Vito power: The Godfather at 50
The film, released in March 1972, didn’t just leave its mark on Hollywood. From Amitabh Bachchan-starrers to movies by Mani Ratnam, scenes, lines, themes and characters from the classic echo across Indian cinema too.
As he pounded away on an early draft of The Godfather on an Olympia Manual typewriter in his New York basement in 1966, the then-cash-strapped Mario Puzo couldn’t have imagined what he was starting.
His novel formed the foundation of what remains one of the greatest motion pictures ever made: The saga of an Italian-American crime family’s struggle to survive and stay relevant in the constantly changing landscape of organised crime in post-World War 2 America.
The book, already a bestseller, was turned into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola, who fought three years of intense battles with Paramount studios to shape it as he’d envisioned. The movie was released in March 1972; Coppola was just 32.
It would go on to become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Newsweek called it “the Gone with the Wind of gangster movies”. It won multiple Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes, even a Grammy. Two sequels followed, spread over 18 years.
Half a century on, echoes of the trilogy, particularly the first two movies, can be heard and seen in pop culture,movie and entertainment. It’s not hard to see why. Few gangster films before Coppola’s gave their mobsters the tortured depth and complexity that Puzo built into his 1969 book, and that the director translated onto the screen.
Filmmakers are still trying to recreate the magic of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino as the father and son torn between the demands of a world they have shaped but cannot control. “There’s a melancholy to the first film that hasn’t diminished with time,” says film critic Anupama Chopra.
From Goodfellas (1990) to Scarface (1983) to the long-running TV series The Sopranos (1999-2007), and the more recent ongoing HBO series Succession (2018-), the ripples are still visible. In Succession, the brute power of media baron Logan Roy (Brian Cox) looms over and warps each of his four adult children.
Each of Succession’s three season finales has been a hat tip to the Godfather films: The first was set at a wedding, mirroring how The Godfather began; the second featured a Fredo-style kiss and a deep betrayal, reminiscent of The Godfather II; and the third ends with a door closing, a new order taking shape on either side of it.
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In India, movies inspired by the blockbuster began to appear almost immediately after its release. Feroz Khan attempted a retelling of the Puzo/Coppola tale in Dharmatma (1975). Shot in Afghanistan, the thriller drew from the true story of Ratan Khatri, known as the original matka or gambling king of India. It features a daughter’s wedding; a segue into the drug trade; assassinations; attempted assassinations, but far too much melodrama and a formulaic ending.
In 1987 came Mani Ratnam’s tour de force, the Tamil film Nayakan. Kamal Haasan plays a gangster modelled on the real-life Mumbai don Varadarajan Mudaliar. The film was a critical and commercial hit. Decades after its release, in 2010, Time magazine picked it as one of the 100 greatest films of all time.
The echoes move like ripples through this masterful film: Velu’s righteousness; the killing of his son Surya; the scene where Velu breaks down as he looks down at his son’s body; the massacre of the rival Reddy brothers. Both Haasan and Ratnam have spoken of how they drew inspiration from The Godfather when making it.
“I love Marlon Brando. But Coppola was my hero,” Haasan told the website Bollywood Hungama in 2015. “I was proven right when the uncut version of Godfather was recently shown at Cannes. The man is still a hero…”
Nayakan was released at a time when Tamil filmmaking was full of formulaic storytelling, says Tamil film historian S Theodore Baskaran. “Nayakan was completely different; and, of course, had great performances. One of its greatest strengths, apart from performances and music, was how the original was Indianised.”
A year after Nayakan, Feroz Khan gave it another shot, this time remaking Nayakan as Dayavan. He changed little about his approach. This version starred Vinod Khanna and Madhuri Dixit, and was a jumble of predictable twists, tired clichés and patchy storytelling.
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In 2005, Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) tried a new approach with Sarkar, moving the setting from crime to politics. The protagonist was modelled on the real-life politician Bal Thackeray. There were rival successors, changing landscapes, a struggle for survival and relevance. Only, instead of gangsters in suits, it was politicians in kurta-pajamas, in a dimly lit family home of long hallways, surrounded by immaculately manicured lawns.
The film starts, as Coppola’s did, with a hapless man arriving to meet Sarkar (Amitabh Bachchan), seeking retribution for his daughter, who was raped. Varma has often spoken of his love for The Godfather, tracing it to the time he ran a video rental in Hyderabad and watched and rewatched it in his free hours. “What really fascinates me about The Godfather is that it is more about power than about crime. It is about a powerful family which could be true of any family, be it a dictator or an industrialist,” Varma told India Today in 2004.
There are references to The Godfather in RGV works going as far back as the crime drama that made people sit up and notice him, Satya (1998). “While Satya is a completely Mumbai story, the juxtaposition of gangster Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj Bajpayee) playing with his children, and his work where he is shooting people, is a little hat tip to Coppola. Those are the parallel realities of this world,” says Chopra.
As around the world, numerous Indian films cherry-pick scenes and characters to reference or emulate too. Dilip Kumar sought to emulate Marlon Brando in Subhash Ghai’s multi-star potboiler Vidhaata (1982). A jowly Amrish Puri, clad in a suit, tried his hand at it as Don Nageshwar in Phool Aur Kaante (1991). Aamir Khan gave us his version of Michael Corleone in an adaptation of The Godfather called Aatank Hi Aatank (1995); he would go on to say that doing the film “was a blunder”. It took three years to make, with parts of it re-shot multiple times, and could have done without the comparisons to the original.
Even that most desi of gangster films, Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), has bits and parts reminiscent of the Hollywood classic. Anurag Kashyap’s two-part mob saga follows three generations of a gangster family in the coal belt of northern India. The first part follows Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee), as he cements his status. Part two follows Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), his ruthless and taciturn son and successor.
“Any lens into a criminal family or this world will somewhere reference The Godfather. From Dharmatma to last year’s Malayalam film Malik, starring Fahadh Faasil, it’s inspired generations of filmmakers,” Chopra says. Some of the best filmmakers in the world continue to kiss the ring.