An offer you can't refuse: The Godfather turns 35

Coppola's masterpiece, she wrote, was "you see, as 'good' as the novel — as therefore, in its new incarnation and availability to the illiterate, for more dangerous." Why so dangerous? "[T]he function of the film is to show us that Hitler is a grand sort of family man, gentle with children, daring and ruthless with enemies, implacable in the matter of honor and so loyal to the ties of blood that even a brother-in-law, to a sister's sorrow, must go (juicily garroted) if he happens to have betrayed a son of the house." (Um: "Happens to have betrayed"? Carlo set up Sonny to be brutally murdered in a toll booth!) But Crist didn't hate it entirely: "You can't say the trash doesn't get first-class treatment." No, you can't.