People have been more than a little obsessed over The Godfather for, like, more than half a century at this point, so if you’re a bit sick of hearing about it by now, that’s understandable. It is the easiest film to single out if you’re put on the spot, and someone asks you, “Yo, what’s the best gangster movie of all time?” It’s a fair pick. It’s a great gangster movie. It’s weird that someone made you pick something out of nowhere like that, but life is funny like that, sometimes. If the person who put you on the spot is a bit of a hipster (it’s hard to accept the 2000s and the early 2010s have come and gone; go easy on them), maybe they’ll scoff at you for saying “The Godfather.” Yet it’s a film that elevated the gangster genre considerably, and it’s also a landmark film within the crime genre more broadly. The original classics from the 1930s and 1940s were cool, because the likes of Scarface (1932), The Roaring Twenties, Little Caesar, and White Heat all hold up pretty well, but they are also a little simplistic on a moral front. They had to be, for the times they were made in. Crime is bad. People who commit crimes experience short-term gains. And then there’s a fall after the rise. Crime doesn’t pay long-term.
The Godfather, though, was significant for showing a little more moral complexity, and maybe even romanticizing the mafia, to some extent, in a not too dissimilar way to how Bonnie and Clyde, in 1967, dared to ask, “Hey, what if maybe those infamous bank robbers who killed a fair few people were actually kind of cool? Or at least human?” The Godfather was also very Shakespearean, like a little King Lear-ish (Ran-ish if you’re more of an Akira Kurosawa fan than a Shakespeare one, or Succession-ish if you’re more of a TV person), with its story about an aging patriarch of a crime family/empire having to think about his legacy and which of his children might run the family once he either steps down or passes away. It ended up being hugely successful, and it’s a film that contains some of the best performances of all time, all of them given by some absolutely phenomenal cast members (Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and on and on and on). It’s pretty much perfectly written and paced, and yet there might well be a few gangster movies that are even better. Feel free to disagree, though. The Godfather and the three movies about to be mentioned are all 10/10s, with some just being a little more 10/10-ish than others. Also, the focus really has to be on gangsters and some kind of criminal gang throughout to count as a gangster movie here, which is why Pulp Fiction isn’t here (it’s possibly a gangster movie, but quite a lot of it isn’t necessarily focused on characters who are gangsters… and it’s also hard to say whether it’s actually better than The Godfather).
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‘The Godfather Part II’ (1974)
Getting the easy one out of the way first, here’s The Godfather Part II, which has a reputation for being one of the very best sequels ever made, alongside the likes of The Empire Strikes Back and Toy Story 2 (hey, don’t smirk at the Toy Story 2 love; that movie’s phenomenal). Like with those two movies, it’s easy to see how daunting the idea of making a sequel to something already pretty much perfect would’ve been, especially in a world where we can plainly see how many sequels fall short of the original, even if the sequels in question aren’t terrible. Like, there’s a sequel to The French Connection. It’s not terrible. But it’s also no The French Connection. And that’s only being referenced here because The French Connection was another early 1970s crime movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars, like The Godfather. French Connection II sure as hell did not win Best Picture, and wasn’t even close to being Best Picture-worthy. The Godfather Part II, on the other hand, did win Best Picture, and it also won Francis Ford Coppola a Best Director Academy Award (he’d been nominated but didn’t win for The Godfather, as Bob Fosse won that year for Cabaret).
The contrast between the two timelines makes for a devastating watch, with the sense of tragedy already found (and felt) in The Godfather just made all the more intense.
In terms of narrative, this one’s all about what naturally follows the end of The Godfather (1972), with Pacino’s Michael Corleone now being head of the family, and making more of a mess of things than his father, Vito. Brando’s Vito exited the picture in The Godfather, but The Godfather Part II keeps Vito around, in a way, by having quite a few extended flashbacks to Vito’s past, including how he came to America and how he built the Corleone family out of nothing… the same one that Michael is pretty much destroying in the scenes that take place during the film’s present. The contrast between these two timelines makes for a devastating watch, with the sense of tragedy already found (and felt) in The Godfather just made all the more intense, in the process. Also, it’s worth highlighting how two actors won Oscars for playing the same character: Brando winning Best Actor for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather, and Robert De Niro winning Best Supporting Actor for playing the younger version of the character in The Godfather Part II. Speaking of De Niro… uh… he’s going to show up in the next two movies here, too. Spoilers.
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‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984)
A year on from The Godfather Part II, there was another epic gangster movie starring Robert De Niro that felt like it pushed things even further in terms of being dark and a deconstruction of gangster movie tropes. That film was Once Upon a Time in America, which was famously butchered, once upon a time, in America, because its theatrical release in the U.S. involved the screening of a super-edited-down movie. The interesting non-chronological storytelling of Sergio Leone’s original vision was done away with, and so too was about 90 minutes of stuff, which is like a whole movie’s worth, and even if what remained was still over two hours in length, that wasn’t nearly enough. Once Upon a Time in America is about a criminal as a boy, young adult, and an old man, and so you need a runtime of about four hours to capture all the stages of his life, with the narrative here spanning about half a century, since it begins in the late 1910s and has its last scenes, chronologically speaking, take place in the late 1960s.
There’s a risk of sounding hyperbolic when it comes to covering all the other things that make Once Upon a Time in America a masterpiece, but the claim’s been made here that it’s even better than The Godfather, so you probably need something. It’s got an all-time great score, courtesy of Ennio Morricone, looks absolutely stunning throughout, has a fascinating structure, and finds new things to say about crime regarding its allure and the destructive capability being a criminal has for both the self and the various people victimized by criminal activity. It’s all very heavy-going and a good deal darker than your average gangster movie, but that’s for the best, and it ends up making Once Upon a Time in America linger in one’s mind long after the film itself is over.
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‘Goodfellas’ (1990)
There was romance and a certain operatic quality found in The Godfather that’s not at all what Goodfellas is going for. That doesn’t automatically make Goodfellas better, the fact that it’s all a bit grittier and (arguably) honest in feel, but it does make it stand out from The Godfather and various other gangster movies that The Godfather might’ve influenced. You get some fairly powerful people explored throughout The Godfather and its sequels, while the main characters in Goodfellas are all more low-level. Some of the narrative involves the fact that the central character, Henry Hill, can’t even be considered a made guy within the mafia because he’s not 100% Italian. He’s in the thick of it, for the most part, but still something of an outsider, which makes him the ideal person to pretty much guide the viewer through the tumultuous world he lives in.
For all the talk about Goodfellas being gritty and raw, it is also still quite fun and stylish. Things move fast, and there’s quite a bit of humor alongside all the violence and despair, the latter coming about because the gangsters here are often ruthless… maybe not as depraved as the ones in Once Upon a Time in America, but not too far off, at their worst. All the other things that make Goodfellas an absolute classic are all plain to see. It’s got some of Martin Scorsese’s best-ever directed sequences, the soundtrack is to die for (some characters do quite literally die while great music’s playing), and everyone feels perfectly cast, with Joe Pesci probably shining the brightest of all, but he does get the flashiest character to play, so that helps. Goodfellas is an essentially perfect film, and is a pretty much ideal counterpoint to The Godfather and what it was trying to do, as a movie about organized crime.
