Budgeted at $6 million and considered a big risk in light of co-writer Francis Ford Coppola's experience as a movie director, The Godfather was released to almost immediate popular success. Though originally offered to Sergio Leone who refused the project to eventually make his own gangster movie, Once Upon a Time in America, The Godfather touched on a cultural nerve and uniquely defined its moment.

Not even the most audacious of studio executives at Paramount Pictures, however, could have suggested the eventual canonization of Coppola's film in the hearts and minds of moviegoers everywhere. In fact, it's story as both a movie and cultural experience is exactly the kind of balance that's often sought after, though rarely attained, between pulp fiction ingredients and high art aspirations to also be recognized as a bedrock of contemporary American movies.

Stating The Godfather's status as a popular film is easily verified when considering its gross domestic box office receipts for 1972. Having earned some $134 million with nearly $87 million in rentals reported to Paramount Pictures, the movie was at the top of its commercial game. Other top grossing films of the year, each of them still famous in their own right, include The Poseidon Adventure with $93 million in proceeds, Cabaret with $42 million and the original The Getaway with $27 million in gross box office receipts.

Arguing over The Godfather's status as film art is possibly still up in the air. Still, its three Academy Award wins among 11 nominations, including Best Picture, its five Golden Globe Awards from 7 nominations, including Best Picture - Drama, its Grammy Award and its entry into the National Film Registry in 1990 would suggest otherwise. By comparison it also won top honors at the 1973 Oscars to beat Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants and Sounder and was also listed on most critics best movies of the year list if not called an instant screen classic.

Then there's the perhaps apocryphal way it redefined the gangster movie and legitimized such stories beyond a mass audience by drawing top talents both in front of, and behind, the camera. Cast members were top draw and included headliner Marlon Brando along with an extraordinary ensemble led by Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Talia Shire, John Cazale, Sterling Hayden and Abe Vigoda, all of whom remain memorable figures in motion pictures. Supporting the co-writer-director much of the film's crew was filled out by technicians who've long since established themselves at the pinnacle of their professions including cinematographer Gordon Willis, production designer Dean Tavoularis, editors William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, co-writer and novelist Mario Puzo and composer Nino Rota. Of course this consideration can't help but also speak to the masterful qualities of the film itself that focuses on Puzo's Corelone crime family that was previously introduced in his best-selling novel of the same name.

Opening in the 1950s with a wedding, The Godfather is the story of Don Vito Corleone (Brando) and his family's legacy to be carried on by his children. Presiding over the wedding of his daughter Connie (Shire) Vito is also determining which of his three sons should lead the Corleones when his day is done. Oldest son Sonny (Caan) is heir apparent except for an explosive temper. Middle son Fredo (Cazale) is an incompetent weakling and youngest son Michael (Pacino) has been reared outside the family to take the Corleone name into more legitimate ventures like politics and traditional industry.

Mixed up in Vito's generational transition is a series of internal and external family pressures. Connie's wife-beating husband, and family outsider, Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo) goes to loggerheads with Sonny over his treatment of Sonny's sister. Michael becomes involved with WASP Kay Adams (Keaton) who trusts in his good nature despite the family shadow. Vito's adopted son, and Corleone family consigliore, Tom Hagen (Duvall) chafes at his non-Italian heritage but also wants to ensure Vito's legacy and the continued legitimization in various industries, entertainment among them.

Running against Vito's plans, however, a number of rival families are leaning towards the new drug trade as a remarkably lucrative new cash business. After convening his criminal peers to advise them of the Corleone position, Vito falls into disfavor and is targeted for removal by his competitors including Barzini (Richard Conte), Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Cuneo (Rudy Bond).

When Fredo fails to protect his father during an assassination attempt that leaves him near death, Michael is forced to enter the family fold against Kay's wishes. Saving his father from a second assassination attempt, Michael kills two of his father's chief rival conspirators, including a police captain (Sterling Hayden), and is then thrust into the criminal underworld much to Vito's chagrin.

Moving to the old country Michael avoids prosecution while the various mob families go to war. Sonny beats Carlo nearly to death resulting in his association with a rival family and Sonny's bullet ridden killing. Likewise Michael narrowly avoids a car bomb only to later return home where the family empire is threatened from all sides at once.

Owning up to his place as family head, Michael stages a coup and kills all the heads of the rival families to consolidate Corleone interests and tie up loose ends. Barzini, Sollozzo, Cuneo and Carlo fall to Michael's word making his renewed romance with Kay an empty one based on mistrust and suspicion just as Connie is left a widow and Fredo a family cipher. When Don Vito Corleone dies Michael completes his ascension to the family's throne with Tom's devotion and his own wily instincts as one who's tasted the legitimate American dream but was forced to relinquish his fantasies and protect his own.

