On the other screen: In 1970, the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, a commemorative march down Fifth Avenue, with 50,000 women pouring out of office buildings in spontaneous support. Also in 1970, Kate Millett publishes ''Sexual Politics'' and her portrait, by Alice Neel, is on the cover of Time. In 1971, the year-end issue of New York Magazine announces the birth of Ms. magazine, whose first issue will appear in July 1972. The Supreme Court legalizes abortion in 1973.

The contrast is striking, yet the images aren't so much mutual opposites as two sides of a coin: the retreat that pulls at the reins of progress. Or, to put it another way, the yearning for tradition that stalks the spirit of liberation. Was it possible that women on the threshold of a mass movement toward consciousness-raising, stock taking and sometimes lonely self-reliance, were already nostalgic for the take-charge male?

Coppola's film demeans and demotes women outrageously, yet offers a seductive trade-off: a portrait of the close and fiercely loyal ethnic family that in a time of rampant alienation and divorce, was irresistible. If that family, a male hierarchy, is created on the backs of acquiescent women, wasn't there almost a sigh of relief, in a moment of flux and ambivalence, at having all women subordinate rather than some rising, some falling? Our upward strivings checked at the door, we could sink for one brief, guilty moment into a voluptuous patriarchy, like a men's club we have entered as an honored guest, while it still has its all-male atmosphere, just before the admission of women.

Strangely and paradoxically, ''The Godfather'' is less typically a for-men-only gangster film than others of the genre. Traditionally, mob movies, with their rat-a-tat rhythms, blood-spattered furniture and hyperkinetic little-boy acting, were almost designed to turn women off. Throughout the 30's and 40's, they were directed as pointedly to male audiences as women's films -- the weepies -- were addressed to females. Bashing or ignoring women was a not-so-covert part of their appeal: Jimmy Cagney smashing the grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face in ''The Public Enemy.'' In ''Little Caesar,'' Edward G. Robinson is jealous that Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has a girlfriend.

But even in these films, or in the tough-love male heroics of Howard Hawks, women play more prominent and versatile roles than does Diane Keaton's simpering Kay in ''The Godfather.'' Having figured in very little of the film's 175 minutes, she has been banished long before the final wipe brings darkness to the screen. A pretty New England teacher, she dates and finally marries Michael after the Sicilian village girl, his sexual and tribal soul mate, has been wed and dispatched by a car bomb meant for him. As WASP outsider, Kay is more type than person, a dim presence, a symbol of the path not taken by Michael Corleone.