci (Gastone Moschin), the local Black Hand don who extorts protection money from businesses. After dispatching Fanucci, Vito expands his operations and sets up an olive oil import business as a legitimate front.

The period segments cover perhaps a quarter of the film's running time (at three hours and twenty-two minutes, the film is almost half an hour longer than its already hefty predecessor). I was at first annoyed by the soft focus and sepia tone returning cinematographer Gordon Willis chooses to mark these scenes: they seemed entirely too pleasant-looking, underplaying the squalor of New York's immigrant areas in the first quarter of the century. Then it clicked. Like the declarative title ins that explain who and what we're seeing in the beginning of the film, the look of the period scenes stresses the artificiality of what is shown and highlights the process of myth-making, particularly as they are constantly contrasted with the grubby present-day scenes.

The Godfather Part II doesn't mimic its predecessor's expert use of the three-act structure, opting for a more level narrative and the back-and-forth between present and period scenes instead. But many of the beats fall into the same place and fulfil equivalent functions, and they're all much nastier. The opening celebration is hollow and conflict-laden. Where Woltz was turned into a vassal of the Corleones after finding a horse head in his bed, Geary wakes up in a brothel next to a dead woman. ('This girl has no family. Nobody knows that she worked here. It'll be as though she never existed,' Tom Hagen assures him.) At the end of the film, those paying for their defiance of Michael Corleone with their lives are not real threats like Don Barzini and his allies, but defeated and isolated people on the run. ('I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out,' Michael explains. 'Just my enemies, that's all.')

'Don't worry about anything, Frankie Five-Angels.'

In its structure, then, the film undermines the sympathies Part I encouraged in the audience. The Godfather Part II thus becomes a critique of its own predecessor, indeed a self-critique by Francis Ford Coppola, who was bothered by accusations of glorifying organised crime with his sympathetic portrayal of the Corleone family. In a series of committee hearings, Michael is questioned by senators (portrayed by the likes of Roger Corman and Richard Matheson). It is, I believe, the first time in the series terms like 'Mafia' and 'Cosa Nostra' are spoken without the halo of 'honour', 'respect' and the rest of the claptrap that these films' criminals invoke to convince themselves they're more than gun thugs who got rich.

If it's a far more searing indictment of organised crime, though, The Godfather Part II also blurs the line between the strong-arm tactics of legal and illegal enterprise more thoroughly than its predecessor. 'This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it,' Roth says in praise of the Batista dictatorship.'We have now what we have always needed: real partnership with a government.' The film's most overt satire comes in a boardroom meeting that brings together the Cuban president, gangsters, representatives from American corporations, and a solid gold telephone. Crime and law enforcement are more thoroughly entwined, too: where Sonny Corleone spat at the FBI, in the sequel policemen are brought drinks by Michael Corleone's waiters.

The film's greater maturity is seen in markedly more subdued acting, with the exception of Gazzo's histrionic Pentangeli. De Niro, hardly recognisable to those used his last two decades of self-parody, is a revelation. Pacino's Michael continues becoming colder, ever less capable of ordinary human affection. 'All our people are businessmen', he knows: 'Their loyalty is based on that.' Yet he continues turning away people who care about him - Tom, Kay, Connie - in favour of those businessmen. In The Godfather Part II, his evolution from idealistic war hero to unscrupulous gangster is completed in a sequence that exceeds the heights reached by the already terrific ending of The Godfather. It's a sad and lonely place, and it's where the character's arc finds its logical conclusion. Accountants thought otherwise, though...

In this series: The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)

I heard that you were a serious man, to be treated with respect

So much ink has been spilt on The Godfather (1972) that a standard plot-direction-acting-technical review would be both superfluous and painfully beside the point. But since that describes much of this blog- er, I mean: having recently enjoyed seeing Coppola's epic at the cinema after years of watching it on the small screen, I thought I'd throw a couple of observations out there. I'm a superstitious man, though, so I'll deal with some standard review points lest this blog become too avant-garde.

The Godfather is often held up as a prime example of auteur-driven seventies cinema, but it didn't spring forth fully armed from Francis Ford Coppola's head. In fact, after snatching up the rights to Mario Puzo's 1969 bestseller Paramount first approached Sergio Leone and Peter Bogdanovich before tapping Coppola, then inexperienced at helming epics and $400,000 in debt to Warner Brothers. The 31-year-old had to fight an uphill battle against the producers' distrust of everything from tone to casting choices, but was bull-headed enough to push most of his vision through.

'I believe in America', spoken while the screen is still black: perhaps the most famous first words in cinema. (Coppola seems to have a talent for it: see also 'Saigon. Shit.') Then we see the face of a middle-aged man, Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), as he tells the story of his daughter, whose boyfriend attempted to rape her and beat her half to death only to receive a suspended sentence. The camera slowly zooms out, letting us see more of the darkened study and eventually the back of the man behind the desk, who listens patiently before asking what Bonasera wants him to do. After he's told, we get the first cut after a three-minute opening shot, and a face: Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando).

