Movies made in the 70s and later pushed boundaries and quickly progressed the evolution of film. Each genre of film was revolutionized by a few certain films and for the crime/mob genre, the first major success was The Godfather.

The Godfather was originally a nonfiction book by Mario Puzo that didn’t receive the greatest reviews. One article said The book is “weakest when Puzo reaches out to drag in dramatic scenes that advance neither his plot nor his characters” (New York Times). Ironically, that drag helps in movies to set a calm, subtle tone, then is effective when the next scene is the opposite; brutal and violent. This is what makes The Godfather intriguing. There is a scene in the movie where the lead character, Michael Corleone is full of rage because the police were going to let another mob family kill his father. So Michael handles the matter like his Mob-boss father would have, and sets a meeting with the police chief and the mafia leader trying to kill his father. The following takes place:

While The Godfather was a fantastic fictional representation of the Mafia, The 1990 movie Goodfellas portrayed a more realistic version of what Mafia life was like.

Director Martin Scorsese directed many movies before Goodfellas, many that are regarded as great films, but did poorly at the box office. When directing Goodfellas, Scorsese thought back to the earliest gangster films and was inspired by Scarface in the 1930s because they portrayed despicable characters in such a way that you like them. Just as David Sims notes in an article, “By making his protagonist Tony a slightly more reasonable person than his violent, thick-headed associates, the character seemed infinitely more relatable” (The Atlantic). What Scorsese did differently and autueristicly in his film is add humor to the brutal storyline. As he says in this video below, just like the people he grew up around would tell stories of being in the Mafia with self-deprecating humor, he knew it was that type of storytelling that makes for the greatest entertainment.

When it comes to conventionalism, both of these movies would be considered mostly conventional with hints of unconventional. First, both movies had relatively decent budgets: Goodfellas with 25 million and The Godfather with 6 million (about 19 million with inflation at the time of Goodfellas’ release). Then they both had one known star: Marlon Brando in Godfather and Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, but with both of the better known stars having much smaller parts than the string of lesser known actors.

They also had experienced directors that had made good movies before, but had not had huge success. And of course the intense violence that audiences were not quite used to, leading to reviews around the time that mention (about Godfather) that it’s “more than a little disturbing to realize that characters, who are so moving one minute, are likely, in the next scene, to be blowing out the brains of a competitor over a white tablecloth” (New York Times). Then Goodfellas gets reviews as a movie made 18 years laters would, “The film combines Scorsese’s typically ambivalent view of violence, displaying it in all its nastiness while at the same time positioning the viewer (through editing, camera angle, and music) to identify with it” (SenseOfCinema.com).

As far as the difference in the success in the box office, it’s apparent that the earlier violent Mafia movie had more audiences intrigued. Goodfellas grossed $47 million in the box office while The Godfather grossed $133 million ($415 with inflation to 1990). This shows the impact that early auteurs made in the film industry, with later films sharing a similar context receiving only one-eighth of the profit than the blockbuster that did it first.