Eldest daughters famously take after their fathers. I don’t know exactly how true that is, but I do know that I inherited at least one very specific thing from mine: a deep and incurable love for cinema.
Our father-daughter bonding routine has mostly consisted of endless movie nights, something that we began right after my 14th birthday. On one particularly memorable night, he chose “The Godfather.” Initially, I was intimidated by the almost three hours of film awaiting me, but once I sat down and the opening credits began, I was hooked.
Released in 1972 and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, “The Godfather” begins a trilogy widely considered among the greatest ever made. The films follow the Corleone mafia family; at its center lies Michael Corleone — the youngest son and eventual heir. Coppola expands the Corleones’ story from a traditional crime narrative into a compelling family drama and a tragic exploration of inherited power.
In the first film, Michael enters the family business as a reluctant outsider, and ultimately succeeds patriarch Vito as the new Don, gradually adopting a world governed by loyalty and obligation. “The Godfather Part II” is about decay, contrasting young Vito’s rise with Michael’s rule to show how the meaning of power changes across generations. Michael uses the authority he inherits to control the family itself. “The Godfather Part III” is about punishment: an older Michael tries to legitimize the Corleone name and buy his way into redemption, only to discover that guilt cannot be laundered.
This is the analysis I can offer now. But at 14, my critical framework was slightly less developed and significantly more vulnerable to Al Pacino.
I don’t remember thinking, “What a fascinating portrayal of moral corruption and dynastic masculinity.” I remember thinking, as many teenage girls before and after me probably have, that Pacino had one of the most devastating faces ever put on screen.
This initial portrayal of the protagonist as “morally attractive” is why Michael works so well as a character. He doesn’t begin as a terrible man –– quite the opposite. He’s a decorated war veteran; he is responsible, observant and removed from his family’s business.
Yet despite his good looks and initially good intentions, Michael eventually turns to crime, using family responsibility to justify each violent act. This ultimately destroys the very thing his father tried to protect. By “The Godfather Part II,” he has become colder than his father ever was. Michael has the name and the empire, but Vito built power because he had once been powerless. His son uses power because he cannot imagine living without control.
Coppola’s representation of inheritance here is truly unsettling. The future Don inherits his father’s belief that family must be protected at all costs, then takes that belief to its most frightening conclusion: everyone he loves becomes someone he must control.
“The Godfather” is about what men pass down to men: names, businesses, violence, codes of loyalty, ways of being feared. For a film so obsessed with fathers and sons, it’s almost funny that my father felt it right to pass it down to his daughter.
Watching this trilogy as a woman, I never saw “The Godfather” as just a boys’ movie. I was amazed by the incredible cinematography and infatuated with Al Pacino, but I also noticed how easily the women on screen were disregarded, even when they were the ones asked to carry the family’s emotional weight. What we inherit from our fathers is not always what they intend to teach us. My father may have shown me a story about male power, but he also gave me the confidence to enter that story without asking whether it was meant for me.
I could admire Coppola’s portrayal of masculine power while also questioning the female sacrifice that makes such power possible.
The role of women in the world of “The Godfather” is best revealed through Michael’s wife, Kay Adams. She represents the ordinary life Michael once claimed to want, yet her marriage never grants her access to his world. The first film ends with Michael closing a door in her face: Kay is close enough to legitimize him as a respectable family man, but never close enough to know the truth.
In “The Godfather Part II,” however, she makes the one decision Michael cannot reverse: By ending her pregnancy, she refuses to give him another son to inherit his violence. For once, the future of the Corleone dynasty does not belong to the Don.
In the Corleone world, men are made offers they can’t refuse, but women are rarely given the dignity of an offer at all. They are simply expected to care for and forgive the family, to uphold it and its image without question. All in the name of this holy ideal imposed on them by their fathers, brothers or husbands, who rarely ask what this devotion costs.
“The Godfather” is the tragedy of a man who gets everything he was taught to want and loses everyone he claimed to protect, but it is also the tragedy of the women around him who are made to be sacrifices in his appetite for power. Michael may inherit the Corleone name, but his authority rests on a domestic world built and sustained by women, one he neither originates nor knows how to preserve.
“‘The Godfather’ is the tragedy of a man who gets everything he was taught to want and loses everyone he claimed to protect, but it is also the tragedy of the women around him who are made to be sacrifices in his appetite for power.”
At 14, I learned that I could admire Michael Corleone as a character (and Al Pacino as a face) without admiring the world he creates.
Though it may come as a shock to those who dismiss women’s interest in mafia stories as performative, we do not need to see ourselves at the center of a story to find it fascinating, nor do we need men to validate our reasons for loving it. A genre dominated by men does not have to also belong exclusively to them.
Bianca Mirica PO ’29 loves gangster movies and crime dramas and has endless material for opinions about her favorite mobsters, which she is more than happy to put into writing.