A 1972 crime epic that won Best Picture, rewrote American movies, and — under this site's settled law that cinema begins at Jaws (1975) — did not officially exist until Thursday. Matt filed the appeal he has been drafting for years. Norm, in a development with no precedent, co-signed it. Management heard the case, granted the appeal, and ratified the double-up, making The Godfather the first pre-1975 film admitted to the record. The written opinion stresses, twice, in capital letters, that this creates no general precedent. Matt has already started drafting the next appeal. Management has already started pretending not to see it.
I have waited a long time for standing. Under the law of this house, everything I love from the early seventies has been legally imaginary — heard on appeal only, appeals rarely granted, which in practice meant a locked door with a sign on it. So let me make the case properly, because I only get one. This is the American movie. Brando reinventing screen acting with cotton in his cheeks and a cat that wandered onto set. Pacino’s Michael executing the quietest character turn ever filmed — a war hero who tells his girlfriend “that’s my family, Kay, it’s not me,” and then spends three hours becoming the thing he disclaimed, one closed door at a time. Gordon Willis shooting whole scenes in darkness so confident the studio thought the film was broken.
“The restaurant scene alone — Michael, the gun behind the toilet tank, the train screaming somewhere outside as his mind makes itself up — is a complete education in directing. And under our own rules, it didn’t exist. I’ve been arguing with a door for years.”
Nino Rota’s theme, the baptism intercut, the cannoli, the orange peels. This is not nostalgia; I brought evidence, it’s called every filmmaker who came after. The thumb is up, the appeal is filed in triplicate, and if the court needs character witnesses, the entire history of the medium is in the hallway.
I want my position characterized precisely: I am not going soft on the appellate process, and I am not co-signing Matt’s whole pre-1975 romance-of-the-archives project. I am co-signing ONE film, because the file is airtight and I follow files. Consider the evidence in my native categories. Crime: the founding text. Thriller: a man walks out of a restaurant bathroom and the film becomes a different, colder thing forever. Mystery: the whole picture is a whodunit about succession — three sons, one throne, and the answer is the one nobody in the family wanted. Dry comedy: “leave the gun, take the cannoli” is the driest line ever recorded, delivered at a crime scene, by a man thinking about dessert.
“One hundred seventy-five minutes and I never once checked my watch — the second time this ledger has recorded such an anomaly, and the first time it happened for a film that legally did not exist.”
The runtime keeps its promise like a Corleone keeps his: completely, and with consequences. No wizards, no capes, no hobbits — just actors, shadows, and a script where every promise pays off. The thumb is up, all the way, and I want the record to show my co-signature is limited to this single docket number. Matt, put the second folder away. I can hear it rustling.
The appeal is granted, and I want the room to understand how narrow this door is. Settled law stands: cinema begins at Jaws, 1975, and the projectors of the so-called 'earlier period' remain, as a class, unadmitted. But the appellate standard was always 'rarely,' not 'never' — and then the second floor sent up a film that is a crime THRILLER, a family MYSTERY about which son becomes the father, and a study in dry, dark comedy so arid that a man is told about a murder with a sentence about baked goods. It runs 175 minutes and wastes none of them; the plot functions like a ledger where every entry gets collected. This court finds that The Godfather is not evidence against the Jaws doctrine — it is the exception that proves the doctrine was calibrated correctly, because look how good a film had to be to get in. Appeal granted. Verdict ratified: two up. And counselor — I can see the second folder under your arm. The docket is CLOSED for the season.