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In "You've Got Mail" (1998), Tom Hanks suggests the answers to all life's questions can be found in "The Godfather". Not as ridiculous as it sounds, because Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece reveals something new every time you watch it.
The family that slays together, stays together, and that's certainly the case for the embattled Corleone clan. Caught up in the middle of a bloody gang war, Don Vito's doomed quest to make his family respectable is dealt a body blow when his youngest son Michael, a decorated war hero and lawyer, is inexorably sucked into a life of murder and violence.
Marlon Brando was considered box office poison when he was cast as the ageing Don, and his hamster-cheek performance launched a thousand parodies (Even Brando got in on the act, mocking himself mercilessly in "The Freshman" (1990)). His performance as Don Corleone won him an Oscar and sealed his reputation as perhaps America's greatest film actor - a claim he bolstered with "Last Tango in Paris" later that year.
Packed with more classic lines than any movie deserves to have ("I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"), "The Godfather" won an Oscar for best picture, became a world-wide smash, and marked career watersheds for James Caan and Robert Duvall.
For Al Pacino and Francis Ford Coppola, however, the best was yet to come with "The Godfather Part II" (1974), one of the few sequels to surpass the original.
Read a review of "The Godfather Part III".
Find out more about "The Godfather" films.
Has there ever been a better performance in cinema than that of Michael Corleone by Pacino?
