Why The Godfather, Casablanca, and Citizen Kane Still Matter Today

Why The Godfather, Casablanca, and Citizen Kane Still Matter Today

Three films get named more than almost any others when people argue about the best movie ever made. The American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Movies" list put all three in its top three, in both the 1998 and 2007 editions, and Citizen Kane held the number one spot on the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound critics' poll, the one voted on by critics rather than the magazine's separate directors' poll, for fifty years before Vertigo finally displaced it in 2012. That's not a coincidence of good taste. The Godfather, Casablanca, and Citizen Kane each solved a problem the movies didn't know they had yet, and everyone who came after has been borrowing the solution ever since. What ties them together isn't that they're old and respectable. It's that you can still see their fingerprints on films released this year.

Citizen Kane and the grammar everyone still uses

Orson Welles made Citizen Kane in 1941 as a first-time director with an unusual amount of freedom, and he spent it rewriting how a camera could tell a story. Working with cinematographer Gregg Toland, he built shots where the foreground and the deep background are both in focus at once, so a character in the front of the frame and one across the room are part of the same idea instead of separate cuts. He shot up at his actors from floor level, which meant building ceilings into sets that films usually left open. He told a man's life out of order, assembled from the contradictory memories of people who knew him, and let the audience do the sorting.

None of that reads as experimental now, which is exactly the point. It stopped being experimental because Kane won the argument. When a modern film flashes back through unreliable narrators or holds two planes of action in a single deep-focus shot, it's speaking a language Welles helped standardize. "Rosebud" gets quoted as a punchline, but the real inheritance is structural: the idea that a film can withhold, mislead, and reward a second viewing.

Casablanca and the art of the line that lands

Where Kane is a director flexing, Casablanca is a script firing on every cylinder. It arrived a year later, premiering in late 1942, built around wartime melodrama: a nightclub owner in Morocco caught between an old love and a larger cause, the kind of premise that should have dated badly. It hasn't, because the writing understood that a great romance needs friction, not just longing.

There's a persistent story about how that script came together, repeated so often it gets treated as settled fact: that the pages were still being finished scene by scene while the cameras rolled, and that nobody on set knew until late in the shoot how Rick and Ilsa's story would end. Aljean Harmetz spent years combing through Warner Bros.' actual production files for her book Round Up the Usual Suspects, and her reading of those records complicates the tidiest version of the legend more than it flatly debunks it: by her account, the ending's basic shape was locked in well before the cameras got there, even as individual lines and smaller scenes kept getting reworked day to day. That's a different claim from saying nobody on set felt uncertain, since the emotional confusion actors like Ingrid Bergman later described feeling in the moment is not the same thing as the studio not knowing how the plot would end. The daily rewriting is probably how the myth got its footing in the first place, since several credited and uncredited writers really were passing pages back and forth under real time pressure.

Rick doesn't get the girl, and the film is stronger for it. His "hill of beans" speech reframes the whole story in its last minutes: the private heartbreak everyone came for turns out to matter less than the thing happening in the world outside the airport. That move, letting a personal story resolve by pointing past itself, shows up constantly in the decades of screenwriting that followed. The famous lines get remembered, but the reason writers still study it is the structure underneath them.

The Godfather and the villain you follow anyway

Before The Godfather, organized crime on screen was mostly cops-and-robbers with clear moral lines, the mob cast as obstacle rather than protagonist. Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 adaptation, the newest of the three, flipped that arrangement entirely. Coppola made the criminals the family you sympathize with and built the film around a slow corruption: Michael Corleone starts as the son who wanted no part of the business and ends as the coldest man in the room.

The craft is in how quietly it happens. The film's most discussed sequence crosscuts between Michael standing at the altar as his infant nephew's godfather, reciting the baptismal vows, and the coordinated killings of the heads of the other four of New York's Five Families. Also among the dead is Moe Greene, the Las Vegas casino man who wasn't a family boss at all but had crossed Michael just the same, one more hit ordered to close out every open account before the christening ends. The two rhythms comment on each other without a word of explanation needed. That patience, the willingness to let an audience sit with a character's moral decline instead of condemning it, runs straight through the prestige television era that followed. The Sopranos makes the debt explicit rather than just implied: Silvio Dante's running bit is a dead-on impression of Michael Corleone delivering "just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in," a line from the trilogy's later chapter, The Godfather Part III (1990), not the 1972 film discussed here, though the joke only works because the audience already carries Pacino's Michael in their head regardless of which installment he's quoting. That bit recurs across seasons as a knowing nod, and the debt goes deeper than homage: in a 2019 Guardian interview tied to the show's twentieth anniversary, David Chase said he'd been approached to make a straight television version of The Godfather and turned it down, telling the paper, "There already is a Godfather," before building the show instead around the one angle Coppola had never touched, a mobster who goes to therapy. Nino Rota's score does its share too, giving all that ruthlessness an air of tragedy it hasn't earned, which is precisely why it works.

What they share

The thread isn't quality, though all three have plenty of it. It's that each one expanded what the medium could do, and most of what's followed since has been working somewhere inside the room they built. Those aren't museum pieces. They're the reasons modern movies look and move the way they do. If you only pick one this week, start with Kane, and watch for the ceiling in frame and the shot that keeps a face sharp in the foreground while a conversation happens in perfect focus fifty feet behind it. Then stay for the very last shot, the workman at Xanadu feeding Rosebud into the furnace without knowing what he's burning: the one answer the reporters spent the whole film chasing, handed to nobody but the audience.

---

Full entries for all three, along with more curated picks, are on TopMovieList.