The Godfather is a 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by Albert S. Ruddy, based on Mario Puzo's best-selling novel of the same name. The novel was published in 1969.

It stars Marlon Brando and Al Pacino as the leaders of a fictional New York crime family. The story, spanning 1945 to 1955, chronicles the family under the patriarch Vito Corleone (Brando), focusing on the transformation of Michael Corleone (Pacino) from reluctant family outsider to ruthless mafia boss.
 

 

 

Vito was born in the small Sicilian village of Corleone to Antonio Andolini and Signora Andolini in Corleone, Sicily, in 1894. Andolini is murdered by a Don Ciccio because he refused to pay tribute to him. His older brother, Paolo, swore revenge, but was himself murdered soon after; Paolo's murder was timed with the ultimate insult: during the funeral procession for his father. Eventually, Ciccio's henchmen came to the residence of the Andolinis to take Vito away and have him killed as well.

 

Desperate, Signora Andolini took her son to see the Mafia chieftain herself. When she went to see Don Ciccio, she begged for forgiveness, but Ciccio refused, reasoning that the younger boy Vito would also seek revenge as an adult. Upon Ciccio's refusal, Signora Andolini put a knife to his throat, allowing her son to escape at the expense of her own life.

 

Later that night, he was smuggled away, fleeing Sicily to seek refuge in America on a cargo ship full of immigrants. Unable to speak English, he was renamed on Ellis Island as Vito Corleone when the immigration clerks saw the tag pinned to his clothes labelled "Vito Andolini from Corleone". Corleone was later adopted by the Abbandando family in New York, and he befriended Genco Abbandando, who later became like a brother to him.

 

In 1917 when he was nineteen, Corleone married and started a family and lives in a tenement with wife Carmela and baby son (Santino). Corleone began making an honest living  at Abbandando's grocery store on Ninth Avenue, but lost the job, as an intimidated Abbandando was forced to employ the nephew of Don Fanucci, a blackhander and the local neighborhood padrone. Vito was forced to take up an unstable job doing back-breaking labor for the railroads, which he also lost during a mass-layoff.

 

Corleone's money troubles were soon solved when one night, a neighbor of Vito's, Peter Clemenza, asks him to hide a stash of guns for him, and later, to repay the favor, takes him to a fancy apartment where they commit their first crime together, stealing an expensive rug. They soon became friends and, joined by a friend of Peter's named Salvatore Tessio, the three soon learned to survive and prosper through petty crime and performing favors in return for loyalty. The three made good money by hijacking garment trucks, Vito being vital to these hijackings since he was one of the few people in Manhattan's Little Italy at the time that knew how to drive a truck.

 

In New York in 1920, Don Fanucci threatens Vito for a share from his robbery operations. Instead Vito has companions Clemenza and Tessio agree to his plan of paying Fanucci less, because he can make an offer he won’t refuse. Earning Fanucci’s respect, Vito stalks him during a festa from the rooftops and shoots him at his apartment, before later cradling his newborn son, Michael.

 

Thus Vito becomes a respected figure in the community,becoming known as a "Man of Respect" on the streets, and was soon asked to intercede in local disputes, gaining a reputation for never turning down someone who came to him for help and for being able to "reason" with "unreasonable" people. Although he had declined to do so at first out of modesty, Vito eventually started accepting "gifts" from local businesses and racket bosses in return for "ensuring that our patrons know that they are safe", and Vito was soon making a wage of $100 a week (in the 1900s this was an enormous amount of money). Vito, Clemenza and Tessio eventually took over the neighborhood, treating it with a great deal more respect than Fanucci did. With the profits he was gaining,

 

Corleone started an olive oil importation business, Genco Pura, with his friend Genco Abbandando. The company eventually becomes the biggest olive oil importer in the nation, thanks to Vito's subtle "reasoning" with store owners. While a excellent moneymaker in it's own right, in the later years he used it as a legal front for his growing organized crime syndicate, while amassing a fortune with its illegal operations, which started during Prohibition, when he used his olive oil trucks to smuggle alcohol in from Canada. Corleone soon started to protect small neighborhood speakeasies, learning early the value of political protection.

 

In 1923, he returned to Sicily for the first time since leaving 24 years earlier. Corleone quietly located and killed the thugs who Don Ciccio had sent to kill him as a child during his exodus from Sicily. He and his partner, Lionele Tommasino then set up a meeting with the aging Don Ciccio under the pretense of gaining his blessing for the olive oil business, where he kills him by carving his stomach open—thus avenging his murdered father, mother and brother while Tommasino is crippled by gunfire as they escape. Vito and his family then wave, leaving Sicily.

 

Vito builds his association with the younger and brutally savage Luca Brasi. Vito's first associations with Young Hyman Roth in bootlegging, Young Frankie Pentangeli, a sidekick of Clemenza's from Italy, in bookmaking and gambling in NYC, a younger Don Altobello and Don Tomassino in Italy. Through the end of Prohibition and the Depression, the Corleone family grows in influence, fighting fearsome battles with the other families in NYC and even across the nation.

