I've never before been bored by a slow-moving film. Ever so much more weight is put on the horse-head scene than it supports. A husband-wife fight is phoney, weak, amateur and isn't even peanuts compared to any such scene by Scorsese. A curly-haired guy beats a guy up and it looks as fake as the fakest action I've ever seen; it was so bad it was hysterical.

As in the faintly superior sequel, Robert Duvall's role consists almost entirely of standing around looking mildly concerned. Early scenes with Brando are effective enough, but not a whole lot else is. That curly-haired guy gets shot by a whole buncha guys later on and some friends asked me if I understood how and why the ambush happened as though I could possibly care why it happened or who he was. I heard one person complain that the film 'insists on itself', but it seemed to me more like it didn't even care it existed.

At the moment, this movie has nearly five hundred and fifty thousand votes on I.M.D.B., but 'Goodfellas' has only three hundred and twenty-five thousand and 'Casino' barely over a hundred and fifty thousand. Sad. But Francis Ford went on to make an infinitely better film only seven years later, and his daughter an unutterably better one three decades later, and so the Family thrives.