Godfather trilogy ( The best ever )

                  

                      The Godfather is a couple of films part1 and part 2 there's also a part 3 most people think that part 3 made rather later is a bit of a failure I think that too I'm not going to say anything about part 3 they're based on a book written I think in 1969 called The Godfather which was a story about an imaginary mafia family in New York and the first film is based on that and the second film develops both forward and backward in time the story of the same family they are not only immensely popular and enduring films which people are happy to watch over and over again but they are rated as among the greatest films ever made by serious film critics and usually ranked between 1st and 4th in any in the serious ranking of   great films of all time the films are very different from earlier gangster films of which there were many from the 1930s onwards previously gangster films had focused onthe violence the anti-social inclinations of the gangsters their brutality and had generally been very calm down a tray of gangsters though of the course at the same time 

            They took care to make their lives seem exciting and in some cases to produce riveting performances such as those of James Cagney in white heat Coppola who made the Godfather decided that he was going to make a film which would be sympathetic towards this Mafia family and in fact, that is what is achieved there's a connection here with something that Shakespeare was doing hundreds of years before because he has a series of plays the history plays which are based on late medieval kings of England and these people in reality were probably rather ignorant certainly brutal and unscrupulous people who were constantly seizing the crown from one another and then plotting to take the crown from whoever currently had it Shakespeare turns some of these people into vastly heroic figures and makes out of this history a marvelously artistic structure of the cycle of human psychology probably the highest achievement in Shakespeare's history plays is the Henry plays which are really three plays the two parts of Henry the fourth and then Henry the fifth and those three plays are really about Henry the fifth first of all when he's Prince how growing up learning to become a king and then in Henry the fifth being the King invading France and defeating the French in the Godfather we have the story of a family and it starts with a family led by Don Corleone II Don Vito Corleone II who's aging and who is in some danger of losing control of the power situation which he occupies and he has a young son Michael he has other sons as well but Michael seems very poorly suited to take over from his father 

                        He has no interest in being a Mafia Don he seems to fit much better into mainstream American society and doesn't seem to have those sorts of ambitions the story of the two films is his progress if you can call it that from somebody who stands outside of the families ambitions to the person who takes over and leads the family with a degree of ruthlessness which if anything exceeds that of his father in Shakespeare we have the same structure in Henry the fourth parts one and two the King Henry the fourth is aging and not fully in control of the situation and he makes a number of strategic mistakes in dealing with his rivals which put the crown in danger and which are really rescued by the young Henry the fifth as he will be who kills Hotspur in battle Hotspur is one of the most significant potential enemies of the King similarly in the Godfather early on in the film things were very bad for the family little because if they're going to go under from the combined opposition of other Mafia families and from the corrupt police force but Michael the young son takes control and hatches a plan that will enable him to assassinate 

                       The police chief and one of the other significant mafia figures in all this and that reverses the situation and puts the Corleone family back in control at least for some period of time there's a big emphasis on both these narratives on the idea of deception so one of the ways in which the Godfather differs from previous films about gangsters and mafia is that there's much less emphasis on physical power a much more emphasis on being able to read other people's psychologies part of the interest in watching those films is that many many conversations take place between people where you realize later on that neither of the people speaking in those conversations seriously meant anything that they said they were both trying to deceive the other parties and the people who win in these situations are the people who are able to deceive the others and to able to know when somebody else is trying to deceive them and that's what gives Michael his power over other people, it's not physical power he never except on one occasion early on uses any physical violence himself and although there are moments of extreme violence in the film most of the film is not a violent film most of it consists simply of listening to people having conversations and working out why they are saying 

                    What it is they're saying now when you talk about deception it can sound as if you're talking about something which is very selfish about something which we would all feel very ashamed but in many ways deception is part of the fabric of our ordinary lives we deceive people sometimes for the best of reasons we do not tell people the truth when they ask us whether we like their most recent haircut we do not tell our children the truth always when they ask us whether that we like the painting that they have just done we are deceptive in many many ways some of those ways are ways that we would feel ashamed of if we knew if other people knew about it but many of them are really just part of our ordinary life our whole lives are made up of deceptions small and sometimes large so what we have in the Godfather is a picture of human deception Ritz much larger than any of us normally experienced in our ordinary lives and deception becomes for these people vastly more important than it normally is because their capacity to deceive other people and to know when other people are deceiving them can actually for those people mean the difference between life and death so we see the similar a similar level of interest in the idea of deception in the Henry plays and we see this particularly in the development of Henry Henry the fists personality Henry when he's a young man is a drunkard a carouser     

                            Somebody whose friends are robbers and 

thieves but Henry makes it clear that 

he's quite consciously engaging in this 

behavior and that he intends later on to 

undergo a change because as he puts it 

by changing in that dramatic way he will 

bring more credit on himself than if he 

had simply been a good honest and sober 

a citizen from the beginning I suppose 

there are other stories in which 

deception and manipulation play an 

enormous part what both Shakespeare and 

the makers of the Godfather films 

managed to do was to show their heroes 

as Machiavellian and deceptive and yet 

at the same time to get us on their side 

and they do that partly by giving those 

characters other admirable trays so both 

the young Henry and my 

who are extremely brave physically and 

they're extremely resourceful they're 

able to rescue very dire situations that 

look as if things are going to go very 

badly Henry at the Battle of Agincourt 

ease facing defeat and the annihilation 

of his army by the vast superior powers 

of the French yet he manages to rally 

his troops give them the courage to 

defeat the French Michel is part of a the 

family that looks as if it's going under 

yet he manages to put together a plan 

that completely reverses their fortunes 

it could be simply that the 

Shakespearean Way of telling those 

stories are so much a part of our common 

culture that you don't have to think very consciously about these things in 

order to produce something that's rather 

similar though of course as I've already 

said previous mafia films never dealt 

with the situation in the same way as 

this so I would put my money on it that 

he knew something about the 

Shakespearean background to this and 

quite consciously borrowed from 

Shakespeare here.