Francis Ford Coppola never wanted to make a third Godfather film. Then again, he never really wanted to make a second Godfather film either. But the fickle fortunes of the movie business have a way of getting talented directors to compromise their dreams or put them on hold for the fool’s gold of a fat paycheck and the promise of artistic freedom that may or may not lay somewhere down the road. And no one knows this Faustian bargain more intimately than Coppola.
The first two Godfather films were, are, and will always be indisputable American masterpieces. No one is going to argue that. And if they do, they’re idiots. Both films are the sort of sprawling, big-canvas epics that, if we’re lucky, we get once every generation. Both would win the Academy Award for Best Picture (in 1973 and 1975 respectively). And both would sluice gigantic rivers of loot into the Paramount vaults. But throughout his confounding ‘What If’ of a career, Coppola has always given the impression that, as brilliant and wildly successful as the first two Godfather films were, they were detours. Distractions that got in the way of the smaller, more personal kinds of films he always intended to make like 1974’s paranoia-soaked Gene Hackman thriller, The Conversation. “To me, the first Godfather was the Godfather, and everything else is greed,” he said before undertaking those sequels anyway.
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Here’s the thing about greed, though. Once you get used to the taste of it, you can get kind of drunk on the stuff. It’s addictive. The first two Godfather films gave Coppola both the financial resources and creative capital to go off and make 1979’s Apocalypse Now. But that movie’s interminable, descent-into-madness production in the Philippines would take an ineffable toll on the director’s subsequent output. Afterwards, something seemed to be missing—the Coppola spark of genius. In the decade that followed Apocalypse Now, Coppola wouldn’t direct another great film—or even a very good one. So when Paramount came knocking with the idea of revisiting the Corleone family for a third time at the end of the ‘80s, well, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I had deliberately left Michael for dead,” Coppola once said about the ending of The Godfather: Part II. “I never thought to visit him again.” The director admitted that when he was offered The Godfather: Part III, he was in a bad place both spiritually and financially. “I’m very embarrassed about my career over the last ten years,” he said at the time. Paramount boss Frank Mancuso knew this. And he also knew exactly what buttons to push with the reluctant, cash-strapped director, offering him a $5 million payday, 15% of the gross, and carte blanche with the third film’s story. To paraphrase Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.
For some mysterious reason I can’t explain, the conventional pop-culture wisdom on The Godfather: Part III is that it’s a bad movie. It’s not. I suppose it may be lacking in greatness if you’re measuring it against the first two chapters in the series. But by any other reasonable metric, it’s actually pretty damn good—certainly way better than its tarnished reputation would have you believe. The truth of the matter is that the reviews were mostly positive when it was released on Christmas day, 1990. It made $136 million at the box office. And it was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. But most likely because it had the misfortune of coming out three months after Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, it couldn’t help but pale in comparison. Coppola’s film was sepia-tinted, elegiac, and old-fashioned; Scorsese’s was flashy, coked to the gills, and thrillingly alive and modern.
Coppola has always been a notorious tinkerer with his own movies. He keeps messing around with them in an attempt to either stall for time while trying to come up with a new masterwork, or in an unhealthy obsession to iron out tiny imperfections that he thinks will burnish his legacy in his old age. He is now 81 and the window for one last artistic triumph seems to be closing quickly. Like his old pal George Lucas constantly tweaking and re-tweaking his Star Wars films, the paint never seems to be fully dry on his celluloid canvases. There is always another mulligan to take.
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Now, on the heels of Coppola’s recent restorations of Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club, he’s finally been given permission by the new administration at Paramount to return to The Godfather: Part III for another Do Over, editing shears in hand. And while I’m usually pretty skeptical about these sorts of big, splashy nip-and-tuck facelifts (more often than not, they’re little more than craven excuses to peddle a few thousand anniversary Blu-rays), it turns out that there actually was a better movie than the Godfather: Part III we saw the first time around 30 years ago.
The first and most obvious change is a pretty superficial one. The film is no longer called The Godfather: Part III at all. It’s been re-titled The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. In an introduction to the new edit, Coppola appears on screen to explain that this was always meant to be the title of the film when he and Mario Puzo sat down to write it. “In musical terms, a coda is an epilogue, a summing up,” he says. “And that’s what I intended the movie to be.”
