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In the film industry, it is exceptionally rare for outstanding artistic achievement to coincide with overwhelming commercial success. Such a feat—one that astonished Hollywood executives over fifty years ago—was accomplished by Francis Ford Coppola who gifted the world with The Godfather. 

 The film’s box-office success can be attributed to the fact that it offers audiences all the pleasures associated with the gangster genre. At the same time, Coppola deliberately transcends the narrow boundaries of the genre’s convention, embedding the crime narrative within characteristic poetics of his own epic storytelling. From the very opening wedding scene—where the director juxtaposes, on both visual and audio levels, two mutually incompatible spaces—it becomes clear that Coppola is less interested in mere plot mechanics than in exploring the tensions between mafia and family.   

On the day of its premiere, however, critics also highlighted deeper meanings of a sociological nature. Writing in Sight and Sound, Stephen Farber described The Godfather as follows:

“The trust inspired by the Mafia (not only among poor Italian bakers, shopkeepers, and actors) is largely the result of the way its work is organized—identical to that of a typical American industrial corporation. Business dealings and ‘board’ meetings are marked by the same cool, impersonal tone found in the boardrooms of major companies. The primary investment is money; violence is merely a means of operation, not an end in itself. (…) The ‘godfather’ himself is a classic example of the American self-made man.”