The 70s are when I stop really having a sense of the motion picture landscape. I get the 90s and the 00s because I've lived through them. I grew up with enough residual pop culture of the 80s to know what was going on then. I can look at a movie like Beverly Hills Cop and place it with other movies at the time and how it fit. I can understand how things came together to make that into the highest grossing movie of that year and I get what Eddie Murphy meant to pop culture at the time.
The 70s get murkier. I know about New Hollywood in the beginning of the decade. Spielberg created the modern blockbuster with Jaws which directly led to Star Wars and Superman. It's a decade with romances the covered a spectrum from Love Story to Harold & Maude to Annie Hall. I can trace how the world digested the Vietnam War from M*A*S*H to Apocalypse Now. I still don't have a way to contextualize The Godfather though. It's a little too organized to fit in New Hollywood. It's an epic, but not like Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago from the decade before. All the mafia movies I can think of come from a post-Godfather understanding of the genre, or are something like The Public Enemy, which aren't remotely similar. The best comparison I can find is how Lord of the Rings changed everything about how people approached fantasy. Fantasy certainly existed before The Fellowship of the Ring, but it hasn't looked the same ever since that film. the Godfather changed things. I just don't have enough understanding of the times to really understand how significantly.
This is actually the second time I've watched The Godfather. I last saw it around 2010 it left only a slight impression on me. I watched it as a modern movie that happened to be 40 years old. In that light, it's only OK. It's not fair to do that though. Directors have been building off the template set by The Godfather and expanding on it for years. What was once revolutionary becomes commonplace. Rating The Godfather against modern movies on the same terms would be like comparing Jerry West to James Harden. It's not fair to either. Anyway, I've seen at least a thousand movies since the last time I watched The Godfather, from a larger assortment of eras and genres. So I figured I was ready to see how I liked The Godfather with a bit more context. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around it. I did like it a lot more though.
What's not hard to understand is how much on screen talent there is in this film. By my count, the cast in this movie has collected 32 Oscars nominations, including five wins, between eight actors. That doesn't even include John Cazale who, incredibly, only starred in five movies, all of which were nominated for Best Picture, and three of them won. I don't know if the movie makes the career for the actor or the actor makes the greatness of the movie. Either way, it's hard to compare with those numbers.
I know I haven't actually said much about the movie. That's because with movies as old and revered as this, there's nothing to say that hasn't been said before. Perhaps if I disagreed with it being a classic, I'd have more to say. I can't argue with the esteem The Godfather has earned.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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