CREDITS THE GODFATHER, 1972 dir: Francis Ford Coppola Marlon Brando Al Pacino James Caan Diane Keaton Robert Duvall Talia Shire Robert Duvall John Cazale Franco Citti

“My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.”

With mafia movies out of fashion and a relatively unknown director at the helm, Paramount was keen to cut costs by updating the film of Mario Puzo's best-seller to the present day and filming on its Hollywood lot.

But as paperback sales hit 12 million copies, the studio reluctantly conceded to Francis Ford Coppola’ s demands, and much of the film was shot on real locations in New York.

Even the studio filming was done on the east coast, at New York’s Filmways Studios, 246 East 127th Street, East Harlem at Second Avenue. The studio has since closed down, and is now a huge supermarket called Foodways.

The wedding scene, at the Corleone compound on ‘Long Island’, did film on an island over the water from New York – not on Long Island, but Staten Island. The outdo or festivities were staged in the garden of 120 Longfellow Road, in the affluent neighbourhood of Emerson Hill. The Corleone Mansion itself is next door at 110 Longfellow Road.

The Staten Island Rapid Transit Railway will take you from St George Station, four stops to Grasmere. From here, it’s about a half hour’s walk north to Longfellow Road, a leafy cul-de-sac running east from Ocean Terrace. Numbers 110 and 120 are the last houses at the end of the road.

When Don Corleone sends his consigliore, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), to Hollywood, to make the studio head the infamous ‘offer he can’t refuse’, there’s a great newsreel shot of the old Hollywood, with Hollywood United Methodist Church on Highland Avenue (featured in movies as far back as George Cukor’s 1932 What Price Hollywood?) and Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard still recognisable from the days before the area became swamped by tacky tourist shops.

The Paramount lot, 5451 Marathon Street at Bronson Avenue behind Melrose Avenue in Hollywood (the studio lot featured in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd) stands in for ‘Woltz International Pictures’. After Woltz eventually agrees to meet up with Hagen, it’s a rare case of an East Coast residence standing in for Hollywood.

The Godfather location: horse's head in the bedroom of Woltz's 'Hollywood' villa: Falaise, Sands Point Preserve, Long Island

The bedroom of Woltz’s villa, where the studio boss finds the head of his unfortunate horse, is the living room of Falaise, on Sands Point Preserve, the Guggenheim estate way out at 95 Middleneck Road on Long Island. You can see the room if you visit the Preserve, which also houses mansions seen in Scent Of A Woman, in the summer months. It’s about four miles north of Point Washington (there’s a cab firm near the station), on the Long Island Railroad from New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Seventh Avenue.

The exterior of Woltz’s mansion, seen also as Whitney Houston’s estate in The Bodyguard, really is LA. It’s the enormous Beverly Hills estate at 1011 North Beverly Drive. Built in the 1920s, and once owned by William Randolph Hearst (the newspaper magnate on whom Citizen Kane was based), it was put on the market in 2007 for $165 million.

Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) and Kay (Diane Keaton) are staying at the grand St Regis Hotel, now the St Regis, 2 East 55th Street (tel: 212/767.0525) on the corner of Fifth Avenue. Nearby stood Best & Co, the New York department store where they do their Christmas shopping, on Fifth Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets in the fashionable stretch of ‘Ladies’ Mile’. Although already closed, the store briefly blazed back to life for filming before being demolished.

Sadly, the model-train heaven, Polk’s Hobby Shop, which stood at 314 Fifth Avenue near 31st Street, is also gone. This is where Tom Hagen stocks up on presents when Sollozzo’s men invite him for a car ride. It has now been replaced by a pizza joint.

The Godfather location: Luca Brasi goes to meet Sollozzo: Edison Hotel, West 47th Street

The bar, where Sollozzo meets up with Luca Brasi, is the Edison Hotel, 228 West 47th Street. You’ll recognise the slightly redecorated corridor with its circular mirrors as the lobby of mobster Nick Valenti’s penthouse in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. It’s inside what is now Sophiaís Restaurant, the Edison’s coffee shop, that Brasi is pinned down to the counter and garrotted.

The ‘Genco Olive Oil’ premises, supposedly on Mulberry Street, outside which the Don is gunned down, was the Mietz Building, 128 Mott Street, a then-unchanged area between Little Italy and Chinatown. The relentless encroachment of Chinatown into Little Italy means that the building has since been gutted and has become a Chinese market, though the ‘Mietz’ name is still visible on the frontage. The art deco entrance was created especially for the movie.

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