 

By the late 1930s and the outbreak of war, the Corleone family is perhaps the leading underworld gang in the country. By the early 1930's, Vito Corleone had established the Corleone family along with old friends Peter Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio, who would become his Caporegimes. Genco Abbandando would become the first Consigliere of the family. By this time, everyone, even his closest friends, were referring to him respectfully as "Don Corleone" or "The Godfather". He soon intervened in a problem involving a dangerous thug named Luca Brasi, making the man his personal enforcer.

 

During the Depression, when most people demeaned themselves to make mere pennies a day, Don Corleone offered good-paying, secure jobs to anyone willing to work for him. Anyone who came to him for help, Don Corleone helped with goodwill and encouraging words. He planned for the future by financing the education and careers of bright young neighborhood boys who would soon become lawyers, assistant DA's, even judges. Large numbers of grateful Italians asked his advice on who to vote for in office elections, giving him a great deal of political power. He even hired a lawyer to organize a system of police payoffs, and insisted on paying as many officers as possible, whether they were needed at the moment or not.

 

When Prohibition ended, Don Corleone decided to offer a partnership with Salvatore Maranzano, the big shot gangleader who controlled all the gambling in Manhattan. Corleone offered a political umbrella which would help Maranzano expand his rackets into new areas, and Corleone would get a share of the profits. However, the short-sighted and short-tempered Maranzano, thinking that Corleone was trying to forcibly buy him out, declared war on the "upstart" Corleone, touching off the Olive Oil War. When the war started, it seemed that Maranzano had the upper hand, with business contacts, and alliances with the Tattaglia family and Al Capone in Chicago. However, the Corleones were far better organized, had far greater intelligence contacts, had greater political power and police protection, and had deceived Maranzano into believing that Tessio's operation in Brooklyn was a separate gang. The War turned into a stalemate until Maranzano called on Al Capone to send his two best gunmen after Vito. Thanks to their contacts in the telegraph business the Corleones learned of this early on, and Don Corleone sent his enforcer Luca Brasi to intercept and eliminate the hitmen in a most horrifying fashion. Brasi and several men abducted the two hitmen, drove to a warehouse, tied them up, and Luca personally hacked one of the men to pieces with an axe, while the other swallowed his gag in terror and suffocated. Corleone sent a letter to Capone a few days later, the message being clear: you can either join me, or else stay out of my way. Not wanting to lose any more valuable men, Capone decided to remain neutral.

 

This was a turning point in the War, Maranzano had severely underestimated just how powerful and crafty the Corleone family really was, and was soon losing soldiers who had lost faith in his ability to win. While Clemenza's regime hacked away at Maranzano's power structure (and in the process gaining loyalty of the unions who had been oppressed by Marazano's thugs), Corleone then sent in the held-back Tessio regime for the deathblow. By New Year's Eve 1933, the Corleones eliminated Maranzano and his empire, and established themselves as the most powerful of the families in New York.

 

While he oversaw a business founded on gambling, bootlegging, and murder, he was known as a kind, generous man who lived by a strict moral code of loyalty to friends and, above all, family. He tried to spread these values throughout the New York crime world; he disagreed with many of the vicious crimes carried out by gangs and so sought to control crime in New York by either consuming or eliminating rival gangs. This was known as the Pacification of New York, which left the area under the control of Five Families. He also started the Commission, in an effort to pacify America's underworld in preparation for WWII. He also disapproved of hard drugs, such as those peddled by his fellow Don, Phillip Tattaglia, who resented Vito for this. A straitlaced man concerning sexual matters, he also held himself above prostitution. During the Olive Oil War Don Corleone got shot down by some Irish thugs during the Pacification of New York.

 

Don Corleone is able to find multiple profits and opportunities in everything. An example of this occurred when his daughter Connie became engaged to a friend of her brother's, a hoodlum from Nevada named Carlo Rizzi. The Don sent several men on his payroll to Nevada to learn about Rizzi, and came back with information regarding legalized gambling there, which the Corleone family capitalized on in the years to come. In mid-1945, on the occasion of his only daughter's wedding, Vito Corleone hears requests in his role as the Godfather, the Don of his New York crime family.

 

Shortly before Christmas 1945, drug baron Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo, backed by the Tattaglia family, asks Vito for investment and protection through his political connections, but Vito declines and voices his disapproval of drug dealers. Sonny shows interest in the deal. This led Sollozzo to believe that if the Godfather could be taken out of the way, Sonny would agree to work with him. An assassination attempt on the Godfather is arranged. Vito sends his enforcer, Luca Brasi to spy on them, but the Corleone family receives a fish in Brasi's vest confirming he "sleeps with the fishes". Sollozzo's assassination attempt on Vito lands him in the hospital, so eldest son, Sonny, takes command. Sollozzo kidnaps Hagen to pressure Sonny to accept his deal. Vito's youngest son Michael thwarts a second assassination attempt on his father at the hospital.

 

After being relesed from the hospital Vito learns to his distress that Michael has become involved in the family business; for him he had hoped for something better as he later told Michael. To end the feuds, Vito meets with the heads of the Five Families, withdrawing his opposition to the Tattaglias' heroin business and swearing to forego revenge for Sonny's murder. He deduces that the Tattaglias were under orders of the now dominant Don Emilio Barzini. Vito collapses and dies in his garden in 1955 while playing with Michael’s son Anthony.