The Godfather (1972) — Al Pacino

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Al Pacino · 1972 · Signature Roles

The Godfather (1972) — Al Pacino

Michael Corleone begins The Godfather as the family’s outsider — a war hero in uniform, telling his girlfriend that his father is not really like the stories.

Michael Corleone begins The Godfather as the family’s outsider — a war hero in uniform, telling his girlfriend that his father is not really like the stories. Al Pacino plays that opening Michael with an almost boyish lightness, which is what makes the rest of the film so chilling.

Shoppers at pushcart market stalls on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx in 1940, with tenement buildings behind.
Photo: C.M. Stieglitz, Wikimedia Commons, public domain · Source

As Michael is pulled into the business, Pacino does not signal the change with big gestures. He signals it with subtraction: the smile goes, the voice lowers, the eyes stop asking for permission. By the final scene, when the door closes on his wife, the transformation is complete, and it happened so gradually you can hardly say when.

A stone-paved lane in Taormina, Sicily, with a stone wall and trees and hilltop buildings behind it.
Photo: Giovanni Crupi, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0 · Source

It earned Pacino his first Oscar nomination, and it remains the definitive screen study of how power does not corrupt all at once. It corrupts one quiet decision at a time.

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