STAY GOLD
THE GODFATHER PART III & the Bright Legacy of Francis Ford Coppola
In 1971 Francis Ford Coppola was a self-invented mogul in the making who had skirted some success and mostly staved off disaster before an offer came his way that would change his life. An offer, ironically, he initially refused. After years spent trying to establish his San Francisco-based American Zoetrope as the modern studio that would render the old Hollywood system obsolete, he had little fruit to show for his labor aside from expensive, next-level film equipment, a roster of talent signed that had yet to fulfill their promise, and a self-possessed genius that had yet to manifest itself fully on the big screen. 1968’s THE RAIN PEOPLE finally showed the critics what he was capable of, but it was his script for PATTON in 1970 that paid first dividends. The Oscar for Best Screenplay didn’t hurt either. Now Paramount Pictures and its head of production, Robert Evans, came calling, with a monster best seller whose rights the studio found itself in possession of. He wasn’t their first choice, he wasn’t even their second or third. Still, with the prospect of quick cash to bail his nascent studio out of hock, he found the offer of hack-for-hire, adapting what he deemed an airport best-seller at best, beneath him. It was his friend and protégé George Lucas who nudged him into it, almost like a heist-flick mentality: travel light, get in, get out, leave no fingerprints, easy score, just to get Zoetrope back into the black. Coppola bit the bullet and took the job.
Of course, the artist was just too strong in the man, and what he initially strode into as a hack gig soon found his fingerprints everywhere, to the point where all other things were nearly blotted out. The result, as the world and posterity knows, was one of the crowning achievements of the cinema. It won Best Picture and broke box office records. It wowed even the most jaded critics and solidified the emerging Director’s Era. He was now not only the successful head of American Zoetrope, not only a bone fide screen genius, he was that elusive and most-prized appellation of the early 70’s New Hollywood: the auteur. THE GODFATHER bestowed all of this upon him.
He wasted no time, shepherding his friend Lucas’s first breakthrough film, 1973’s smash hit AMERICAN GRAFFITI, arguing the case for his other Zoetrope crew, names like Philip Kaufman, Caleb Deschanel, and John Milius. He prepped his next opus, an examination of the steady creep of surveillance culture, even as Paramount begged him to follow up his gangster epic, an assignment he DOUBLY refused. “What more was there to say?”, he thought out loud at the offer. The combination of the dare, the risk, the artistic and financial potential and, frankly, his swelling ego ultimately led him to take on the challenge. The result? In 1974 he produced two films of equal resonance and influence, the intimate, heady character study THE CONVERSATION, and the miraculous THE GODFATHER PART II, which not only served as companion piece to the former film, but broke out to examine the American 20th century in its own unique epic manner. He repeated his Best Picture win and justly won Best Director for his second go-round with the clan Corleone. It seemed like, now that he’d found success, or perhaps that the world was now in full recognition of his genius, Coppola could do no wrong.
And maybe that was the case. Finding himself with no immediate follow up project, yet wanting to move quickly to enhance his stature and that of his beloved American Zoetrope, he dusted off an older project once earmarked for Lucas and penned by Milius. APOCALYPSE NOW was to be a modestly-budgeted, self-financed affair, taking advantage of the Philippine locale Roger Corman had thrived in due to its mud-level economy. Third World exploitation very soon led to Third World nightmares, as the production, beset by tropical storms, civil war and the near death of its lead actor, quickly became a sinkhole for Coppola’s personal fortune. Many made the parallel between Coppola’s film and its Vietnam war subject, so-called civilized western man losing himself and his money and resources in the jungle. In fact such comparisons were to become de rigeur for not only Coppola but the others of his New Hollywood tribe, each film a chapter in a director’s autobiography. Such was the result of auteur status. During production Coppola would find this a most unwelcome comparison. After its premiere he wrapped himself in it like a flag.
