The Godfather

Crime doesn’t pay, according to people who have never successfully committed one, but those sanctimonious moralizers have clearly never enjoyed the splendor of a Corleone family wedding. There you will find nice cars, expensive clothes, fine dining, and a vibrant collage of personality disorders, and all bought and paid for by an illicit empire of robbery, extortion, gambling, and murder. Those of us unwilling to kowtow before the Corleone’s imperious patriarch will have to experience such luxury vicariously through the camera aimed at them in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 gangster flick to end all gangster flicks The Godfather, based on the book of the same name by Mario Puzo. To say that The Godfather is an influential, well-regarded movie is to call outer space a bit nippy. The Godfather isn’t just a paragon of the medium of filmmaking, it’s a pillar of the cinematic canon, as synonymous with movies as Romeo and Juliet is with the theater. Today, then, let’s return to this certified classic and see what awaits us, conversion or disillusionment? I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse: press the play button and you’ll get to listen to the episode!