Well, I know you know all that. But observe the precision in every little moment. Bonasera's monologue gives us a full character, a self-righteous man who wants to be thought respectable, loves his daughter in a paternalistic fashion, and is afraid of and disgusted by the man he is no longer too proud to ask for help. Corsitto, an Italian stage actor who put in his one and only film appearance here, delivers it note-perfect, which would be a problem if Brando were not equally brilliant. Thankfully, he is that and more: so what if he's reading his lines from cue cards?

From the start, the all-round extraordinary physical acting gives The Godfather the feel of well-choreographed theatre with stage directions whose detail would put Tennessee Williams to shame. Brando (slouched posture, shrugs and little hand movements) and James Caan's Santino Corleone (expansive gestures, struggling to contain animal fury) are showiest, but to my mind Al Pacino takes that particular crown - by not doing very much. In the beginning he is relaxed, but as the film progresses and he is hardened by loss and brutality he becomes clenched and tightly controlled, exuding power through impassivity: the scene in which he mollifies and wins over his Sicilian future father-in-law (speaking English because his Italian is limited and a man in his position can't afford to look ridiculous) is not so different from a much later encounter in which he sits still while an enraged Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) hurls insults.

That's the point: The Godfather is all about power. While Puzo's novel was defanged slightly for the big screen, the parallels between the Corleone family and 'legitimate' power are still spelt out. (Michael: 'My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.') Not just any power, but patriarchy, whether it asserts itself in Carlo Rizzi's wife-beating, Sonny's open adultery or Michael's refusal to tell his wife about his business. The film's men genuinely view their authority as a burden rather than a privilege ('women and children can be careless, but not men'), having so insulated themselves against alternative voices that they are blind to the reality and self-serving benefits of their rule.

Power, and power asserted through violence: what better illustration of that point than the men with lupare at Michael's Sicilian wedding? The Corleone family, like all empires, ultimately comes down to men with guns - although, like all empires, Vito knows to dress it up more nicely than that. (Michael lacks his natural charm, but is as ready to spend money on his public image.) The Sicilian scenes in the film's second act may be on the nose and potentially offensive (gee, all the men are dead from vendettas, are they?), but their barebones displays of criminal power form the film's real heart: Vitelli's choice to associate with a Mafia family when Michael treats him con tutto rispetto,  Apollonia's naiveté rendered deadly by the omnipresent infantilisation of women, Fabrizio's opportunism. And they're gorgeous: how could anything filmed on Sicily fail to be?

The heart of The Godfather, I said, and that's true even in the most mundane sense: the Sicily scenes form one half of the film's second act, the most placid of the three even though it covers the phase in which the gang war is fought openly. Rarely, in fact, does a film have three acts that are so distinct, even though all end with defining moments for Michael (the film's protagonist, recall, despite the fact that the elder Don Corleone is remembered better). The film's third act, in which Michael takes over the family business from his ailing father and prepares to strike at the enemies gathering against him, feels much more like it belongs to the world of the film's own sequel - it's set in the fifties, after all - and closes with one of the great endings in cinema, as a horrified Kay (Diane Keaton) watches Michael's caporegimes swear fealty to him before Al Neri (Richard Bright) shuts the door in her face.

It's the first act, in which a single rash sentence by Sonny leads to an assassination attempt on the don and Michael's irrevocable decision to involve himself in the family business, that I've always liked best, though. The reptilian Barzini (Richard Conte) is still in the background, while the visible antagonist is Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), a Sicilian narcotics importer who calls himself a 'man of honour' even after he attempts to kill the don over the latter's refusal to support the drugs business. On the page Sollozzo is an unremarkable baddie, but in the hands of Lettieri (who sadly died in 1975) he's extraordinary: a savvy businessman who would prefer to live in peace with the Corleones, but he is ruthless enough to kill, and constantly alert to any danger (there's a twitch in his left eye that Lettieri works to perfection). I still get upset every time he bites the dust.

Coppola and Puzo's screenplay excises remarkably little of the source material's plot (Fabrizio's fate, Neri's story, Vito's youth which would be adapted in The Godfather Part II). The real change is structural. Puzo's novel is a terrific page-turner, but it mostly just goes on until it ends. With the perfection of the three-act structure, complete with self-contained arcs and moments that rhyme both visually and narratively, the film knocks its source material into a cocked hat. Its excellence as an adapted screenplay is not the least of them, but The Godfather sets a number of records: greatest cast of all time with career-best performances all round, greatest crime drama of all time, greatest anti-Sinatra screed. It made some people angry and made some other people a lot of money, but to us it's a film that keeps on giving four decades down the line.

In this series: The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)