In 1972, everyone was talking about the screen version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Who could forget the pageantry, the brutality, Marlon Brando stroking that cat? When awards season rolled around, The Godfather was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay. (It was a great year for movies. In the Best Director category, Francis Ford Coppola was beaten out by Bob Fosse and Cabaret.)
A mere two years later, a second Godfather film showed up on movie screens. With Brando’s Vita Corleone dead and gone, Godfather II focused on son and heir Michael (Al Pacino), now a reluctant crime boss trying to reconcile himself to his new power. Michael’s story in the present day is interwoven with that of Vito as a young man (Robert De Niro) leaving Sicily in response to the massacre of his family. Unusually for a sequel, Godfather II was perhaps even more admired by critics and audiences than the initial film. It was nominated for nine Oscars, and won an impressive six, becoming the first sequel ever to be named Best Picture, even though it was up against such masterworks as Chinatown.
You can’t blame Paramount Pictures, which had optioned Puzo’s 1969 novel, for wanting to take full advantage of its golden goose, even though, after the release of Godfather II, Coppola considered the Corleone saga complete. That’s why Paramount hired a string of established writers and directors to come up with Part III. Some versions had the Corleones working with the CIA in Latin America. One involved a turf war with the Irish Mafia in Atlantic City. In another, Michael Corleone is killed early on, and the entire focus is on his surviving children.
Some twenty years later, Puzo and Coppola were finally persuaded to return to the project, and much of the original cast signed on. The focus is now entirely on an ageing Michael, still trying to balance his criminal activities with a desire to lead a worthy life. It’s striking to see what time has done to the familiar Corleone family members. Michael is greying and fighting health problems. His estranged wife Kay (Diane Keaton) has a rather silly new hairdo, and her sadness over the hand she’s been dealt is a bit hard to buy. (Since we’ve all seen Keaton be adorably addled in Annie Hall, it’s easy to think she’d face tragedy with a blithe and dithering la-di-da.) Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire), whom we first met as a jubilant bride in Part One, has been turned by circumstance into a black-clad angel of death. New characters include Michael and Kay’s grown children. Son Anthony, who has turned his back on his father’s murderous ways, aspires to be an opera singer, and his stage debut in Palermo (in an opera that features Godfather-style violence) provides a nice excuse for the entire family to end up in Sicily. Daughter Mary (played by Coppola’s own daughter, future director Sofia) is her dad’s loyal sidekick. Her performance was much derided back in the day, but the truth is that it’s a thanklessly unconvincing role. And of course there are lots of thugs, connivers, and assassins-in-waiting. (Watch out if you see a cop or a priest on the streets; he’s probably a killer in disguise.)
What makes Godfather III worth watching? Coppola is still brilliant at staging public spectacle: a street fair, a night at the opera, an innocent-seeming place where danger lurks. Palermo and Manhattan both look gorgeous. And the music—that plaintive trumpet theme—lures us into a story that might not be quite worth telling.
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