One of my favorite bits of TV, which goes back far enough that you get the sense of how little TV I watch these days, is from a fairly hacky 2006 episode of “The Family Guy” where the Peter, trapped in a room and about to drown with the rest of his family confesses the grievous sin:

Peter: But since we’re all gonna die, there’s one more secret I feel I have to share with you. I did not care for The Godfather.
Lois: What?
Peter: Did not care for The Godfather.
Chris: How can you even say that, dad?
Peter: Didn’t like it.
Lois: Peter, it’s so good! It’s like the perfect movie!
Peter: This is what everyone always said. Whenever they say…
Chris: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, I mean, you never see, Robert Duvall!
Peter: Fine. Fine. Fine actor, did not like the movie.
Brian: Why not?
Peter: Did not…couldn’t get into it.
Lois: Explain yourself. What didn’t you like about it?
Peter: It insists upon itself, Lois.
Lois: What?
Peter: It insists upon itself.

It can be hard to find online (unlike the ACTUAL Godfather) because “Family Guy” is culturally significant.

If one wished to describe all of Francis Ford Coppola’s oeuvre with a single phrase, it might well be “it insists upon itself”. I’ve known plenty of people who felt Apocalypse Now (one of my favorite movies) was basically a bloated college film full of self-importance and, honestly, I can’t really disagree with that any more than I could disagree that The Godfather insists upon itself.

But I’ve actually never been a big fan of the film. When IMDB was first created, this movie and its sequel were #1 and #2. (They’ve been relegated to #2 and #3 since The Shawshank Redemption became ascendant.) And that’s all I have to say about that.

I wanted to see it again because I’ve never seen it on the big screen before and, frankly, that makes a world of difference. It’s a very dark film. I mean, literally, with scenes in the theater being almost complete blackness, like a higher budget Dirty Harry, and important things happen in those scenes that I can’t imagine I was ever able to make out on the little screen. There are a ton of people moving around here, and one needs a good visual image to keep track of the plot.

Look at all the blacks! And here, it’s at least backlit. Often, nope.

The story is that an aging gangster is losing his grip on his little corner of the underworld because he refuses to deal drugs—and I believe this actually has some basis in reality—until a botched assassination ends up with his previously reluctant war hero son first fleeing after an act of revenge but soon re-emerging to take control.

I feel like that doesn’t matter, though. This is one of those movies practically overwhelmed by its historical impact. It won a ton of Oscar nominations, most of which it lost to Cabaret, except (oddly) for Best Picture (and it also won a writing award), and best actor (which Cabaret didn’t have a nom for), and when Marlon Brando won, he had a fake Indian come up and chastise the Academy and America (over Wounded Knee!). Al Pacino, Diane Keaton and Robert Duvall were bit players (at the time, not in this movie). Talia Shire was the director’s sister. (What an actress, though!)

Simonetta Stefanelli makes Al Pacino forget all about Diane Keaton.

And Coppola did everything “wrong” from a studio standpoint. He made it non-commercial. He made it about family rather than fun-times running-and-gunning, which would’ve been more in the mold of Bonnie and Clyde, which one imagines this was part of the spate of gangster movies that the Beatty/Dunaway vehicle inspired. The violence there is not fun, and it’s not glamorous. There’s a lot of it, and the movie lacks much in the way of heroic figures though, as antiheroes, Brando and Pacino’s characters are far from the worst we’ve seen.

You know, in the theater, when I could follow it pretty well, I found it hung together and held my attention for the THREE whopping hours it goes on. That’s no small feat. The kids basically responded with “That’s a lot of movie,” and again, I can’t disagree. We liked it. But I don’t think we have the superlatives for it that others seem to.

Al Pacino starts out all American and reluctant to get into the biz.