The Godfather

With just two prior features under his belt, 33-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola fought the studio at every step of the way to transform Mario Puzo’s pulp bestseller into an improbably rich, profoundly personal meditation on family, power, and the nightmarish underbelly of the American dream. Holding her own alongside Marlon Brando and fellow newcomer Al Pacino, Diane Keaton is quietly penetrating as Kay, the doe-eyed daughter-in-law of mafia boss Don Vito Corleone (Brando), whose youngest son Michael (Pacino) tries and fails to resist the gravitational pull of the family business—inevitably implicating his uninitiated wife. Kay’s dawning awareness of her own precarious position on the margins of a criminal dynasty serves as a kind of moral ballast within what the critic Vincent Canby described as “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.”