Coppola had managed to turn a potential $40 million disaster into arguably the film of 1979, and a masterpiece to equal his achievements with Puzo’s fictional clan. He gamely faced the new decade as one of its mightiest survivors. Think about it. Even Spielberg was crossing his knees at the dawn of the 80’s, afraid that the failure of 1941 might be the anchor hung around his neck. Friedkin and Bogdanovich, his partners in the quickly annulled Director’s Company, were coming off more than one box office flop and uncertain of their place in the pecking order. His buddy Lucas had yet to release THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, which, it seems impossible to think today, was no sure thing back then (anyone remember MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI?). Altman had yet to implode with POPEYE. DePalma had never spun his stature as professor emeritus at the dinner table to equal status onscreen. Scorsese was about to release RAGING BULL, which would absolutely cement his status as genius filmmaker but severely cripple his ability to be his own boss. By 1980 Coppola had spent some clout to present the great film preservationist Kevin Brownlow’s painstaking restoration of Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece NAPOLEAN. He had joined forces with George Lucas to secure finances for their hero Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece KAGEMUSHA. He had produced USC colleague Carrol Ballard’s hit version of THE BLACK STALLION. He had founded a culture magazine (City), he had purchased a prestigious boutique distribution company (Cinema 5). He loomed impossibly large on the cinematic landscape, both in America and abroad. Coppola remained the only King Kong of his generation of Hollywood directors. That, sadly, would soon change.
Lucas often spoke of his brotherly status with Coppola, how he felt adopted by the older filmmaker. He’s unabashedly admitted that Coppola is the model for Han Solo, the gambler who risks big and loses just as big. He’s spoken of this regard in terms of both caution and envy, how he learned not to take the risks his “older brother” took but how he romanticized them as well. Coppola was about to take his biggest risk. On the heels of what seemed infallible decision-making he marched forth into his long-held dream project: making American Zoetrope an actual, functioning production studio with its own active lot. A modern day iteration of the classic Golden Age studio with all the amenities of advanced technology, with himself as a kind of Thalberg/Warner/Welles at the helm. Between the founding of United Artists in 1919 and Dreamworks SKG in 1996, it would be the only artist-run studio on that kind of scale. He repeated the gamble of APOCALYPSE, only instead of staking a film he purchased Hollywood General Cinema, a reserve backlot and production facility that served as resource for major studios whose lots were fully booked, as well as poverty row studios looking for cheap day work. By 1980 it was no longer in demand and in dire disrepair, but like Ackroyd scouting the fire station in GHOSTBUSTERS, Coppola fell in love with the ghosts this place repped. He put up his fortune current and future to gain it, then to outfit it in his image of the modern film Mecca. Every space was wired for sound, for film and video. He pretty much invented the practice of turning storyboards into a kind of dirt cheap low budget version of the film to be made, what’s now called pre-visualization, or PreViz. His intention was to modernize production and futurize distribution, availing himself of the most modern methods, some so modern they had yet to exist, in order to eradicate Old Hollywood on his terms. He decided to film a modest love story, both to test out his new facility and prove it was the way forward, and to generate a quick cash infusion for his new investment. Indulgence replaced the jungle this time, and Coppola served as his own mire. What was supposed to cost 3 or 4 million dollars wound up at 23 million, and suddenly Coppola’s new venture was as heavy with risk as the Titanic was with the Atlantic. He released it as a special engagement, in an effort to prove its commercial viability to the majors he still hoped to sway, personally serving hot split pea soup to the folks who’d waited in line at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. It was at best a wonderful cult movie, beloved by few in 1980 but to millions more as the decades sped past and basic cable and VCR’s turned to DVD and BluRay and streaming. It is a wonderful, warm, unique love story, both charmingly lowbrow and the stuff of hazy blissful woo. However, as commercial venture, ONE FROM THE HEART sank like a stone, and stalled its maker’s plans dead in their tracks.
