ON A PERSONAL level, The Godfather doesn't glorify Mafiosi. It shows them as the hotheaded hoods and wiser, mellower monsters that they are. They live in their own social and spiritual hierarchy: the men of the New York Five Families here depicted battle for position in an underworld pecking order, and keep their women and children secure with pasta and the Catholic Church and other more American delights. If Don Corleone, the Man himself, and Michael, his son and successor, come off looking better than any others, straight or crooked, it's because they play the game the best--and the game is sordidly exciting.

This is one gangster film that boasts men who make choices, who are more than fun-loving ethnic types. The restriction and discipline of Mafia living are accurately conveyed: Its deadly patronage, by which vows of love for the Don and pledges of unmitigated loyalty result in feudal bonds which can't be forgotten. The code of silence, omerta, which makes the actions of subordinates individually culpable, thus protecting caporegima and dons at the center of the ring. The political and judicial networks which both in Europe and in the U.S. ease black-market activities into "legitimate" areas of influence.

At the same time, the film doesn't go to the historical roots of the Mafia. It does, in fact, try to justify the group's existence by condemning corrupt national enterprise in general. Though this isn't crucial to the film's success as dramatic narrative or slice-of-life, it leaves a gaping rent in the generally tough fabric, through which we can see the soft heart of the financiers or the heavy thumbs of Mafia carabinieri who helped supervise the shooting of some scenes.

Mario Puzo, author of the original best-selling hunk of heave and cheeseburger, states that he only wrote the book for money, and that he took the stories entirely from the memories of friends and family. His intentions and sources show. His Sicilian Don Tommasino is a type from Italian folklore, the local patrician who rules his regime with warm tongue and hard hand, and guards the locals from threatening outsiders.

Actually, the Mafiosi in Sicily were not rebels against baronial power structures, but go-betweens for nobles and peasants. From the start of their history, they were directed to use every means of torture to extract fealties to their lords. When feudalism died, they did the job for themselves, maintaining an iron grip on the land they once just supervised. The Mafia has always been reactionary; it was no surprise that it helped kill Italian Communism.

THE MAFIA grew quickly in America, absorbing the operations of such unpaid Sicilian scouts as Al Capone or the Black Handers. There was in this country, perhaps, more impetus for violent crime than ever, given the slum conditions most recruits lived in and the sweat they would have had to muster getting out of them via normal routes. But the nationalist image they projected was merely a good business front and organizing factor. Mafia means were ugly, its ties to home Mafiosi still insoluble, and its responsibility for widespread corruption--first through cathouses and clipjoints, then through drugs--unavoidable.

Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay, probably felt the grudge of conscience more than Puzo. If he cuts a key line--"A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns"--he compresses most of Puzo's legends until their grain of truth is revealed. All that remains in his Sicilian scenes, for instance, is the animal vitality of the settings and natives, and the treachery which kills Mike's Sicilian bride in a sabotaged auto.

And Coppola has done much more than cover Puzo's sloppier tracks. He has managed to pick up the loose stitches and thread together an epic family chronicle, expressing its conflicts with an immediacy and a love for detail of location and character that can only come from the deepest rapport with the subject matter. Comparisons have been made with Gone With the Wind, and snots have sniffed at the melodrama which can't be separated from the tenets of the retold crimes. No matter. There's heart to the work, and it starts to beat when the Don says "a man who can't spend time with his family is less than a whole man." Coppola takes off with a story in the grand tragic manner.

Its theme is the corruption of once justifiable goals, their altering through histories of struggle and domination. What would be natural for the Family to desire would be a return to the Sicilian hills: to farm and fornicate and celebrate the sacraments. But they've got to be in business to stay alive in America. And this business requires them to kill. And when they start to kill, and to bear responsibility for men's lives, and then begin to enjoy that power--they start to think in terms of puppets and stringholders, and to hope that their sons will be U.S. Presidents rather than olive oil canners.

A VOLUME of mash-notes couldn't hold sufficient praise for the wonders Coppola's worked with his actors. Marlon Brando, with a receded hairline, grey pencil moustache, jowls hanging off a twisted mouth, and a voice cracked from years of command, is Don Corleone. Brando plays the character totally from within, making him physically expressive and, as a result, extraordinarily complex. He walks as if his shoulder blades were pinned back behind him (which can't hide an old man's paunch in front). But the sensibility beneath the authority is surprisingly agile; the Don can suddenly break into mimicry, or dance a wedding turn with his daughter with a slight protective bent that catches sentiment in movement. Brando puts so much substance into his relatively few scenes, blowing hot and cold with equal eclat, that parallels between his two sons and himself are made concrete through nuance.

James Caan plays Sonny like the Don without his hatch on: he kills with pleasure and screws incessantly--and if he feels he fuels the fires that protect his family, it's his lack of control that starts a costly gang war that ends in his death. Caan's part is different than the other thugs he's played: he animates his body with a high-strung rage barely controlled. When he lets go, dragging a piggish brother-in-law through the streets and bashing his body with a garbage can, the effect is exhilarating.

But the growth of Michael (and Al Pacino is startlingly good in the role) is what gives the film its shape. Emerging a hero from World War II, graduating from Dartmouth with honors in math, he goes straight into Ivy Leavue blase--even picking up a cultivated, long-legged blonde from New Hampshire. Only when Papa Corleone is nearly killed in gangline fire does the son test his cunning and strength in one-to-one, life-or-death arenas. Michael turns to crime. His rationale: all twentieth-century life is political, politics is just power-playing, and one mode of warfare isn't more virtuous than another just because it's sanctioned by the state. According to some ultimate kind of morality, he's right; still it's clearly the suck of action that involves him. After avenging the plot to murder his father, he flees to Sicily, getting back to the earth and into a wench named Appolonia. By the time he returns to New York, he has as much control over himself and his loved ones as his father. He is also in the tradition of second generations, more cold-blooded and intellectual, more Organization than Family. Pacino makes the changes real: if at first he reminds you of Dustin Hoffmann, by the time he takes over the business he's found the emotional reserves, if not expression, of...Brando.

There's still more. Robert Duvall, rivalling Robert Ryan as America's most underrated actor, is the Corleone's German-Irish lawyer: Sterling Hayden, brute incarnate, a guinea-baiting crooked mick cop; and a supporting cast of lesser-knowns and has-beens with the right number of stitches in their faces and cricks in their walks.

COPPOLA'S DIRECTION is among the best that ever has been done in American film. He's created some puerile nonsense previously, but knowing the territory here seems to have given him the spark plug he's needed. (What could a Coppola expect to do with Finian's Rainbow anyway?) Every scene--even the most violent--is played for character, and timed with the perfection needed to bring off such cocky middle-distance lensing. Coppola knew that in Gordon Willis he had the best colorist in current Hollywood credits. So he lets Willis react to the setting in color while Coppola points his angles towards the people.

The film begins and ends with a set of ripe trumpet arpeggios so full of undefined resonances, comic melancholic, and heroic, that you doubt a film could ever create a heady enough mixture of its own. It does, and the brew is not only heady but true, not only true but important. It makes us feel again, in a modern context, what the wicked have always known: that there is no God, and that the men who rule the earth in his stead are those with the biggest compensating pictures of themselves.