Godfather 50th Anniversary

What’s left to say about “The Godfather?”

When ranking all of my favorite movies across time, it always winds up in the top slot. This restoration is a revelation and seeing it again gave me some pause to reflect on why it’s my favorite movie.

Anniversary Restoration

Let me talk about the film as a collection of images. The 50^th anniversary release, has had hundreds of painstaking hours of color and light correction put into it by the director, Francis Ford Coppola. Because Paramount hadn’t expected the film to be a success, they had only a few prints. When the success began, they keep originals in reserve and screened all the films they had. As such the originals had had their color palette flattened: the blacks leeched away and the director’s vision was lost.

Deep in to his 80’s, Coppola sought to ensure his legacy would be preserved as he saw it. For the last several years his team of editors and restorers created a restored version that honored the original color and lighting. Thusly restored, we see just how deeply Coppola was affected by Renaissance lighting. His scenes feel profoundly deep and dark, wrapped in small, dramatic light sources. The scenes look like Caravaggio oils in their simplicity, focus, and careful use of light.

Experiencing this restoration in our local Dolby format deepened the experience of the restoration both visually and aurally.

Acting

There’s not much to say about the acting: Brando, Pacino, Caan, Duvall. They’re all astoundingly good and have received earned accolades for their work here since forever.

Meaning

But perhaps more important than the beautiful images of the film or the powerful performance of the cast, this is the most American movie I know of. If anyone wants to understand the engine of American culture, I suggest The Godfather and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Both of these works reflect the essential components that drive the engine of American identity. I don’t know the exact proportions, nor am I entirely sure I have fully distilled the formula, but ultimately America is about:

• capitalism and wealth acquisition: moderate and immoderate
• family, with its oppressions of expectation and its calls to greatness
• institutions, secular and canon law, often in conflict
• violence: the country was founded in bloodshed and chattel slavery, we start our history with Cain’s mark and being brothers of Joseph
• delusion and hypocrisy: these forces drive us to do horrible things that we seem to have a genetic refusal to own up to

The entirety of this maelstrom is presented in the very first, very long, very beautiful, very dark (and now, even more dark thanks to restoration), very quiet scene between the undertaken Bonasera and the Don. The opening line, in fact is:

I believe in America.

And in the movie we all come to see that all those here do too and what they’re willing to do, what the country allows the to do, what their dreams drive them to do, is a commonly held credo for all of us.

I need not sell the movie, but I will say that this restoration makes experiencing the beautifully-told horror (yet again) a pleasure.