The films spawned countless Mafioso movies, and of course The Sopranos - in fact, every vaunted TV drama about loving families with a dirty secret. They helped define machismo for a couple generations of young males, maybe females too. God I and God II had both immediate and lasting impact.

Together they formed a bold mural of America: crime infiltrating big business and Washington politics, all intersecting with the Corleones’ family values. 1) and is widely considered the darker and stronger of the pair. Part II was sixth on the 1974 chart (Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles was No. The Godfather was its year’s box-office champ - its $135-million take at North American theaters would be nearly $700m today - and, in real dollars, still in the all-time top 25. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him. This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations - not fully realized - to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy.

A skilled popular artist - the kind of man who can blend subtly observed details with a gift for socko showmanship - takes over to lead a guided tour of an exotic yet humanly recognizable and completely realized world. What happens at this point is that delicious sensation of letting-go familiar to readers of huge 19th century novels, but much less readily available to a moviegoer today. In TIME’s Godfather Part II review, titled “The Final Act of a Family Epic” - who knew, back then, that every movie epic had to be a trilogy? - Richard Schickel described the Lake Tahoe scene of a party celebrating Michael’s son’s First Communion and noted: Both won Oscars for Best Picture - the first and only time that’s happened - and made enduring stars of De Niro, Al Pacino (as Michael Corleone), Diane Keaton (Michael’s wife Kay), James Caan (his brother Sonny) and Robert Duvall (Consigliere Tom Hagen). Third time was not the charm, but the first two were sensationally popular, influential and cherished. 12, 1974 it arrived in theaters about a week after) and The Godfather Part III in 1990.

Coppola provided these anecdotal nuggets in a commentary on the 2001 five-disc DVD of the saga he made from Mario Puzo’s novels: The Godfather in 1972, The Godfather Part II 40 years ago (its New York premiere was Dec.

Diane keaton the godfather 2