What followed was a decade of films normally defined as Coppola’s “Wilderness Years”, much the same as his contemporary Scorsese, who I also argue had a more fertile period between 1980 and 1990 than his chroniclers seem to believe. While Scorsese relegated himself to lower budgets and work-for hire, in pursuit of financial credibility AND artistic resilience, Coppola made bold moves in an attempt to maintain his status. He held the rights to a very popular YA novel, a property much desired by the major studios. He manage to parlay this acquisition into a money deal that helped him stave off bankruptcy while offering the opportunity to create, as he described it, the teenage GONE WITH THE WIND. THE OUTSIDERS was a mild financial hit upon release, but most critics felt Coppola had bloated what was a more intimate story, more akin perhaps to THE LAST PICTURE SHOW than the scale of Selznick’s Civil War epic. He followed this with another property by the same author, one S.E. Hinton, only this time he ran in the complete opposite direction, making perhaps the first art house, existential treatise on teen ennui with 1983’s RUMBLEFISH. It was the kind of artistic daring and technical bravura his New Hollywood fans had come to love and expect from the auteur, and was met with critical indifference and box office crickets upon release. His debts mounted, his choices narrowed.
He agreed to a lucrative offer from his personal Voldemort, the once golden but now tattered Robert Evans, his GODFATHER benefactor/tormentor, to direct a property Evans had been prepping for years, a swing and prohibition era gangster epic set in Harlem. Jazz, guns and sex was the mantra going in. Coppola soon ousted Evans from the set and took complete charge of the production, something its financiers had been hoping for all along. At the 11th hour Coppola was pressured to cut the film of nearly all the narrative relating to its African American characters, something he found not merely impractical but ridiculous, seeing as it was set in Harlem, specifically at its most famous jazz club, and all its musical numbers revolved around the people of color in its cast. Nevertheless he caved, the film was released to mostly positive reviews but not raves, it made money but not a fortune, and Coppola found himself pretty much in the same financial spot he’d come into the project with. It would take him 25 years to return to the film, THE COTTON CLUB, to undo the damage he’d done in ‘84. The resulting ENCORE restoration was a revelation to critics and fans alike.
After this Coppola navigated the decade with varying focus and results, regrettably hindered by constant restructuring of his debts and the looming specter of bankruptcy. The films were interesting, if not always successful. He narrowed his ambition and focus and produced a minor gem with PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, a much-needed hit that also scored an Oscar nomination for star Kathleen Turner. He scored a quick payday joining with Lucas and Michael Jackson to produce CAPTAIN EO for Disneyland. He made a serious, sober meditation on the cost of the Vietnam war for those who served stateside in GARDENS OF STONE, reuniting with GODFATHER star James Caan. The film fared only reasonably well with fans and flaks. He returned to the big gamble, albeit with Lucas’ wallet, on the terrific, jitterbug-charged biopic TUCKER: A MAN AND HIS DREAM, but again found tepid response. An offer from Touchstone studios brought Coppola together with his fellow Manhattanites Scorsese and Woody Allen for the appropriately, if unimaginatively, titled NEW YORK STORIES, an end of-the-decade boost for all three men critically and commercially. Except it failed to do so. As the decade closed it seemed by most assessments the 80’s had been a productive one for Coppola. Although he still found himself dogged by financial woes, he’d innovated the cinema in terms of technical advance and found some creative success as well. But he wasn’t the Big Dog anymore, he’d relinquished King Kong status nearly as quickly as he’d attained it. Ironically, perhaps maddeningly, that status was now conferred on his onetime protégé and lifelong adopted little brother, George Lucas, and George’s pal Steven Spielberg. Coppola was no longer Napoleon, no longer Colonel Kurtz, no longer the Capo di Tutti Capi of his best decade. As poetic justice often has it, however, he was about to get his second shot at the throne. Perhaps his last.
