in values between the first generation Italian-American Vito Corleone who still follows the traditional code of honor of a Mafiosi vs. his Americanized son Michael, who during the course of the films comes to lose all his moral bearings as greed consumes him. Marlon Brando who played Vito Corleone described his character: "I had a great deal of respect for Vito Corleone: I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, refinement, a man of unerring instinct who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment". The American author Tom Santopietro argued that much of the appeal of the Godfather lay with the way Brando played his character as an Old World gentleman who still lived by his traditional values such as omertà (the Mafia code of silence) and a certain modesty, which stood in stark contrast to modern American values, most notably the way in which the media relentlessly publicized everything relating to the lives of the famous. Santopietro argued the way in which the media never allowed any privacy together with the way in which many Americans were happy to share the most intimate details of their lives made omertà all the "more alluring" in modern America. The Godfather films also offered up a perverted version of the "American Dream" trope as the Corleones rise up to power and wealth via thoroughly illegal and brutal means. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, events such as the Vietnam War and various social protest movements had caused many Americans to lose confidence in traditional American values, and so the twisted, dark version of the "American Dream" theme had a particular appeal when The Godfather was released in 1972. Since the Corleone family become more powerful under the leadership of the "ruthless and business-oriented" Michael Corleone than it was under the leadership of his father, the Godfather saga seems to be suggesting that these are the qualities that American society rewards. The film's director, Francis Ford Coppola, had intended The Godfather to be an indictment of American society as he envisioned the story of the Corleones to be a metaphor for what he saw as the underhanded methods of American big business and of the U.S. government. Coppola envisioned the moral degeneration of Michael Corleone as a metaphor for what he perceived as the moral degeneration of America, saying: "Like