Pushing the Boundaries: The Godfather (1972)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola Run Time: 175 min. Rating: R Release Year: 1972
Starring: Al Pacino, James Caan, Marlon Brando, Richard S. Castellano, Robert Duvall
Country: United States
Language: English, Italian, Latin
The 1970s: Pushing the Boundaries
A Film Center retrospective on the most groundbreaking films to come out of the 1970s.
See more Pushing the BoundariesAbout the film:
Winner of Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Actor in a Leading Role at the 1973 Academy Awards.
Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone, barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
“The Godfather is the most memorable, most influential, most quoted, most beloved, most discussed, most imitated, most revered and most entertaining American movie ever made.”
—Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
About the filmmaker:
Francis Ford Coppola is an influential film director, producer, and screenwriter. Along with other New Hollywood filmmakers, his unconventional ideas challenged contemporary filmmaking and helped shape American cinema. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas founded American Zoetrope, an innovative, independent film production company based in San Francisco that has produced feature films for directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Wim Wenders, Godfrey Reggio, and Coppola’s daughter Sofia.
Among his own projects, Coppola co-wrote the script for Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton (1970). He then revolutionized the gangster genre with The Godfather (1972), and The Godfather Part II (1974) became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Conversation (1974) followed by his vivid Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now (1979), making him one of only nine filmmakers to have won the award twice. His other features include The Rain People (1969), The Outsiders (1983), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and The Rainmaker (1997). Among other accolades, Coppola has won five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). His upcoming feature Megalopolis is competing for the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
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