For a Times of India podcast that's now online (link here), I rambled a bit about The Godfather on its 50th anniversary - mainly providing context about the changes in American cinema in the late 1960s, the advent of the "kids with beards", and Francis Ford Coppola's personal history. (Did he relate with Michael on some level, given the nature of his own relationship with his big brother August?) Also some of my favourite moments in the trilogy, including the gloriously melodramatic ending of Part 3.
My bit starts around the 9-minute mark, but do listen to the nice insights provided by director Vikramaditya Motwane.
P.S. in the podcast I mention some of those great dissolves in The Godfather Part II, transitioning from Michael in the present to Vito in the past. Here are two of them: the second scene, as the writer Ryan Gilbey noted once, makes it seem like Michael is being absorbed into his father’s body. (Think about it in a certain light and it also looks like a moment from a Cronenberg film like The Brood. Or from the creepy opening-credit sequence of De Palma's Sisters.) For a very long time (before the 1995 film Heat was made) these scenes were also the answer to the movie-nerd trick question “Have Al Pacino and Robert De Niro ever appeared in the same frame in a film?”
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