The new version of The Godfather: Part III (sorry, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone) has a new beginning, a new ending, and a few scenes that have been repositioned. First, the beginning. The new cut opens with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone meeting with New York’s archbishop to discuss bailing out the Vatican bank to the tune of $600 million in exchange for the Vatican’s shares in a European real-estate conglomerate called Immobiliare. The deal will finally make Michael a “legitimate” businessman, cleansing the stain of his mafia past. The new beginning immediately submerges us into what will become the film’s main driving plot and scraps a lot of the flabby, superfluous table-setting from the original cut. The change in pace and momentum is a massive improvement.
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (Blu-ray + Digital)
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Then there’s the ending. After the climactic bloodbath at the Sicilian opera house where Michael’s son is making his professional debut and the corpses pile up like cordwood as all family business is settled (with some unintended tragic consequences), the original cut’s flashback sequences are done away with. Instead, we are shown Michael in old age, sitting in a rustic courtyard much like Marlon Brando’s Vito Corelone at the end of the first Godfather—a clever mirroring technique that adds poignancy and resonance to the closing chapter and brings the whole saga full circle. He does not die. At least, not physically. He is already dead spiritually. It’s straight out of Shakespeare and it works.
Three decades ago, production on The Godfather: Part III was rocky from the get-go. Paramount gave Coppola and Puzo six weeks to write the script. It took them six months. Then the screenplay had to be totally overhauled when Robert Duvall refused to return as the family’s consigliere, Tom Hagen. The actor was insulted by Paramount’s lowball salary offer for the third film, saying, “I didn’t think it was fair that they offered the lead actor [meaning Pacino] four and a half times to five times as much as they offered me.” Duvall walked. Then there was the casting of Michael Corleone’s daughter, Mary. Winona Ryder had signed on for the pivotal part, but when she arrived on the set in Rome after wrapping Mermaids, she complained of suffering from exhaustion. A doctor examined her and agreed. The studio wanted to a big star to take her place. But Coppola was under the gun and gave the part to his 19-year-old daughter Sofia.
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Today, Sofia Coppola is a world-famous director (Lost in Translation) whose star has basically eclipsed even her famous father’s to a younger generation of film fans. But as anyone who’s seen The Godfather: Part III already knows, she was not much of an actress. And the critics were needlessly cruel in eviscerating her admittedly pouty, wooden performance. When you’re 19 and you’ve never really acted before (nor do you have any designs to be a professional actress) and you’re just doing your under-the-gun dad a favor, how do you not just curl up into a fetal ball after being on the business end of such personal attacks?
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Yes, she’s distractingly amateurish in the film. But the script didn’t really do her any favors. As Mary falls in love with her cousin Vincent (Andy Garcia channeling his dead, hot-headed father, Sonny), she’s saddled with scenes that stop the film dead in its tracks. In one extreme howler, she and Garcia’s Vincent give into their semi-incestuous urges while making gnocchi together. As their flour-covered fingers intertwine, it’s so unintentionally hilarious that it makes the pottery scene in Ghost look like Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence. It hasn’t gotten any less wince-inducing with age.
Still, I was surprised at how well the rest of the film played two decades after I last sat down to watch it. No, George Hamilton is no substitute for Duvall as Michael’s smarmy adviser/right-hand man. Eli Wallach’s death-by-poisoned-cannoli scene feels lifted from the pages of a Mad magazine movie parody. And some of the plot beats are needlessly Byzantine. But Pacino really commits to the King Lear-ness of it all as he cycles through moments of regret, guilt, and grief with heartbreaking realism. It’s a monster performance completely in sync with everything that’s come before it in the first two films—and also completely overlooked.
If Coppola’s heart wasn’t in The Godfather: Part III as he’s often maintained, you’d never know it from watching the latest version of the film. It’s easily the best thing he’s made since 1979. Which isn’t saying much, but still…. Is it a pantheon-worthy classic on the same tier as The Godfathers I and II? No, but then again, what is? Either way, it’s definitely worthy of re-evaluation. It may not be perfect, even in its new-and-improved incarnation. But in 2020, it’s now harder than ever to make the case that The Godfather: Part III is the poor, hapless Fredo of the franchise.
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