Rome Open City
Films it shaped
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He grew up on opera and realism, and his roots were in French poetic realism, Renoir, Marcel Carné. He went straight from that into Italian neo-realism, making Ossessione (1943)... Then he moved on to a more operatic, theatrical realism, which reached its peak in Senso (1954) and The Leopard (1963).
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The Godfather Atlas note
Francis Ford Coppola has named Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers as the direct ancestor of The Godfather, an Italian film about a Southern immigrant family slowly destroyed by ambition, loyalty, and violence. The Godfather's structure of family as both the source of love and the mechanism of destruction is pure Visconti. The Leopard gave Coppola his visual grammar: the long table scenes, the sense of a dynasty in its last hours. The Godfather is Italian cinema with an American accent.
