Secrets of ‘The Godfather’: How Brando got his epic underbite, the gruesome secret of the horse scene and more
Michael Corleone, the legendary, all-American family man who runs a mob from his own basement in The Godfather.
By Richard Corben
Published: March 22, 2006
The first time most people think of The Godfather is as the most violent movie in motion picture history.
It turns out the movie was in production for almost five years before the shooting actually began. The film only premiered its opening scene at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959. In the United States, it was released in 1960. The film’s ultimate success was that it has become the most widely seen motion picture of all time.
Over the past decade, the saga of The Godfather has been expanded dramatically. The film was re-released on video in the early 1980s and the original film re-released in 1992. On Nov. 18, the movie’s new Blu-ray edition is set to be released on Blu-ray and DVD. It comes with a new special feature on the film that was filmed exclusively for the occasion.
All those rereleases and releases have yielded many new insights and details about The Godfather. It has been a time saver for those curious about the movie, but in the end, one must be careful at a time like this, as the retelling and retelling of The Godfather inevitably creates new mysteries and new information that no one can fully fathom.
The key to understanding the film lies in the fact that it is essentially, and for the most part, a gangster film. The Godfather is a gangster film.
There are few gangster films more than The Godfather. The film has one of the most recognizable and enduring themes in the history of the genre, the question of authority and crime. The films’ most celebrated gangster, Michael Corleone (James Caan), is the ultimate power figure in the film. The other characters are all either family members or the descendants of the family,