At first sight, The Godfather seems like a crime picture or a gangster movie. And we should remember that in its day it was the most successful film there had ever been, as well as winner of the Oscar for best picture. So it seems like a triumph of the mainstream.
However with The Godfather containing elements of American new wave it is a great example of a film that takes it's place in American new wave cinema but diverts towards the rise of mainstream Hollywood cinema. its focuses on the truth of what is going on at the time focusing on the crime and violence with the mafia. Making people see a different reality rather than the reality of the Vietnam war.
The scene in particular, is a brilliantly sustained exercise in suspense in which we hear about the meeting arranged and follow the plan to conceal a gun in the lavatory of the small, neighbourhood Italian restaurant chosen for the rendezvous. We wonder, will it work? So there's the night-time car ride where Michael is frisked and approved. There are the ominous chords of Nino Rota's score building. And there is the restaurant itself, a quiet but welcoming place – "Try the veal", says Sollozzo. There's Italian talk at the table, with subtitles, and then Michael asks to be allowed to go to the bathroom. It figures. He should be very nervous.
Then you hear the noise. It's the rise and fall of a subway train passing. Through the restaurant? No. But did you ever hear of a successful restaurant, even one with great veal, where every passing train drowns out conversation? Of course not. The train is an artistic device, a heightening effect, a vibrato supplied by the great sound designer Walter Murch. With New wave films dialogue drowned out by noises was used as a sense of verisimilitude to show audiences that they are watching a film that has a sense of reality written within, that and most shots were only filmed once due to a lower budget, The Godfather may have had a larger budget but shots were still usually done in one to save time and create a sense of verisimilitude.
The scene in particular, is a brilliantly sustained exercise in suspense in which we hear about the meeting arranged and follow the plan to conceal a gun in the lavatory of the small, neighbourhood Italian restaurant chosen for the rendezvous. We wonder, will it work? So there's the night-time car ride where Michael is frisked and approved. There are the ominous chords of Nino Rota's score building. And there is the restaurant itself, a quiet but welcoming place – "Try the veal", says Sollozzo. There's Italian talk at the table, with subtitles, and then Michael asks to be allowed to go to the bathroom. It figures. He should be very nervous.
Then you hear the noise. It's the rise and fall of a subway train passing. Through the restaurant? No. But did you ever hear of a successful restaurant, even one with great veal, where every passing train drowns out conversation? Of course not. The train is an artistic device, a heightening effect, a vibrato supplied by the great sound designer Walter Murch. With New wave films dialogue drowned out by noises was used as a sense of verisimilitude to show audiences that they are watching a film that has a sense of reality written within, that and most shots were only filmed once due to a lower budget, The Godfather may have had a larger budget but shots were still usually done in one to save time and create a sense of verisimilitude.
The coup works. Michael comes out with a gun and leaves the two men for dead. He walks out of the restaurant and remembers his instructions – drop the gun. The music rises in triumph. Game, set and match to the Corleones. But something else has happened – Michael, the good boy in the family, the Ivy League student with a glowing military record, the son Vito was hoping to save, has crossed over. He has come of age – he is a made man. Coming of age films were a large part of 1960's/1970s cinema in Hollywood giving the audience something to connect to. The Godfather suddenly reveals itself as not just a gangster chronicle, or even a series of magnificent set pieces, but the progress of Michael towards evil. And evil is a subject for art.
With that thought we begin to appreciate the cumulative artistry of the film – not just Murch's plans with sound, or Rota's operatic music, nor even the overwhelming period authenticity of the production design by Dean Tavoularis, but hanging over everything, the Rembrandt browns in the photography by Gordon Willis. What makes The Godfather so ambitious is that atmosphere in which the true-to-life gloom of Italian-American interiors takes on a moral force.
The influence of The Godfather is unequalled. Not just in the new vogue for gangster and mafia pictures, but in the stress on family and the unsentimental attraction to darkness and evil, and in the career of Francis Ford Coppola as a model new director. The American movie comes of age in 1972. The old distinction between good guys and bad guys will not pass in an America suddenly aware of its own corruption and compromise. (This is the time of Watergate.) Finally, a pregnant confusion has set in: what is the mainstream and what is art? Michael Corleone is our modern Charles Foster Kane, and every bit as tricky.
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