Coppola with his two leading actors. The Godfather would launch Pacino’s film career and revitalize Brando’s. By Steve Schapiro.

Caan’s rage as Sonny confronting the feds at his sister Connie’s wedding was pure instinct: “When I grabbed that poor extra as he took the picture, the guy must’ve had a heart attack. None of that was scripted. Then I remembered my neighborhood, where guys could do anything as long as they paid for it afterwards. I had this guy choked. Luckily, Richie [Castellano] grabbed me. Then I took out a 20, threw it on the ground, and walked off.”

All in the Family

‘The Mafia is a peculiar thing,” says Talia Shire, sitting in her Bel Air home. “It’s the underworld. It’s interesting to look on the dark side. But in this darkness there is the Vito Corleone family. Remember when Vito says, ‘There’s drugs,’ which he didn’t want to touch? He’s a decent man on the dark side, who is struggling to emerge into the light and bring his family there. That’s what makes it dramatically interesting.”

“There’s one reason that movie is successful and one reason only: it may be the greatest family movie ever made,” says Al Ruddy. “It’s a great tragedy of a man and the son he worships, the son who embodied all the hopes he had for his future. ‘I never wanted this for you, Michael.’” Ruddy has switched into a dead-on impression of Brando as the Don, pouring his heart out to his youngest son: “I thought that when it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone.”

Ruddy sighs. “That was his dream. But what happened? The kid is put into the fucking line to save his father’s life, and he becomes a gangster, too. It’s heartbreaking.”

The film’s premiere was held in five theaters in New York. “Henry Kissinger, Teddy Kennedy—the whole world was going to show up,” says Ruddy, who got a call that day from one of the mobsters: “Hey, they won’t sell us no tickets to this thing.”

“To be honest, I don’t think they want you there,” Ruddy said.

“That’s very unfair, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“When they do a movie about the army, the generals are guests of honor, right? If they do a movie about the navy, who’s sitting up front? The admirals. You’d think we’d be guests of honor at this thing.”

Ruddy continues: “So I snuck out a print that Paramount never knew about, and I gave them a screening. There must have been a hundred limousines out front. The projectionist called me and said, ‘Mr. Ruddy, I’ve been a projectionist my whole life. No one ever gave me a thousand-dollar tip.’ That’s how much the guys loved the movie.”

They not only loved it—they adopted it as their own, employing the term Puzo invented (the Godfather) and frequently playing the movie’s haunting theme music at their weddings, baptisms, and funerals. “It made our life seem honorable,” Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, of the Gambino crime family, later told The New York Times, adding that the film spurred him on to commit 19 murders, whereas, he said, “I only did, like, one murder before I saw the movie.… I would use lines in real life like, ‘I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse,’ and I would always tell people, just like in The Godfather, ‘If you have an enemy, that enemy becomes my enemy.’”

The actors would forever be identified with their roles—especially James Caan, who is constantly tested in public to see if he’ll react like trigger-tempered Sonny Corleone. “I’ve been accused so many times,” says Caan. “They called me a wiseguy. I won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.… I was denied in a country club once. Oh, yeah, the guy sat in front of the board, and he says, ‘No, no, he’s a wiseguy, been downtown. He’s a made guy.’ I thought, What? Are you out of your mind?”