The Godfather & Dirty Harry
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The Godfather was the highest-grossing film of 1972, while Dirty Harry was a major success the year before. Both films can be defined loosely as being in the crime genre, but their generic differences are considerable. The Godfather is in the tradition of the gangster film, though it melds this with a traditional family drama, while Dirty Harry is a police drama that owes as much to television as to earlier movies for much of its structure and theme. The Godfather was directed by Francis Ford Coppola in his first major studio feature, while Dirty Harry was directed by Don Siegel, a veteran with many films to his credit by the time he directed this one. The way the two filmmakers approach their material is quite different, and yet in one respect they are similar--both filmmakers respond to the socio-historical forces of their time and embody some aspect of those forces in their work. Clint Eastwood stars as the title character in Dirty Harry, a character he would play several more times in sequels because of the popularity of this film and the character it spawned. Eastwood would make five films in all with Don Siegel, and Siegel would also serve as his mentor when he started directing on his own with Play Misty for Me in 1971. One of the key films the two made together was Dirty Harry. The film was seen by many critics as an expression of right-wing anger at crime and the supposed hobbling of the police, with the character of Harry Callahan serving as the policeman w
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odfather can serve as an artifact for ethnographic study, presenting as it does a full and detailed picture of a social subgroup in American society. The novel on which the film was based was published in 1969 and was on the best-seller list for 67 weeks, selling a million hardcover and twelve million paperback copies before the release of the movie (Bisking 4). The book became a best-seller, but the studio was still pessimistic about a film. When the film was finished and opened, however, it brought in one million dollars a day for several weeks (Cowie 90-91).
The plot of the film focuses on the criminality of members of this subgroup, but in a broader sense the story of the Corleone family reflects a number of other forces in American society--the immigrant experience, the maintenance of certain Old World social structures in the New World, and a family organization that is different from the prevailing structure in American society at large. The film tells the story of a specific family in a way that reflects the experience of a large number of people from a similar background at this particular time in American history.
The novel was written by Mario Puzo, an Italian-American familiar with this milieu and with the expe
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Dirty Harry, Don Corleone, Ford Coppola's, Godfather II--will, Tom Hagan, San Francisco, Harry Callahan, Harry Godfather, American Italian, Italian Americans, dirty harry, crime family, francis ford, american society, corleone family, don corleone, organized crime, story corleone family, ford coppola, males family, film depicts, francis ford coppola,
Approximate Word count = 2012
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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