Anna Hill Johnstone, the costume designer for The Godfather, knew how to make male antiheroes into fashion icons. In the mid-’50s, she outfitted the cool of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and of James Dean in East of Eden. On The Godfather—for which she received an Oscar nomination—she turned Al Pacino (dubbed “the midget”… Keep Reading
Nino Rota once said, about his work as a composer, “They reckon my music’s just a bit of nostalgia plus lots of good humor and optimism? Well, that’s exactly how I’d like to be remembered.” It is ironic, then, that his best-known work is the score to The Godfather—a film that, on the surface, offers… Keep Reading
Late in The Godfather, when Vito Corleone collapses to the ground and his grandson Anthony runs away to get help, viewers are left to look at the former Don’s body lying motionless in the shade of a trellised tomato garden. For five seconds, the only sounds that fill the soundtrack are the birds chirping and… Keep Reading
The title of The Godfather is a surprisingly cunning one: ultimately it turns out to refer not to Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone, but rather to his son, Michael, portrayed by Al Pacino. It is Michael who comes to sit at the core of this film — Michael, whose character is its focus. Viewers watch as… Keep Reading
A film is written thrice — in pre-production through screenwriting, in production through shooting, and in post-production through editing. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was written (and re-written) in the editing room by a total of six editors, only two of whom, William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, were credited. Coppola’s biggest struggle, edit-wise, was to… Keep Reading
The scene begins with the camera positioned at a low angle, hovering just above ground level. We are transported into a setting never before seen, one that is fashionable, well-decorated, Art Deco-themed, and visually intriguing. It is a mere hallway but spacious, a series of platforms and stairs—pristine, white, heavily mirrored, gold-accented, and possessing an… Keep Reading
In a film as eminently quotable as Coppola’s The Godfather, perhaps only one choice line emerged solely from improvisation: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” Neither the shooting script nor the novel mentions cannolis, but Coppola had his own childhood memories to draw this detail from: he remembered the specific white boxes that his father… Keep Reading
Few people smoke in Coppola’s The Godfather, and for many of those who do, the cigarette functions more as a prop than as an expression of an idea about their character. However, the moments that Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, chooses to smoke are exceptional, deliberate moments: the action is in fact an action and… Keep Reading
Many scenes in The Godfather—Connie and Carlo’s wedding, the baptism and assassination montage—are full of self-conscious bravura, but it’s the quieter, shorter scenes that lend the film its emotional depth and narrative intrigue. Consider Michael and Kay’s hotel scene: lasting seventy-five seconds, and with only 9 lines of dialogue, this scene courses by, brief and… Keep Reading
Alcoholic beverages – wines and spirits – are an essential aspect of Italian-American dining culture. A meal without a drink is no meal at all. Similarly, a scene without a drink is incomplete. In Coppola’s The Godfather – a film that follows the Corleones as they try to balance their dangerous business with their personal… Keep Reading
In The Godfather, director Francis Ford Coppola introduces the lead character Michael Corleone in the most curious of ways: almost thirteen minutes after the film has begun, Michael walks into his sister’s extravagant wedding, wearing a full Marines Corps uniform with a non-Italian-American woman on his arm. This choice on Michael’s part, and on the… Keep Reading
Early in the opening wedding scene of The Godfather, a photographer lines up the Corleone family, preparing a family photo to solemnize the marriage of Constanzia, or Connie, Corleone to Carlo Rizzi. Yet Vito Corleone, the Don of this Sicilian family, notes his youngest son’s absence and so stops the shot from being taken: “We’re… Keep Reading
Michael’s marriage to Apollonia, halfway through The Godfather, marks a metaphorical marriage to Sicily and the ways of his father. By partaking in an intensely traditional wedding with an equally traditional Italian bride in a town that bears his family’s name, Michael is wedding himself to the Old World of his father’s generation and to… Keep Reading
The Godfather is a sensually ingenious movie: it lulls its viewers into a dream state with scenes of comfortable warmth, then shocks us awake through punchy pops of drama and action. This rhythm is developed, in no small part, through Francis Ford Coppola’s distinct and painterly use of color. The visual scenes of the film—brushed… Keep Reading
Cinema is a medium that, even in the more progressive present, is largely dominated by men. As Laura Mulvey has famously suggested, this domination has caused a clear masculine bias in how films are shot and presented to viewers who, sometimes unknowingly, consume examples of harmful masculinity. In her landmark essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative… Keep Reading
Mind Your Mannerisms For a film filled with intense scenes of violence and gripping dialogue, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather contains an equal amount — if not more — of quieter, more understated moments. Throughout the film, masculine power is not expressed in feats of physical strength, or through hardened exteriors and hyper-masculine personas. Instead,… Keep Reading
We begin the scene in a noticeably dark garden: Michael Corleone has his back to us on the left, while his father, Vito Corleone, looks away to the right. They are meeting to go over Michael’s possible assassination from a traitor in the business. The scene of their meeting — in a garden —strikes a… Keep Reading
The Corleone office is a crucial setting in The Godfather: after all, it is the place where Vito Corleone is introduced and subsequently the setting in which he hands over power to his son Michael. The office’s interior décor — first with Vito in power, and later with Michael — contains details that, while small to the… Keep Reading
This website exists because, in the fall of 2017, I read the following sentences from Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, a book-length manifesto for rethinking how universities teach their students: “Students do not do particularly well writing papers for the sake of writing papers,” Davidson suggests, referring to a landmark Stanford study of how the digital… Keep Reading