"A wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, inwhich organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of Americanfree enterprise. The movie is a popular melodrama with its roots in thegangster films of the thirties, but it expresses a new tragic realism,and it's altogether extraordinary.... The visual scheme is based on themost obvious life-and-death contrasts; the men meet and conduct theirbusiness in deep-toned, shuttered rooms, lighted by lamps even in thedaytime, and the story moves back and forth between this hidden,nocturnal world and the sunshine that they share with women andchildren.... The dark-and-light contrast is so operatic and so openlysymbolic that it perfectly expresses the basic nature of the material.The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters:innocence versus knowledge-knowledge in this sense being the same asguilt.... There are rash, foolish acts in the movie but no acts ofindividual bravery...(and) the recognition that the killing is anintegral part of business policy takes us a long way from the fantasyoutlaws of old movies. These gangsters don't satisfy our adventurousfantasies of disobeying the law; they're not defiant, they're furtiveand submissive. They are required to be more obedient than we are; theylive by taking orders.... The direction is tenaciously intelligent.Coppola holds on and pulls it all together. The trash novel is thereunderneath, but he attempts to draw the patterns out of the particulars.It's amazing how encompassing the view seems to be...." PaulineKael, The New Yorker