Based on the best-selling novel by Mario Puzo (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Francis Ford Coppola), THE GODFATHER tells an epic tale of Mafia life in America during the 1940s and 1950s. Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) is the family patriarch balancing a love of his family with an ambitious criminal instinct. At the wedding of the Don's daughter Connie (Talia Shire), youngest son Michael (Al Pacino) is reunited with his family. A subsequent assassination attempt leaves the Don too ill to run the family business, forcing Michael and Sonny (James Caan), with the help of consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), to lead the Corleones into a vendetta-filled war with other mob families. Violent revenge ensues as the family tries to change from its old criminal ways into legitimacy.
cast
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone
quote
Don Corleone: You could act like a man.
[slaps Johnny Fontane]
Don Corleone: What's the matter with you? Is this what you've become, some Hollywood finnochio that cries like a woman?
[mockingly imitates Johnny]
Don Corleone: Oh, Godfather, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?
Rarely can it be said that a film has defined a genre, but never is that more true than in the case of THE GODFATHER. Since the release of the 1972 epic (which garnered ten Academy Award nominations and was named Best Picture), all "gangster movies" have been judged by the standards of this one (unfair as the comparison may be). If a film is about Jewish mobsters, it's a "Jewish GODFATHER"; if it's about the Chinese underworld, it's an "Oriental GODFATHER"; if it takes place in contemporary times, it's a "modern day GODFATHER."