A Tragic Greatness

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, one of very few movies in the last half-century that can contend for the title of greatest film made in America. Coppola is still identified with it, although he has other great films to his name, and in our public memory he has simply taken possession of the story, although it was already an incredibly popular 1969 novel by Mario Puzo when Coppola got the idea to make it a movie, with the novelist’s help. The two are as different as possible, the movie elegant and tragic in dignity, the novel trashy and lacking a carefully crafted structure.