Sometime in the early months of 1989 Frank Mancuso, then CEO of Paramount Pictures, made what had become by then a routine yet fruitless annual overture, an offer to Coppola to helm yet another sequel, the final chapter in the GODFATHER saga. This tryst had been ongoing since 1974, when Coppola beat the odds to create a follow up that not only repeated as Best Picture but, in the eyes of many, had bested the first film, itself a modern masterpiece. Since then Coppola had repeated the same mantra spoken in the wake of the first film, “What story is there left to tell?” Only this time the studio had their answer; “That’s what you said after the FIRST film.” In the intervening 16 years there has been multiple sequel projects mooted; a 70’s-set film with John Travolta as Michael’s son; a script by Vincent Patrick (THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE), an outline from Micheal Eisner, then-head of production at Paramount, a treatment by Mario Puzo himself; and a last minute plug-pull on a threequel written, directed and starring Sylvester Stallone! You read that last one right! None of it, of course, went anywhere beyond talk. No one at Paramount or in the audience seriously expected a third film to materialize without Coppola’s participation. It was unheard of. So this dance was had, year after year, ever upping the ante in one further attempt to make an offer he couldn’t refuse. In Spring 1989, to the astonishment of many, not the least of whom Mancuso himself, he finally relented. Again, the risk, the dare, the artistic and financial potential, and the last bold bellow of ego proved too tempting. Especially the financial part.
As well as the chance to reunite with the cast, probably for the last time, with Pacino and Keaton and kid sister Tally, with “Prince of Darkness” DP Gordon Willis and production designer Dean Tavoularis, with story collaborator and original author Mario Puzo, and to command the kind of budget he’d lorded over at the peak of his powers, the deal Mancuso and Paramount offered would fully dig Coppola out of the financial hole he’d languished in for a decade. At the very least it offered a clean break, a fresh slate, or as Michael himself would term it, a chance to get out. But where to start? Was there a point? And how would it end? Coppola now found himself asking the very question he’d posed year after year to those clamoring for a third film: what story is left to tell?
Or did he? There’s a great line author John Le Carre gave to his greatest creation, superspy George Smiley: every fanatic harbors a secret doubt. No artist of Coppola’s prowess would publicly insist there was no there there without secretly asking himself “what if?”. Friends and colleagues have stated publicly that Coppola had, whether in jest or secretly teasing out reaction, proposed fragmented plot strands or character sketch for a possible third outing over the years. It’s more than probable that he’d already had a good idea, perhaps even a solid outline, of where he’d take the Corleone family for a third installment, a final journey. Still, as great as the potential reward was on the project the terms were harsh: he signed onto the project without a script and would begin to batter one out with Puzo immediately and for a very abbreviated term, but the immutable agreement twixt filmmaker and studio held a Christmas Day 1990 release date. Come Hell or high water, no matter what state the film was in, the world would see it that day. That gave Coppola just over a year to conceive the story with Puzo, begin pre-production, shoot, wrangle the ingredients in post, preview for the critics and present THE GODFATHER PART III to the public, for better or worse. The challenge in and of itself must have quickened his pulse, the artist once more asked to best all challenges to his vision. Still, such challenges must’ve weighed quite heavily on the man. The GODFATHER films had made his rep and fortune, formed the cornerstone of his legacy. A third trip to the well could prove calamitous. But now the deal was made, the oath sworn. Like Tom Hagen, it was time to have his drink, and then to tell his tale.
Coppola’s audaciousness remained fully intact, if not now emboldened. After negotiating the corruption of the American family in the first film, and the government in the second, he and Puzo now set their sights on perhaps the biggest institutionalized taboo, the Catholic Church. This was decades before the church’s scandals would become widely known and it would become its own worst enemy. In 1990 it was controversial stuff to make the Vatican the bad guy in a Hollywood movie. But go big or go home, this was Francis Ford Coppola, swinging for the fences like his best days at bat. Also, logically, there was nowhere else for Michael to go, no higher institution whose hypocrisy he’d yet to encounter, to challenge, and ultimately to best. Paramount and Mancuso had no problem at all. They’d gotten their Coppola and their GODFATHER III and their Christmas Day release. They were happy to indulge their auteur’s artistic vision.
