The book does a good job of showing how Vito built his organization bit by bit. He quietly amassed power without doing a lot of killing. He was feared, and that was enough.
When you come to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.
Everyone said the third one was shit. But it was the pentultimant consequence of Michael’s success. He was all alone at the end, a victim of his own ruthlessness and success. It completed the arc.
I’ve never gotten the mass appeal of The Godfather series, personally. But I like a lot of shit movies, so I can’t pass judgement.
It was a leap forward in gangster movies. The genre had peaked in the 1920-30’s, then it flipped to becoming more detective/police focused in the 1940’s forward. The gangster film was fairly dead by the 70’s. The entire vibe you think of as a modern ‘gangster movie vibe’ is The Godfather.
There’s a lot of movies that don’t exist without The Godfather coming first. Once Upon a Time in America (1984) was Sergio Leone’s attempt to do the same sort of thing. Which was meant to be 2 movies. Goodfellas (1990) also borrows a lot, but gives a significantly faster pace to the storytelling. The gangster film was pretty much reborn anew, all in the wake of the success of The Godfather.
If you tried to make any sort of gangster movie today, you might not even realize you were borrowing from it. It’s genre defining.
You forgot the cinematic masterpiece Mafia!
