Welcome to the next edition of Late To The Party, a regular column in which some Avocado cops to a blind-spot in their cultural gaze, and dives into a ubiquitous piece of popular entertainment for the first time. This week, it’s my turn to again sort-of-embarrassingly admit that I went almost five decades without watching The Godfather. Spoilers abound, but I’d probably the only person who’d’ve been spoiled by this article, if it wasn’t me who wrote it.

“You what??”

This was the reaction from my mother when I told her that I had recently watched The Godfather for the very first time in my life; a conversation we had just two days ago. Mom (and Dad, to a degree) were very big on raising my brother and me with awareness of the higher end of popular culture and art. We went to museums, we saw shows on Broadway, we were introduced to The Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati with equal reverence. So to be told that her own son hadn’t seen one of the cornerstones of Great American Cinema until he was 47 years old, well…yeah I can see why she was taken aback.

Here’s the thing though: I don’t like Mafia stories. Most Mafia stories–when they’re on the big screen, at least–are crafted so the audience is placed in the position of rooting for the bad guys. Maybe they’re less-bad by comparison to greater forces like The Cops, The Other Gangs, The Government, etc. But they’re still BAD GUYS. I don’t mind an anti-hero if he’s mumbling his curmudgeonly way through a moral quandary, since most of the time he picks the most righteous moral option of two bad choices. But if you’re in the mob in a movie, you tend to just roll with whichever option will sustain your/your family’s power and status, and live to RICO another day. Not my kind of story.

I get it, though! The American Mafia story is also the story of Idealized America. Strength, money, power, wisdom, and legacy. Typically filtered through the American immigrant success story, valuing God and Country and Family above everything else…and then being ruthlessly efficient and uncompromising in pursuit of what seems rightfully YOURS. (Also: guns.) What could be more USA than that? But it always left me soured. The few mafioso-glorifying movies I have seen would work for me best when they embraced a nihilistic sense of ludicrous over-the-top chaos that allowed me to laugh at what power could do to a person, like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

So already I was at a disadvantage going into The Godfather for the first time, because I was inclined not to want to root for any of these people. More than that, I’d already had about 70% of the movie spoiled for me. So entrenched in pop culture is this film that I  knew the character arcs from the get-go. I’d seen clips of the most famous set-pieces in AFI specials and Oscar montages. Soooo many lines from the movie had become cliches folks would just use for effect in everyday speech. I was watching the main event long after having seen the highlights beforehand. Was this movie really good enough to overcome those stumbling blocks?

Well, of course. I mean, beneath the cultural ubiquity of it all, The Godfather wouldn’t have become what it is today if it wasn’t still an incredible feat of cinema. It’s gorgeously shot, incredibly toned, cast to within an inch of its life, and acted so powerfully it makes you forget who you’re watching. The brilliance of Marlon Brando is that he’s Marlon Brando when he acts, rather than the easy-imitation-of-Marlon-Brando we all hear/see/perform when we want to be cute in conversation. He plays every scene like someone who’s endured the crushing weight of responsibility and control over an underground empire, not to mention sustaining a HUGE traditional family with great power for all his life, all without becoming a parody of a Mob Family Patriarch. (Was there even a stereotype of that role back when this movie was released?) Al Pacino, for his part, is young and subtle, still decades away from the scenery-chewer that he has become in the last few decades. Although it’s not strenuously emphasized during the first hour of the movie, it’s quite plain from his performance that Michael would much rather not be following in the career path his father chose. And at the same time, we see that he very casually benefits from it in many ways, which helps make his gradual transformation understandable and human.

That’s the part of the film I connected with the most, even though all the other actors in this murderers’ row of great performers all do some of their greatest work here. Being the anti-Mafia person that I am, Michael was the easiest character to identify with for the first hour of the film. Someone who still seemed to want the typical postwar-G.I. lifestyle, with a fiancé and Christmas shopping sprees and such. The more he edged closer to defending his Family’s honor, and avenging/protecting his father, the less I felt inclined to cut him any slack. Which is totally on me: I’d make a really lousy gangster.

But the truth is, this movie grabbed me and got under my skin regardless of the things it had going against it. (And I didn’t even mention how hard it is for me to retain attention to long movies. I had no such trouble here.) It’s a story that works on its own merits, and gets the viewer to accept the world in which its characters make their lives. I could never really identify with DeNiro in Casino, but I identify with basically each of the Corleone family’s major players here. Their lives have been meticulously built for decades before the audience joins them. We see why they’re necessary to the survival of this family, this cultural force. We–I–get it. Even if I don’t really agree with it or like it very much.

So there you go, The Godfather, finally watched. It’s not going to be hurtling to the top of my personal Favorite Movies list, but it’s definitely going to be one of those films I think of when I consider the best examples of American art.