His first stumbling block involved money, much to everyone’s surprise. Robert Duvall, very much an integral part of Coppola’s plans, was insisting on equal pay with Pacino to return as Hagen, family consigliere and lone surviving brother, though not blood, of Michael Corleone. Paramount balked at his asking price, what in the scheme of things had to seem an infinitesimal quibble considering the prestige and profit potential of the project. In a stunning move Paramount walked away from negotiations, and Coppola, clock ticking ever louder, decided to write Duvall out of the film. Surprise turned to shock. It was a most foreboding omen of the film to come. Coppola and Puzo proceeded apace with one strike already against.
John Savage and George Hamilton, accomplished actors who’d enjoyed both lead and character success, joined the cast to help fill the Duvall void, as son and family legal counsel respectively. The rethinking of the latter’s role seems at first a fleeting nod to an absent member of the family, but it’s also quite telling of where Coppola and clan had arrived in the sixteen years since they’d parted ways with the Corleones. American Zoetrope had begun much like Genco’s, the olive oil importer and family ally from the source novel, relegated to the second film. Small but ambitious, family run, and those who joined the team became adopted family. By the start of the second film Coppola’s vision of Zoetrope has flourished, but it was still a family run concern, run from his Napa estate, with himself at the head of the table. The character of Tom Hagen represented this tight-knit dinner table sensibility, even as the Corleones, or the Coppolas, were branching out and meeting more and more well-financed, well-connected and perhaps more sophisticated allies or competitors or flat-out enemies. Times had changed for Coppola’s Zoetrope, itself an entity that had swirled through various permutations and now found itself a vague emeritus label overseeing its makers film holdings, what remained by 1990. Coppola, like Michael, was now older, removed from some of his close-held, familial ways of the Old World and skating with fleet and flair with the modern money- and tech-obsessed 80’s. No wonder Fredo had to go, there could be no ballast to weigh down this post-modern vision of America. So, a new lawyer, a new flashy Wall Street mouthpiece, with the white teeth and tan skin and slim grey suit of George Hamilton, he was to represent the face of Corleone, and therefore Coppola. After all, if Michael could lose a brother to consolidate his power, what was a half brother to Coppola?
Nevertheless the liquid papering of Hagen set the sked back to allow time for a rewrite. Shortly after principal photography got under way in Italy, the second pitfall hit the production. Winona Ryder, who’d beaten out a host of other then-hot actors for the key role of Mary Corleone, Michael and Kay’s daughter, arrived straight off the back-to-back filming of two other features and collapsed of exhaustion. It surely served as a reminder to Coppola of Martin Sheen’s scrape with the reaper on APOCALYPSE NOW, and he might’ve found it a poetic stanza in his oeuvre had the train he’d set in motion not been this particular behemoth of expenditure and expectancy. Unlike APOCALYPSE, Ryder’s character was supporting, not lead, and unlike that film Coppola was now in Europe, not the jungle. A delay to accommodate the actress was unthinkable, it had to be recast. After reportedly giving great consideration to Madonna (to allayoo who say it couldn’t have been worse!), Coppola threw the cast, the crew, the studio, the press and the breath-abated world a curveball and made a decision that still provokes heated argument to this day: he cast his nineteen year old daughter Sofia in the role. For those of you who remember the Y2K foofaraw, this was that. Only ten years earlier.
Sofia Coppola is mostly known today as a serious filmmaker in her own right, a unique voice helping to maintain a mid-budget art house cinema that has been steadily under assault since the 80’s. Once upon a time, however, she was double bullseye to critics, ticket-buyers, late night hosts, gossip columnists, really anyone who squeezed two nickels together for telling a cheap, lazy joke. She’d come to the Italian leg of the shoot to visit her parents, on school break. She was informed almost instantly by her mother, Eleanor Coppola, that her father wanted her to report to set. She was now Mary Corleone, her father had decided thus. Had staked the whole production on thus, it seemed. Sofia was no stranger to her father’s filmography, having appeared in PEGGY SUE and RUMBLEFISH and, really, as far back as Connie and Carlo’s baptized newborn in the first GODFATHER film. There was the sense of destiny about this moment, perhaps. Back in ‘71 he’d chosen to cast his sister Talia as Connie, had employed his father Carmine to compose the score (with legendary composer Nino Rita providing the immortal theme music). This whole endeavor was about family, about the Corleone family and the Coppola family. His blood had served him well in the past, why wouldn’t he think his young charge would serve as both life-saver and good luck charm? Coppola cast the die, the neophyte was on board, the script was revised yet again, and the production, still teetering in its rails, was soon at full speed again.
