Why The Godfather is still the best gangster film - 50 years on

The Godfather at 50 - Francis Ford Coppola's mafia epic revolutionised movies, television and Hollywood. The director, his daughter and a mob of admirers talk family, flawed heroes and the future. By Jonathan Dean.

Fifty years ago Francis Ford Coppola was worried. Rightly. The Godfather, the biggest film of his career, was due out and feedback from suits at the studio was poor. "I always heard the picture is too long," he recalls. "That it's boring." Coppola was just 29, and the studio's third choice, when he signed on to be director. The film stuck out in 1972: it was a three-hour epic up against the easily sellable disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure and pioneering porn (Deep Throat). Yet Coppola's slow-burn Mob saga went on to top the US box office, was lauded by critics for decades as the best film ever, and has influenced every leading director to follow him.

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

"Even though I grew up with the Godfather films, I'm always impressed when I see them," emails Sofia Coppola, the Oscar-winning director of Lost in Translation and daughter of you-know-who. You can actually see her in The Godfather: she's the baby at the christening at the end. "Every time you watch, you notice some new detail. It feels so authentic because my dad really knows the details of an Italian-American family."

For David O. Russell, who dabbled in the mafia for his acclaimed American Hustle, it was putting family at its core that made The Godfather magic. "Heart and soul is everything," says the director. "You've got to have heart and soul or else I don't care."

Paul Greengrass, acclaimed British director of three Jason Bourne movies, hails it as "the greatest masterpiece of modern cinema", which has guided film-making ever since. "It showed that boundless ambition could command the mainstream, sweeping audiences up with its immigrant family who want, above all, to belong."

The Godfather is all about family then because, of course, the Mob is a family business — in this case the Corleones, headed by Vito (Marlon Brando), reluctantly handing the reins to son Michael (Al Pacino). The family that slays together stays together.

The film is being rereleased at the cinema to mark its half-century — and in pursuit of perfection it has been tweaked to sharpen the odd historic blur. Catch it while you can. If Coppola feared that his film was an anomaly in 1972, it is practically alien today, in cinemas full of superheroes.

Francis Ford Coppola.

Indeed, if The Godfather were made today it would be on Netflix, but perhaps three times as long, over countless episodes. They tried it as a television series in 1977, the largely forgotten The Godfather Saga. Yet it's easy to see a direct line from Coppola's classic to the way we take our entertainment this century.

From family to violence to rewriting Italian-American stereotypes, The Godfather's DNA is all over The Sopranos — the show that changed film and television forever. Without Corleone there would be no Soprano. With no Soprano there would be no The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and today's cultural supremacy of small screen over big. After all, what is Succession if not The Godfather of the corporate elite?

Coppola's film was based on the novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo, an American journalist of Italian descent. "I was just ready for that book," said David Chase, The Sopranos creator, and you know he means its film too.

Tom Santopietro was 18 when he first saw The Godfather. Years later this Italian-American wrote The Godfather Effect about the impact the trilogy has had on America. It has been invoked by presidents Clinton, Obama and Trump, and is part of how the country understands its own immigrant story.

At the time of the film's release, Italian-Americans made up 4 per cent of the US population and prejudice was rife, largely down to the mafia. Many thought the Mob were behind the assassination of JFK. But the 1970s were a difficult time for the Mob in the United States. The decade started with Congress passing the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico), which led to the convictions of key mafiosi and marked the beginning of the end for organised crime that had thrived since Prohibition in the 1920s.

Before Coppola, mobsters were presented as thugs. "In Scarface [1932] Italians are creatures from another planet," Santopietro told Smithsonian magazine. "They speak terribly and wear awful clothes. In The Godfather they were still mobsters, but also developed and real human beings.

Coppola was aware of the criticism that he had given souls to monsters. "If you were taken inside Hitler's home and went to his parties, you'd probably have liked him," he explained to Playboy in 1975. "If I made a film of Hitler and got some charismatic actor to play him, people would say I was trying to make him a good human being. He wasn't, of course, but the greatest evil is done by sane human beings who are miserable in themselves. My point is that you can't make a movie about what it's like inside a mafia family without them seeming to be quite human."

It makes sense that the most rewatched scene in The Godfather on YouTube is the one in which Carlo gets whacked. That is nasty rat Carlo, violent husband to Michael's sister, Connie. In the scene Michael tells Carlo he knows what he has done and that he will be sent to Las Vegas as punishment. Yet there is no Vegas — just a wire wrapped around Carlo's throat in a car. The tension is quiet. This is about the anger felt by a family torn apart and you feel sorry for Michael, even while he makes Connie a widow and Carlo's feet smash through the windscreen.

The Godfather effect is still felt today. What did Hollywood do when the lucrative DVD market collapsed 15 years ago? The answer was simple: give your audience what they know, hence the suffocating rise of today's franchise film-making. And who invented the modern sequel? The Godfather: Part II arrived in 1974 — more ambitious, some say better, it was the first sequel to win a best picture Oscar. The Godfather: Part III — better than you remember — came in 1990.

The Godfather III. Al Pacino (left) as Michael Corleone, Sofia Coppola as his daughter, Mary and Andy Garcia as Vincent Mancini.

"I'd always felt The Godfather was a one-off film," Coppola said. "But this is something that has happened to the film industry. They want to own some sort of trademark and then see what they can get out of it."

Remarkably The Godfather was also among the first to surf the merchandise boom and spin-offs that are now the norm. "The rush to commercialise The Godfather was embarrassing," Coppola moaned to New York Magazine. "There's a Godfather's Pizza. A terrible video game. And they're making a television series. It's theirs. It's not mine."

Coppola had his whole career ahead of him after The Godfather, but it is no surprise that just over a decade later he made his last great film. Most of his shoots had been a slog. By 1979 he had toiled through Apocalypse Now and by the mid-1980s cinema was not the place for his measured pace. The snap editing of MTV removed stateliness from the big screen.

"We lost the richness of character The Godfather represents," Santopietro said. It made a brief comeback in the 1990s, via directors like Michael Mann and Scorsese, but in multiplexes it was soon gone again.

No wonder Coppola largely makes wine these days on a vast Californian estate. "I realised I probably wouldn't make another film that cuts through commercially, or creatively, like The Godfather or Apocalypse Now," he said, even if there is a plan for him to return this year with an ambitious sci-fi epic called Megalopolis.

"I went from zero money to several million dollars," he told Empire magazine, discussing the personal impact of The Godfather. "Everyone knew about me. When they talk about the big directors of the 1970s, they say Francis Coppola. I have what I want."

Yet others want more. Such is the continued fascination with The Godfather that next month another project hits our screens, this one starring Juno Temple and Miles Teller. The influence of the mafia has waned, so this is not about the mafia, but the making of a movie about a mafia. Even more telling, The Offer is not a film at all. It is, of course, a series. On television.

The Times of London