The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola - an appreciation

Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan
Francis Ford Coppola

As far as family businesses go, film isn't a bad choice: look at the Fondas, Barrymores and Redgraves. Relatives can become royalty in Hollywood: cue the Coppola clan.

Led by filmmaker Francis Ford, the profession stretches far into his extended family, including actor-director daughter Sofia and actor nephew Nicolas Cage. That sense of family, of Italian-American connections and keeping things close, is a large part of how Coppola initially found success with his most famous film, The Godfather.

It's after the second world war and Don Vito Corleone is the head of one of five major mafia families in New York, running union and gambling ventures out of his Long Island estate. But the rise of the drugs business presents a new challenge to organised crime. Refusing to get involved in such a dirty industry, Vito is soon beset by a new breed of amoral gangsters and it's up to his sons to keep the family business afloat.

The Godfather seems an obvious success today, 40 years after its release. But the film was a troubled production from the start and Coppola didn't seem the obvious choice to helm such a major film.

But in his strange, enticing filmmaking methods, the producers saw a resolve to surround himself with people he trusted, an insistence that family always came first. And if you were going to do justice to a three-hour film about an Italian-American family that spanned several decades, you had better get one of its kin to oversee the production.