Best Ever
Drama?

The wedding lasts twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of Connie Corleone’s reception before the film lets you inside the house where the actual business happens. Coppola makes you wait in the sun with the guests, watching the band, the dancing, the cake. You’re outside. The power is inside.

That’s the film’s central move—showing you how exclusion works, then letting you in, then making you complicit. By the time Michael tells Kay about Luca Brasi and the bandleader’s head, you’re already inside. You’re already part of it.

The Godfather isn’t about whether the Corleones are good or bad. It’s about how power makes those categories irrelevant. Vito Corleone is a murderer. He’s also a beloved father, a respected don, a man who helps his community. The film doesn’t reconcile these things. It shows you how they coexist. How one enables the other. How the system runs on exactly this moral flexibility.

Michael’s arc is the thesis made flesh. He starts outside—war hero, college boy, the one who isn’t involved. “That’s my family, Kay. That’s not me.” Famous last words. By the end, he’s deeper in than Vito ever was, and the tragedy is how natural the descent feels. No single choice damns him. It’s a series of small, reasonable decisions. Protect your father. Avenge your brother. Consolidate power. Each step makes sense given the previous step. That’s how corruption works. It’s never one big decision. It’s a thousand small ones that feel inevitable at the time.

Coppola shoots it like a documentary of empire. Gordon Willis’s cinematography is all darkness and shadow—characters half-lit, rooms that feel like tombs, light that never quite reaches where you need it to reach. The visual language is suffocation. Even the sunny scenes in Sicily carry weight. You know what’s coming. You know Michael’s idyll can’t last. The film won’t let you forget what business he’s in.

The set pieces are famous for a reason. The restaurant assassination. The tollbooth hit. The baptism sequence where Michael renounces Satan while his enemies are systematically murdered. These aren’t action scenes. They’re procedural. The film shows you how it’s done—the planning, the execution, the cleanup. Violence as workflow. Murder as management.

What makes it devastating is the intimacy. These aren’t strangers. Fredo isn’t just a traitor—he’s Michael’s brother, weak and hurt and desperate for respect. Carlo isn’t just an enemy—he’s Connie’s husband, the father of her children. The film forces you to feel the human cost of every decision even as it shows you why the decisions get made anyway. That’s the trap. You understand the logic. You see why Michael does what he does. And understanding becomes complicity.

The ending is perfect. Kay asks Michael if he ordered Carlo’s death. He lies. She believes him, or pretends to. The door closes. The men kiss Michael’s ring. Kay is outside again, watching through the doorway as the camera pulls back. She wanted in. She got in. Now she sees what “in” actually means. The film ends where it began—with someone on the outside looking in, understanding too late what they’ve married into.

The Godfather is the template for every prestige crime saga that followed, but most of them miss the point. They romanticize the power. Coppola doesn’t. He shows you exactly how it works, exactly what it costs, and exactly why people do it anyway. The American Dream as a protection racket. You’re either in or you’re out. And being out isn’t safe either.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Godfather 50th Anniversary Blu-ray includes Coppola’s commentary track where he discusses the battles with Paramount, the casting fights over Pacino and Brando, and how Willis’s dark cinematography became the film’s visual signature.
• For the complete saga, The Godfather Trilogy box set bundles all three films with hours of supplementary material on the making of an American epic.
• Mark Seal’s Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli goes behind the scenes of the production—the mob connections, the studio interference, the miracle that it got made at all.