Quite often, here at Last Movie Outpost, we have found ourselves making an unconscious distinction between “films” and “movies”. We don’t like it, but sometimes it just happens. The brain makes all sorts of consciously biased connections, and it is hard not to sort things into buckets such as “film” being works of cinema, and movies being works of entertainment to play in movie theaters.
If that distinction is correct, and we are not saying it is, then Steven Spielberg has probably made two of the greatest movies of all time in Jaws and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. He has also made quite a few notable films, as well.
Spielberg himself clearly doesn’t make that distinction, as he has named what he considers the greatest American movie of all time, and it is one that our biases might bracket as a film.
As told by The Hollywood Reporter, Spielberg made his pronouncement at a tribute to director Francis Ford Coppola. This was held by the American Film Institute on April 26, where he said Coppola’s 1972 classic The Godfather was that movie.
Before Spielberg and George Lucas presented Coppola with the 50th AFI Life Achievement Award, Spielberg talked about meeting Coppola in 1967 and being asked to watch and critique an early cut of Apocalypse Now.
Spielberg naming The Godfather as the greatest American movie made Coppola cover his face with his hands. Spielberg said:
“Many artists can and do take a bow from their work on a page, on a canvas, on a screen, but our applause for you Francis, is from a different kind of audience. When we’re young, it’s our parents we want to make proud, and then it’s our friends, and then it’s our colleagues, and finally, it’s our peers, but you, sir, are peerless.
You have taken what came before and redefined the canon of American film, and in so doing, you’ve inspired a generation of storytellers who want to make you proud of their work, proud of our work, and I always want to make you proud of my work.”
Coppola co-wrote the screenplay with Mario Puzo, based on Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel. The Godfather is long-regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made, as well as a landmark of the gangster genre.