Magazine Film Cover Analysis: The Godfather

I chose to look at this empire magazine cover as i believe it shows a great contrast between itself and other film based covers we would see promoting a film. The simplicity of the cover instead of using eye catching covers with writing and bright colours to draw in buyers, instead makes it stands out for the receiving audience, as it subverts from the normal by doing less, this would therefore attract an older audience to it.

The older audience is most likely due to be the target audience for this cover as the advertising film "The godfather" was filmed in 1972, Meaning the younger generation are less likely to be familiar with it, therefore it's purpose may be to introduce the picture to younger audiences due to the tagline seen at the bottom of the cover in small simple italic writing, "The greatest movie of all time", possibly due to the Sicilian heritage of the main characters,  trying to teach the younger generation of great film, by making this bold statement of stating that this is the greatest film ever made.

The image alone stands as an iconic tribute to the late Marlon Brando, who is widely considered the greatest actor of all time, with also winning the oscar for best actor in a leading role, through his portrayal of the leading character in "the godfather", Don Vito Corleone. The image is of Brando within his godfather character, showing the memorable "bulldog" cheeks that was created for his representation of the character.

Also contributing to this is the black and white effect used within the cover this again could be due to the original film poster,which was shown as a black and white cartoon styled image of Don Vito, with the only sense of colour being a red rose in his top pocket, although instead of red colour use, we see an almost gold toned text for both magazine's title and also the film's, showing the effect of gold to be 1st and valuable film.

The fact the the film's title is seen finely written in a small bold golden font underneath the image of Corleone, is showing the audience that the image alone is all that the receiving audience needs to know this film.