Is The Godfather the greatest American film ever made?

Which is why the closest thing we have is a combination list. Now even if you got a bunch of critics to collect all their opinions together, such as Sight and Sound did, you still only have a limited selection of critics and a small portion of the world therein. So combining the "official" lists ends up being more or less the same as combining the opinions of forumers such as us. With there being both good and bad critics, it ultimately defeats the purpose of rank, acknowledging the autodidacts and the unfairness of life as the movies themselves do all the time.

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In Crumbs defense, he legitimately tries to get people to get more involved in the thinking process of what we’re discussing and to challenge normal conventions on their thoughts on films, and other topics, in general.
I think most people take his posts the wrong way, and sometimes he certainly doesn’t help matters with his approach when he gets annoyed (which happens all too quickly at times), but he generally means well in moving the discussion in a more thoughtful lines.
That being said, his very first post realky did nothing to do any of this, and I can see how quickly it derailed right after it. It helps to question what his motivation and his thoughts, however. And I don’t mean necessarily to challenge him personally but to ask him to clarify his post.
As he already acknowledged, he was challenged but Wondeur and look how well that conversation went right he after. It went back into the discussion of what and why a movie is considered the best. And it was interesting stuff.

Magnificent Ambersons > The Godfather


How's that for some deep meaningful analysis.


I also think the tragedy of the Michael Corleone character is what makes the Godfather particularly meaningful. How the good and honest can be slowly corrupted and turned into exactly what they always hoped to rebel against. That maybe what they were fighting against all along was what they knew was always somewhere inside of them. It's both a profound and unsettling sentiment, especially when articulated as cleanly and honestly as The Godfather does. It doesn't ever pander to that cliche of becoming what one hates. It moves silently and almost imperceptibly until it completely has overcome Michael. We can in many ways completely empathize with his ultimate corruption. In these ways, it's an extremely relatable tragedy, even if so few of us would ever be in the kind of situation he finds himself in.


This is the beating, human heart of the film, even if it betrays itself with its search and (possible achievement of) technical perfection.

While I do think The Godfather is among the best films ever, I love Apocalypse Now even more.

Yeah. In my statistics world, meta-analysis (a composite of lots of ratings and averages) is kinda neat but still suffers from trying to impose some sort of rationale to something that, after all, is a calculation. Math-wise, you can take any 100 critics, average their ratings and get a number. Even within the frame of reference of a particular culture, raters, e.g., American reviewers who are published in mainstream media, errors such as recency, halo, etc, bias the outcome.

I'm fine with combinations, meta-analysis, etc, but I also take it as a recommendation, not as Truth.

Someone in a recent comment mentioned the movie Ben Hur, the 1950's one. It was "Greatest Ever", most Oscars, in its day, but, in spite of that amazing production, has some elements that are fairly cringe-worthy now. That happens to a lot of movies eventually, casting doubt on the idea that reviews over had that thing we like to call objectivity. It all depends......

Which only justifies the idea that the greatest of all time changes with technology and the awareness of how it worked with the general time period of each candidate. This means that historical context can help.

Of course, when you think about it, even a bad opinion or an uneducated one is purely relevant in certain cases. Think about all the critically acclaimed movies that fail to reach thousands of people because of their unique genre or datedness or modern social perception of right and wrong. When a movie can grab mass amounts people despite any of these things, that's a true measurement of its greatness. So if the objectivity thing did exist, I can at least speak from personal experience when I say I don't think Jeanne Deilman is going to achieve that same thing in this day and age (although I adore Satantango, which may fail to grab people for those same reasons).

So just having people who don't get movies is also a healthy reflection on which films do a better job of gripping the masse, even those who don't study the way we do. The whole world is relevant in that way.

Sure, lay opinion is closer to the mean of the masses. If you want to know how that people felt about a film, sample the people. Critics direct opinion. The common man reflects opinion.

But are they good directors? If so, French art films would be much more popular (as an Agnes Varda fanboy, I wouldn't complain).

While perusing this thread, I was internally drafting a comment to the effect that there is no objective measure for "greatest." A statement such as "The Godfather is the greatest movie of all time" is always written or uttered by some person (or some bot, these days) and this is inarguably someone's opinion, not fact. So when I hear a sentence such as "The Godfather is the greatest ..." I internally reprocess it as "I consider The Godfather the greatest ..." and it saves the stress of spewing pedantic outrage. But time and again I found this sentiment expressed better and more eloquently in earlier multiple posts by @skizzerflake, so I will leave him to continue to fight the good fight here.