There is a third upheaval that this chapter in The Godfather saga fell victim to, but it is one that is rarely mentioned, not in terms of its production anyway. It’s rarely mentioned because it came three years before its start, but its reverberations were still seismic by 1989-90. Francis Ford Coppola suffered the loss of his oldest son, Gio, in a boating accident in 1986. Of all the blows he suffered in that decade of upheaval, of financial terror and marital crisis and self-doubt, nothing came close to this. The kind of loss some never recover from. I bring this up because I believe it to be a key factor, along with his predicament financial, that finally led Coppola to relent and tell this final chapter he’d been avoiding for 16 years. I also believe it to be a prime motivation in the Sofia decision. He had indeed finally found something to say, a story left to tell, or rather his own story, the story of his last decade, of all the peaks and craters, the love and the love not lost, the bonds of family and friends, the deceit and deceptions and even betrayal of self. It’s this loss though, I believe, that Coppola ultimately needed to stage for the world, to answer for publicly, this loss that formed the nucleus of the project. In a moment of grand opera, or Sicilian theater, or ever Gran Guignol, he would cast his own daughter to play out this loss, one child stepping in for another, the living portraying the departed. It was this scream that had no voice that Coppola needed to purge himself of, as his proxy self, Michael Corleone, grieves not only the weight of his sins, but the failure to protect his child.
It’s one of the more remarkable moments of cinema that Coppola has ever given us, and though a great deal of the initial audience may have already fell full gaze into their popcorn by this point, it has lost none of its raw power, its primal human pulse and pang, in subsequent viewings over the last three decades. It may be the most naked he has ever allowed himself to be as a filmmaker, surely as a blockbuster filmmaker, as stripped down and marked with his own blood as Willard in that hotel room.
When a train is delayed, it’s never just an inconvenience for that particular line. It means all other lines have to deal with its delay. Switches have to be made, timetables adjusted. No engine is as affected as the one causing the pause. As others scramble to remake their immediate destinies, the errant diesel does its damndest to realign the entire map in order to make its destination at something close to its original ETA. A film of this particular production’s magnitude is no different. What Paramount seemed to save with its accelerated start time and declination of Duvall’s salary demands it more than paid for in delays due to those decisions, as the script demanded constant revision and even re-think. As the film neared post-production Coppola decided an entire new sequence needed to be shot, on location in New York City, Little Italy to be precise, none too far from where he made his east coast home. Cutters were frantically assembling what he’d already filmed, in a breakneck race to complete a rough version, as he made this decision. It was the kind of thing Coppola did and does, the cost matters not if the art suffers because of it. This reunion with Paramount all but guaranteed his decision was not only sanctioned by the purse-stringers, but judged good publicity for its gamble. The scene in question would turn out to be a much-needed action beat, a violent dramatic release in a film of mostly verbal tête-à-tête, mirroring the injections of violence he’d played up in the first film, the Solozzo rub-out and Sonny’s tollbooth demise, twin examples of what Coppola might have deemed overcompensation for a very talky film, and had now become ritual with this series. His instincts proved correct again: both naysayer and acolyte to the finished product praised at least this sequence for its fealty to the original entries.
