The movie Denzel Washington will “never forget” seeing for the first time
Some films are so powerful that they’ll stick in our minds for good, often when we’re a bit younger and hungry to soak up information like culture-ravenous human sponges, childhoods spent cross-legged and wide-eyed watching the same movies again and again, Star Wars or Back to the Future or The Goonies.
For Denzel Washington, that pivotal film came a little later in his life, but it was possibly the greatest of all time.
Washington was 18 years old in 1972 when Francis Ford Coppola released The Godfather, the epic adaptation of Mario Puzo’s story of the mafia taking roots in New York that has become one of, if not the, finest movie ever made and featured astonishing performances from young actors including Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall, supplemented by the legendary Marlon Brando.
The young Washington had just left high school and was still trying to work out what he wanted from life, with dreams of attending University, something he would eventually do five years later to study drama and journalism. But seeing Coppola’s masterpiece had a pivotal effect on him, as he would later reveal to the film writer Cindy Pearlman, saying, “I’ll never forget the first time I saw The Godfather. It affected me because I remember thinking, Now, this is a good picture from start to finish.”
Unlike some films that take their time to cement their place in film history, critics and audiences alike realised the majesty of what Coppola had produced almost immediately. The film was nominated for seven Golden Globes, winning five and then eleven Oscar nominations, picking up three wins, including ‘Best Actor’ for Brando.
And the film would go on to reverberate through Washington’s career on his way to becoming one of the most recognised film actors in history, a two-time Academy Award winner with a laundry list of acclaimed films including Philadelphia, Malcolm X and Training Day. He would often reference the performance that Brando gave as Don Vito Corleone as inspiration for his own roles in crime-based films, not least in 2007’s American Gangster, directed by Ridley Scott, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
The film tells the story of Washington’s New York drug kingpin Frank Lucas’ rise to fame in the criminal underworld in the city, much like Pacino’s ascent in The Godfather trilogy, with Washington’s character starting off smuggling heroin into the city during the Vietnam War and making millions.
Most recently, Washington has also played a different kind of mogul as he combined with long-time collaborator Spike Lee to make Highest 2 Lowest, the story of a high-powered record exec held to ransom by a kidnapping gang. Washington has also just wrapped on filming a new movie with Robert Pattinson in New York called Here Comes the Flood, a Netflix production scheduled for release later this year.
Despite saying that his action franchise The Equalizer came to an end with the third movie, which was released in 2023, it now seems that Washington will return for a fourth and possibly fifth movie, with his highly trained veteran operative Robert McCall ready to dish out more justice to the globe’s assorted baddies. A clue as to why another adventure might be on the cards is likely to lie in the fact that the last part in the series made almost $200m on a budget of less than a third of that, with fans hungry for more.
Washington is also lined up to appear in another trilogy, this time Ryan Coogler’s much-awaited Marvel movie Black Panther 3, which will again star Sinners’ compadre Michael B Jordan in the lead role.
