The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) marked a transition in American filmmaking, and its success - as a work of art, as a creative property exploited by its studio, Paramount Pictures, as a model for aspiring filmmakers - changed Hollywood forever. Jon Lewis's study of the film looks at the significance of The Godfather in Hollywood's dramatic box-office turnaround in the 1970s and offers a critical and historical discussion of The Godfather's place within the crime and gangster film genre. Lewis focuses on the film as a commercial as well as an artistic landmark of American auteur cinema, as a singularly important film in Hollywood studio history and as a brilliant reworked modern genre picture that at once adopts and adapts the gangster film.