“When did going to the cinema start taking three hours?” has become a popular grumble over recent years. In 2022 alone, films ranging from blockbusters to Oscar botherers have come close to gobbling up entire afternoons and sternly tested our bladders, from No Time To Die (2 hours and 43 minutes) and Dune (2 hours 35) to House of Gucci (2 hours 38) and West Side Story (2 hour 36).
But they’re all shorter than the The Godfather, released in 1972, which turns 50 this year and is being re-released in cinemas to celebrate. Watching it again, I was struck by how its 2 hours and 55 minutes felt, if anything, a little brief. Francis Ford Coppola was considered a no-hoper by Hollywood when he reluctantly agreed to make the film – as were most of his cast – but somehow he produced a perfectly proportioned masterpiece in which no scene feels superfluous or overdone, something close to the way Anthony Burgess described the Hemingway novella The Old Man and the Sea: “Every word tells and there is not a word too many”. It is what Marvel, Disney and auteurs like Tarantino and (whisper it) Scorsese think they’re doing with their bloated modern epics, but in reality don’t come close.