After this final shoot, there was nothing left but the assemblage, the grand coming together of all the elements disparate or harmonious he’d harvested up to this point. It was a lot, and it didn’t always seem to line up at first, but in much the same way the first two films were chiseled in post there was a statue in the center of all that marble, and Coppola relied not just upon his own instincts but the venerable skills of Barry Malkin and the legendary Walter Murch, both of whom had worked on the previous GODFATHER films. This team raced to the deadline with both the power of legacy and the weight of expectation. In the macro it had to live up to the near-mythic scale of its predecessors. In the micro, it was arriving in a film season perhaps overcrowded with similar genre. The newly-minted critical darling Coen Brothers were about to release MILLER’S CROSSING, a prohibition-era Tommy gun saga following up their previous successes BLOOD SIMPLE and RAISING ARIZONA. STATE OF GRACE, loosely based on T.J. English’s account of Hell’s Kitchen’s Irish Westie mob, was poised to finally make good on director Phil Joanou’s wunderkind promise. Abel Ferrara was about to help spearhead the indie 90’s with KING OF NEW YORK. The gangster film was hot again, and Coppola was expected to not only match his own masterworks, but lay waste to his competitors. Oh, did I mention Martin Scorsese was about to unveil a little thing called GOODFELLAS around this time as well?
All of these films were met with mixed assess, and most would fail upon their initial unveil only to be discovered mere years later by way of basic cable or Blockbuster or hipster film diatribe. Only GOODFELLAS was met with unilateral acclaim, and had the bean-counters at Warner Brothers correctly forecast Scorsese’s return to the big time it surely would’ve doubled its take and been assured a surer shot at a Best Picture win. As it was the latter film enjoyed one of the shortest lifes as cable/cassette curio before becoming mass culture monolith. All these contenders to the throne had had their season, their autumn/early winter Oscar months to unseat the Don. As Christmas Day 1990 approached, no other film or filmmaker had posed a serious challenge to Coppola’s throne. It was his to lose.
The anticipation was too great. Nothing short of the second coming (or the third, to update expectations) would meet the bar set by the years of love and awe the first two films had set. Had the resulting film been at or near the quality of the first two films, it may have been regarded as the greatest tour de force in American cinema, the impossible achieved thrice running. Had it been some completely egregious folly it may have served to divide critics and audiences alike and the resulting controversy may have cemented its status in some far more grandiose manner. The reaction was somewhere beyond those two possibilities. Good but not great. Not new exactly, but not quite repetitive either. The word everyone seemed to agree upon might’ve damned another director or another project, but it seemed the general assessment nonetheless: it was respectable. Most critics seemed genuinely appreciative of its merits and kind to its faults. Some no doubt just felt some comfort in seeing the band back together, even if some notes were no longer within reach. And some, of course, savaged the film in their review. The single constant between fan and foe alike was the controversial choice the director had made back in Italy, and Sofia Coppola took a particular pummeling in the press, the gossip columns and late night TV monologues the culture no longer welcomes, not outside of the garbage corridors of the internet. In its initial run the film did very well for Paramount, easily making its money back, even adding to its legacy profits, as a three-film repackaging for the home market guaranteed its take’s padding for decades. It’s even somewhat forgotten now that the film racked up 10 Academy Award nominations, including 3 for Coppola as producer, writer and director. It left the party empty handed, but the nods themselves were testament to its very existence, and the eminence with which its maker was still regarded.
The film itself, while admittedly pale in the shadow of its predecessors, has suffered these last three decades from a reputation most unfair. Only its dents have been remembered, it seems, as the years have passed, as sentiment cemented, as new critics, some having just learned the alphanumeric keyboard as the internet encroached on modern life, jumped on the apparently popular dogpile. Laziness has a way of replacing legitimate analysis and critical thought. And while some films from that same era have found themselves on the other side of a reevaluation, what CASINO referred to as a “personality car wash”, this third entry has seemingly not only failed to retain its initial sheen, it’s become a popular wreck the neighborhood kids can hurl a baseball at for practice. What’s one more broken window?
