THE GODFATHER (1972) **** In the opening scene Francis Ford Coppola offers up a challenge: the mafia can protect the citizenry where the government does not, the mafia demands less for that protection, where the government offers effete bureacracy the mafia offers justice. Somewhere between there and the final scene the mafia, like the government before it, goes terribly wrong by responding in seemingly sensible manners to unavoidable issues. The glamour, the elegance, the mystique, the intrigue...some reviewers compared the mafia to a corporation after this film, but I don't see any corporations vaguely like this. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall have never been better, and that's really saying something. James Caan plays on an entirely different level from the rest of his career. Diane Keaton, Talia Shire are tremendous. More than all that though, the big guns are given the opportunity to roar by so many great actors in small places setting things up-Abe Vigoda and Simonetta Stefanelli are perfect-so many brilliant underlit shots in strange and sensual places with an accent on distance and the absence of distance. There has never been a more powerful four minutes of cinema than the montage trilogy of assassinations, baptism, and the renunciation of evil by The Godfather. The Nino Rota score is brilliant, but the theme was never fully developed until Slash got ahold of it twenty years later in the Hippodrome, Paris.