Adapted from the novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Ten years of relative peace between the Italian Mafia families of New York is brought to an end when Don Vito Corleone refuses to agree to use his considerable connections and resources to back a narcotics dealer. The ensuing war forces the Corleones to re-evaluate how their family business needs to be run, and who will be the best man to run it when the aging Don is no longer in charge.
This book contains an awful lot of sex and violence, and describes both in a little more detail than I would have liked. I find it rather interesting - although entirely unsurprising - that the movie cut out almost all of the sex and included almost all of the violence. That's Hollywood for you. But to be fair, the main storyline is mostly focused on the gang war, so the violence would have been difficult to remove without detracting from the story, whereas the love affairs are mostly incidental and involve minor characters who could easily be reduced or eliminated. Still, it's interesting to me how much more comfortable American audiences seem to always have been with violence onscreen than sex, but that's a discussion for another time. Back to this particular adaptation.
I noticed that several things that were included in both versions were rearranged in the film. Many of the important events in the novel are revealed from the point of view of a character who didn't witness them as he or she learns about it, at which point the book takes the reader back to show what led up to that point. The film mostly presents such events to the audience in the order they actually occurred. This is a perfect example of what I'm always looking for in an adaptation: following the source material without being confined by it. The novel's method works very well in book form, but if the movie had done it exactly that way, it wouldn't have made much sense dramatically. I thoroughly enjoyed noting these changes, and would therefore highly recommend reading the book and watching the movie close together, as I did.
Beyond these and a couple other minor alterations, the film follows the book relatively closely. In a way, I found this slightly confusing, knowing that The Godfather Part II would go on to win this award two years later with the same novel cited as its source material. There doesn't seem to be a lot of the book left to adapt into the sequel. Given that I haven't watched it since my Best Picture project over 7 years ago, it shouldn't be too surprising that I don't really remember what happens in Part II, but I'm interested to revisit it and note whether any of it is directly from the novel, or if it's merely considered an adaptation by virtue of being a sequel. Regardless, I will not be reading the book again for that, so I'll be getting to the movie in the very near future. Particularly since I've already finished reading and watching 1973's winner, The Exorcist, which I should be blogging about quite soon.
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