The Godfather

I've watched the three Godfather films in the last few weeks.

Godfather II felt brilliant, particularly with the intersecting backstory of Vito Coreleone with his son, Michael's 'present,' as Godfather himself, with so much filming in Sicily.

Godfather III I loved, again for being filmed so much in Sicily and Rome, and the wild reach of the opera within an 'opera' of a gangster film.  I also enjoyed so much recognizing all these actors from The Sopranos, in younger incarnations of themselves, playing the same parts they play in the latter era made television series' Sopranos, sometimes even with the same names.  It's one of those meta kicks, I guess, that one either enjoys, or, as so often in my case, perceive as really annoying cheap tricks.

But the first, The Godfather -- it knocked the film world's sox off. And I can't get why.  Now the following films wouldn't be meaningful without The first Godfather.  But why this film was so adulated that not just one but two, very successful and highly regarded sequels were made because of it, I don't get.

Also, these films differ a great deal from Puzzo's potboiler novels.  Puzzo's ability as a novelist is minimal by my standards of writing.  But his skill at choosing one colorful detail after another, which substitute for narrative drive, was superb.  The films are far superior as films than the novels are as novels.  But it took both the novels and the films, the novelist and the film director, to create this incredible mythology for Italian Americans, so successful that they spawned endless, well spawn, even down to 7 seasons of the Soprano family business 'thing,' which is always comparing itself and their 'thing' with the 'old days,' and how different it is now, or, as in the case of the women speaking to each other of their men, how it isn't different -- that they are still living in the last century when it comes to women and sex and marriage.  For the men, they sometimes think the old times were better, with higher loyalties and honor.  The last century they refer to isn't the 20th, either, but the 19th.  But what they are all comparing their times to, whether in approving nostalgia or in future asperation, is fiction, mythology, not reality, at least not mostly.

The only other history I can think of this same process happening via fiction and films crossing is the Western. Which then, with The Godfather, the Western was officially displaced by the mafia as our great national myth.  Which is explained, then by Season 2 of The Wire, with the great epitaph of the U.S., as spoken by Frank Sobotnik, the dockworkers union boss: "Once this was a country that made things. Now it's about putting your hand in the other guy's pocket."  Sobotnik goes down to an international crime syndicate.
But I still don't know what it was, as a film, that so deeply impressed everyone from professionals in the film world to the novo gangsters which crossed themselves with the music biz in hiphop and rap (though that pop music genre didn't begin with gangsterism), to the average movie consumer.

Do you think it was the constant scenes of eating such delicious food?  The Sopranos emulates this.  Shoot, I emulate this.  While these have been my dinner time watching this winter, I have been making a lot more Italian dishes than usual.  I also am spending a lot more money in Raffetos, and their home-made fresh pastas, pestos, mozzarellas, parmeseanos and reggianos, olive oil and other products.