There's also a Part three.

Most people think that Part three made rather later, is a bit of a failure.

I think that, too.

I'm not going to say anything about Part three.

They're based on a book written, I think in 1969 called The Godfather, which was a story about a new imaginary Mafia family in New York on the first film is based on that on the second film develops both forward and backward in time, the story of the same family.

They are not only immensely popular and enduring films, which people are happy to watch over and over again, but they're rated as among the greatest films ever made by serious film critics and usually rank between first and fourth in any serious ranking of great films of all time.

The films are very different from earlier gangster films, of which there were many from the 19 thirties onwards.

Previously, gangster films had focused on the violence wth e antisocial inclinations of the Gangsters, their brutality.

Aunt had generally been very comed in Nate Ary of Gangsters, though, of course, at the same time, they took care to make their lives seem exciting on DDE, in some cases to produce riveting performances.

Such a sense of James Cagney in white heat cupola who made The Godfather decided that he was going to make a film which would be sympathetic towards this Mafia family on DDE.

In fact, that is what is achieved.

There's a connection here with something that Shakespeare was doing hundreds of years before because he has a Siri's of plays, The History plays, which are based on late medieval kings of England on dhe.

These people, in reality, were probably rather ignorant, certainly brutal and unscrupulous people who were constantly seizing the crown from one another and then plotting to take the crown from whoever currently had it.

Shakespeare turns some of these people into vastly heroic figures and makes out of this history a marvelously artistic structure of cycle of human psychology.

Probably the highest achievement in Shakespeare's history place is the Henry Plays, which were really three plays, the two parts of Henry the fourth and then Henry the fifth on those three plays air really about Henry the 5th 1st of all, when he's Prince, How growing up, learning to become a king and then in Henry, the fifth being the king, invading France on defeating the French In The Godfather, we have the story of a family, and it starts with a family led by Don Corleone, Don Vito Corleone, who's aging on who is in some danger of losing control of the powerful situation which he occupies.

And he has a young son, Michael.

He has other sons as well, but Michael seems very poorly suited to take over from his father.

He has no interest in being a Mafia don.

He seems to fit much better into mainstream American society and doesn't seem to have those sorts of ambitions.

The story of the two films is his progress, if you can call it that from somebody who stands outside of the family's ambitions, to the person who takes over and leads the family with a degree of ruthlessness, which, if anything, exceeds that of his father.

In Shakespeare, we have the same structure in Henry, the fourth, parts one and two, the King Henry.

The fourth is aging Andi not fully in control of the situation, and he makes a number of strategic mistakes in dealing with his rivals, which put the crown in danger, on which are really rescued by the young Henry the fifth, as he will be, who kills hot spur in battle, Hot spur being one of the most significant potential enemies of the king.

Similarly, in The Godfather early on in the film, things were very bad for the family because if they're going to go under from the combined opposition of other Mafia families in from the corrupt police force.

But Michael the Young Sun takes control and hatches a plan that will enable him to assassinate the police chief on one of the other significant Mafia figures in a ll.

This on that reverses the situation and puts the coolie only family back in control, at least for some period of time.

There's a big emphasis in both these narratives on the idea of deception.

So one of the ways in which The Godfather differs from previous films about Gangsters and Mafia is that there's much less emphasis on physical power, a much more emphasis on being able to read other people's psychologies.

Part of the interest of watching those films is that many, many conversations take place between people where you realize later on that neither of the people speaking in those conversations seriously meant anything that they said they were both trying to deceive The other parties and the people who win in these situations are the people who are able to deceive the others and able to know when somebody else is trying to deceive them.

And that's what gives Michael his power over other people.

It's not physical power.

He never except on one occasion early on, uses any physical violence himself.

And although there are moments off extreme violence in the film, most of the film is not a violent film.

Most of it consists simply of listening to people having conversations on working out why they are saying what it is they're saying Now.

When you talk about deception, it concern sound as if you're talking about something which is very selfish about something which we would A ll feel very ashamed.

But in many ways deception is part of the fabric of our ordinary lives.

We deceive people sometimes for the best of reasons.

We do not tell people the truth when they ask us whether we like their most recent haircut.

We do not tell our Children the truth, always when when?

When they ask us whether that we like the painting that they have just done, we are deceptive in many, many ways.

Some of those ways are ways that we would feel ashamed off if we knew if other people knew about it.

But many of them were really just part of our ordinary life, our whole lives and made up of deceptions, small and sometimes large.

So what we have in The Godfather is a picture of human deception.

Ritz, much larger than any of us normally experience in our ordinary lives on deception, becomes, for these people, vastly Maur important than it normally is, because their capacity to deceive other people and to know when other people are deceiving them can actually, for those people mean the difference between life and death.

So we see that similar a similar level of interest in the idea of deception in the Henry Place, and we see this particularly in the development of Henry Henry, the Fists personality.

Henri, when he's a young man, is a drunkard corrals somebody whose friends are robbers and thieves.

But Henry makes it clear that he's quite consciously engaging in this behavior and that he intends later on to undergo a change because, as he puts it, by changing in that dramatic way, he will bring Maur credit on himself than if he had simply been a good, honest and sober citizen.

From the beginning, I suppose there are other stories in which deception and manipulation play an enormous part.

What both Shakespeare on Dhe, the makers of the Godfather films managed to do was to show their heroes as Machiavellian and deceptive and yet at the same time, to get us on their side.

And they do that partly by giving those characters other admirable trays.

So both the young Henry on Michael are extremely brave, physically on their extremely resourceful.

They're able to rescue very dire situations that look because if things were going to go very badly, Henry at the Battle of Agincourt looks as if he's facing defeat on the annihilation of his army by the vast superior powers of the French.

Yet he manages the rally is troops give them the courage to defeat the French.

Michael is part of a family that looks as if it's going under.

Yet he manages to put together a plan that completely reverses their fortunes.

It could be simply that the Shakespearean way of telling those stories is so much a part of our common culture that you don't have to think very consciously about these things in order to produce something that's rather similar.

That, of course, as I've already said, previous Mathea films never dealt with the situation in the same way as this.

So I would put my money on it that he knew something about the Shakespearean background to this and quite consciously borrowed from Shakespeare here.