Characters and Situations -- "The Godfather" and "The Green Mile"

Both "The Godfather" and the prison epic "The Green Mile" depict characters at the center of moral dilemmas. To underline the significance of the ethical dramas of these characters, both films effectively make historical and literary parallels, as well as deploy the techniques of metaphors and visual and verbal symbolism, to give the characters and the plotlines a significance that transcends the purely 'entertainment' quality of the film.

For instance, the character of the Godfather played by Marlon Brando is immediately characterized as a man of power and immoral influence through the use of the literary or historical allusion of the singer at his daughter's wedding -- an obvious stand-in for the real-life Frank Sinatra, one of the most famous crooners of all time. But the exhibition of the Godfather Don Corleone is not limited to merely his association with...
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