Except, well, I'd like to pick up on the topic of a meta-analysis. I take these with a grain of salt (pun intended!) on questions such as whether vegans live longer than us non-vegans. So much depends on the authoritativeness of the contributing studies. And methodology, and sponsorship, and on and on .... But sometimes the sheer scale of a metanalysis can produce results that are worth casting your eyes over.

In this arena I'd have to say I do refer to They Shoot Pictures Don't They to fill in the gaps in my own menu of consumed films. Over 10K "ballots" collated from over 30 different curated lists that, to my eyes, seem to be gathered with a fair global distribution. But I'm not here to submit the voluminous data can actually elevate "the best." Just that it's worth a look. (And gosh, what an effort.) Anyway, here's what this huge metanalysis shows as the frequency with which films appear at the top of "best of" lists:

1. Citizen Kane
2. Vertigo
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey
4. Tokyo Story
5. The Rules of the Game
6. The Godfather
7. 8½
8. Sunrise
9. The Searchers
10. The Seven Samurai

And, ho gosh, if you're going to reply that you consider another movie "the best of all time" you'll be completely missing the point. (But let's see if someone does.)

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Scarecrow: I haven't got a brain ... only straw. Dorothy: How can you talk if you haven't got a brain? Scarecrow: I don't know. But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they? Dorothy: Yes, I guess you're right.

They Shoot Pictures always has great lists. Mostly the further you go into them, as you end up finding films you might not expect or haven't even heard of. That's what I'm always looking for in these things, surprises. Inclusions that catch me off guard and make me want to seek them out. Or give them another chance.


The top 10 of that list is pretty basic though. But isn't that sort of what we want when looking for the supposed best ever? There is a reason some movies always appear in these things, because they truly do feel a cut above most and these 10 movies make sense in the context of the conversation, even if Rules of the Game has always baffled me slightly. Thats a movie I like a lot, but if I didn't constantly keep seeing it pop up on top 10s, it wouldn't even occur to me it might be considered as such a top tier contribution to cinema. I find Grand Illusion to be a much better Renoir, but it seems to have fallen slightly out of favor over the years.

From that list I suspect The Godfather to be the one with the broadest appeal.
Perhaps "greatest" is a combination of the film and the audience.
It's not my favourite greatest film, but this is about what most people like, not individual opinions.

Conclusion: Steven Spielberg was right when he made that comment about The Godfather (even if he didn't mean it).

A forum thread with a happy ending and we're all friends now

Exactly what I use it for. Many of the polls referenced stretch back a decade or more, which is OK in that they don't reflect recency bias. And as far as I can tell, no crowd-sourced lists. (The Rotten Tomatoes count of 246 seems to me to indicated those are the critics.)

The Rules of the Game also perplexes me.It seems to be a critics' favorite rather than an audience favorite.

No one can complain about happy endings. But I do wish I'd discovered this thread four days ago, when all the fun was happening.

Ummmmmm.............

Even though I disagree with the list, just seeing that link made it one of my favorite things.

I"m surprised that Death In Venice is not on the list.
It's a film about passion for beauty, and by extension art.
It climaxes with the death scene when Tadzio points at the sky (or maybe the sun) which creates an image of such divine beauty that it cannot be watched by the living.
I think there's a similarity with the Thornbird myth which is about the greatest beauty (the bird's song) which can only be achieved by the ultimate sacrifice.
Apart from that the whole film is like a gorgeous painting, and Dirk Bogarde is almost unrecognisable despite his appearance not being overly enhanced.
The evil that appears in the shape of the plague, threatening to destroy Tadzio's beauty, emphasized by the gypsy's intrusive mockery.

I watched this film on TV when I was a child and of course this is not the kind of film that children love, but I couldn't forget it and when I watched it again as an adult I understood why it had made such a huge impression.

But no, Vertigo had to be on that list.

is Bill from TSPDT on here?

New question: Is Mall Cop the greatest American film ever made?

At the very least, the best American film about a mall cop ever made (and hopefully the last)

Well, there was Mall Cop 2.