Beyond Grand Guignol excitement in rich sequences of violence and mayhem throughout the film, The Godfather was groundbreaking in its depiction of organized crime. Seen as an epic-sized underground industry complete with absolute organization and a code of ruthlessness largely predicated on the difference between personal and business pursuits, the Corleones were a new kind of American fantasy. Gone are the usual presumptions of hard work turning into achievement and the benevolent spirit of opportunity unique to American shores. Instead the conflicts of ethnic tension, immigrant connection to homelands, the blood bonds of family and the interconnectedness of official corruption with business success are made the tapestry of gangsterism and domestic melodrama.

By self-consciously avoiding the term "mafia" throughout the script, Coppola and Puzo were also able to construct a fable of self-determination without specifically offending or exciting any of the known crime families then in operation. As a result their script and Coppola's resulting film give the viewer a sense of the Corleone enterprise as being like any other story of pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps successes with the exception that the family's pursuits are decidedly illegitimate. Yet those pursuits are not without moral consideration since Vito himself trades in favors, prostitution, racketeering, loan sharking and the like but balks at the prospect of drug trafficking.

Perhaps not enough has been made of this consideration in the years since 1972. Namely Vito's vision of his family's future is based on offering services outside the sanction of law but within the relatively safe rules of sating human desire. He's uninterested in supporting business ventures that result in the dissolution of society and in the lost quality of life for those involved with such activities.

In other words, Vito is intent to feed human wants for a price and consequently deal with his competition but he does not want to legitimize outright human destruction as the aim of his business. Willingness to kill his competitors and defend himself against them is not the same as targeting the wide swath of people in the world as his potential customers since everyone is lessened through the destructive capacity of various substance addictions.

Seeing this kind of business as being antithetical to his moral universe Vito wisely turns away from it while his competition and, later on his heir Michael, embraced the rights of moneymaking opportunities. Though the gap between the personal and business oriented spheres of activity was to diminish over time, Vito's stand was against minimizing innocence and the reduction of everything to bland commodity fetishism the way Michael's changed worldview was to consider such values alone.

The Godfather is then a parable about free market capitalism and industrial competition just as it's the story of one family's progression from one generation to the next. It's thereby a study in personality all the while putting enough bullets through enough bodies, enough decapitated racehorse heads under enough piles of bedclothes and enough shadowy meetings filled with enough underworld types to satisfy a mass audience only half-interested in more cerebral metaphors and allegories.

Just as complicatedly The Godfather defied critics to dismiss it out of hand because it was just too good to be ignored. It likewise infuriated moviegoers and aestheticians who were shocked by its shootouts, beatings, violent set pieces and indifference to suffering as another of the many tools of the criminal trade. By spinning these possibly negative features in the film as some of its methods for redefining gangster movies along with screen violence and criminally minded movies more generally, The Godfather weathered its surrounding controversy to emerge a timeless cinematic artifact to stand the test of ages.

Interestingly there are a number of "what if" scenarios surrounding the picture that may very well have produced an entirely different film were it not for the sometimes-accidental forces of history. For instance, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman were all offered the role of Michael while Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal were also considered for the part. Robert De Niro auditioned as well, and also for the part of Sonny, but lost out because Coppola had already settled on Pacino and didn't feel De Niro was right for the more volatile Sonny.

Before Pacino was cast as Michael, though, he was committed to starring in Bang the Drum Slowly. Because Coppola wanted him so badly for the part he pulled strings to have Pacino released from his commitments whereupon he was replaced by De Niro who was forced to give up his own small part in The Godfather that eventually yielded his work in The Godfather: Part II as young Vito for which he won an Academy Award.

Rumor also has it that Burt Reynolds was originally cast as Michael but that Marlon Brando refused to act with him when considering Reynolds too much a TV star. In any case, Laurence Olivier was considered for the part of Vito before Brando won the part partially because he screen tested with cotton wool stuffed into his cheeks to make the character look more like a bulldog. One result of this creative leap was Brando being rewarded with the central, and Academy Award winning, part of The Godfather. Another result, as is well known, is that Vito came to be physically characterized by his jowls produced for the film with a special prosthetic device worn inside Brando's mouth.

Altogether the industry of The Godfather and its two sequels has fueled a deluge of popular and scholarly tracts, books, articles, exposes and cinematic rip-offs ever since the first few notes of Rota's score lit up movie audiences in 1972. The overall effect of this movie juggernaut is yet to be completed in that The Godfather lives on with new home video and DVD releases and packages every few years that relies on an older audience to remember the film's debut along with a newer audience fascinated by the world of gangsters, criminals and family ties that truly bind.

It's no small result that Puzo's bestseller turned into a blockbuster. That the blockbuster became the state of the art is one for the record books.