Marlon Brando as ‘The Godfather’

Marlon Brando (as the titular godfather, Don Vito Corleone) pets a distracted cat in the 1972 mafia movie The Godfather. The Oscar-winning film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, kicked off the unfortunate mobster phase in American movies that lasted for decades and decades, helped along by mob obsessives such as Martin Scorsese. Perhaps the craze will burn itself out by the year 2172; let's hope so. Marlon Brando was born in 1924, so he was only 48 when the film was released.