Songwriter Roger Radcliffe lives in a bachelor flat in London, England along with his dalmatian Pongo. Bored with bachelor life, Pongo decides to find a wife for Roger and a mate for himself. While watching various female dog-human pairs out the window, he spots the perfect couple, a woman named Anita and her female dalmatian, Perdita. He quickly gets Roger out of the house and drags him through the park to arrange a meeting. Pongo accidentally causes both Roger and Anita to fall into a pond, but it works out well as the couple falls in love. Both couples marry.

Later, Perdita gives birth to 15 puppies. One almost dies, but Roger is able to revive it by rubbing it in a towel. That same night, they are visited by Cruella De Vil, a wealthy and materialistic former schoolmate of Anita's. She offers to buy the entire litter for a large sum, but Roger says they are not for sale. Weeks later, she hires Jasper and Horace Badun to steal them. When Scotland Yard is unable to determine the thieves or find the puppies, Pongo and Perdita use the "Twilight Bark", normally a canine gossip line, to ask for help from the other dogs in London.

101 Dalmatians (1961)

Michael Corleone has succeeded in making his “family” a top force in Lake Tahoe, Nevada and he seeks to expand his empire to pre-revolutionary Cuba. Meanwhile, the early life of his father, Vito Corleone, is chronicled as he rises to power in the 1920s.

The first Godfather was ambitious. The second film in this legendary series is even more so. With Part II, director Coppola decides that a sequel to his Oscar Award-winning movie just isn’t enough. No. Instead he decides to make a sequel AND a prequel and turn them into the same movie. The film follows Michael Corleone after he has risen to power and moved his operations to Lake Tahoe. From there he must maneuver his way through a web of Mafia politics that include an old co-hort of his father’s, Hyman Roth, and his own brother. On top of this he also survives an attempt on his life, deals with betrayal, escapes Cuba during the revolution and even

The Godfather II (1974)

Broadly speaking, the first Godfather is a generic gangster film with arthouse trimmings and the second is an arthouse film with generic gangster trimmings, but both blockbusters encompass masterful American adaptations and appropriations of recent Italian cinema. The first and best sequence in the first film, built around a wedding, is indebted to the remarkable, protracted ball in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) while the stylish, nostalgic handling of period décor in the second appears to owe something to Bertolucci’s The Comformist (1971); and both would of course be diminished considerably without the catchy music drawn from Fellini’s habitual composer. The outsized success of both Godfathers helped to mark the eclipse of foreign film distribution in the U.S. for the sake of glossy American art movies, a little bit before Woody Allen’s (and Martin Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s) mining of similar fields started to take hold.

I’m certainly not claiming that Godfathers I and II lack moral ambiguity and nuance and that cherished hits necessarily lack such qualities.

The Godfather 1 (1972)