And perhaps that’s a valid legacy for this film, this film that, on the surface, was a money grab to retake the reins of a faded glory and, even more unforgivably, splendid box office. Perhaps it should suffer the worst imaginable fate its maker might be dealt; to be recognized as the “Fredo” of the trilogy. I would argue otherwise. I believe it is a remarkable work of cinema. I believe it is the last attempt by Coppola to achieve his great artistic purpose, to make intimate, personal cinema on a major scale. It remains one of the most intriguing works from his CV, if not, as I would argue, among the superior. It has LEAR in its DNA, Visconti’s THE LEOPARD in its veins. It’s true, as Roger Ebert once assessed, that you’d be lost in a viewing had you not seen the prior films, but even without those crutches as prop there’s enough fascinating plot and regal melodrama to engage any viewer. I’ve largely felt the same way towards this film over the years as when I initially viewed it, solemn in the dark, in supplication to the experience that was to unspool, with popcorn bucket tucked between knees and large soda held up between Pumas, as silent as everyone else in the theater that opening weekend. We all shared the same emotion as the lights went up 3 hours later, that desperate need to convince ourselves that it lived up to expectations, only to be quite vocal at the nearest gin mill regarding our confusion, even letdown. I knew it hadn’t met expectations, but I also knew it was something else quite special. Something worth examining and revisiting. If anything my esteem has grown, and not only have I never felt the need to apologize for my appreciation of the film, or to label it a guilty pleasure, I have stood for it and it’s place within Coppola’s canon. Here is my assay of the film’s merits, and some of its misfires:
I am and have always been in the minority on two counts regarding THE GODFATHER PART III, and it’s these issues I’ll quickly get out of the way in order to focus on greater and more interesting merits in the film.
Firstly, I have never felt Sofia Coppola was horribly miscast in this film. As a matter of fact, I have always DEFENDED not only her casting but her performance. Surely there’s a roughness, an awkwardness, an unpracticed tone and manner and response in her portrayal, and yet there are moments of assuredness as well, of maturity’s cusp, of a woman whose wants are evolving from childhood to adult, and how her control flits from total in one scene to elusive in another. There is no doubt that her father’s guidance nurtured these emotional character beats in the film, but, in my eyes anyway, there is also no denying her natural comfort in Mary Corleone’s skin. I will never argue the Academy’s oversight regarding her turn, but I feel and have felt it is the perfect one for this film. Now to my secondary unpopular opinion.
The single WORST performance given by an actor in this film, and I’ve said this from first screening to last, and it pains me in the depths of my heart to say this, is the one given by Al Pacino. It would take me a very long time to list an actor who either 1. found such disconnect or 2. failed to find the connection between different stages of a single character arc, let alone one he or she first brought to cinematic life. Indeed, it has taken me three decades and I don’t think I’ve found a worse example. In the first two films Michael evolves from earnest, square citizen to last hope of the family’s survival to meticulous, cunning and deadly spider, ever imploding, ever withdrawing, until he’s nothing more than the plots he obsesses over. How they got from that Michael Corleone to the shoulder shrugging throat-clear in Part III is beyond me. My only explanation all these years later is that he was still in character for DICK TRACY. Laugh it up, it could be true.
The most surprising performance in the film came from Hagen 2.0 himself, George Hamilton, given the thankless and, quite frankly, impossible task of replacing one of the key pillars of the saga. He didn’t, of course, but Hamilton, always a sturdy actor, made the most of his opportunity to turn in a couple of standout scenes. Again, consider what this new character reps: the diminishment of the family and the Old World ways, the slow trod toward the impersonal, the corporate. In a lot of ways it was a brilliant move to make him the ANTI-Tom Hagen. He’s one more factotum, a faceless ferryman guiding Michael down his own personal Styx.
The BEST performance in the film, hands down, comes from the kid sister, both to Michael and to Francis. Talia Shire’s Connie is so entangled in the machinations of the family melodrama by this third chapter she seems in constant spiritual strangulation, as perfectly displayed by Milena Canonero’s wardrobe design. Hers is the most fascinating arc of them all, I argue, from kid sister and kept housewife in the first film, to self-destructive train wreck in the second, to honest-to-god Lady Macbeth by the denouement. It’s as if her truest revenge against the family is to be the living embodiment of its blackest heart, and Shire’s every word and motion is slight, calculated, plotting, in reflection of this. She’s so pitch perfect I wish this third chapter had focused on HER character. Think about that possibility for a second, a GODFATHER III that begins with Michael dead, and Connie now in command. The mind reels.
Andy Garcia’s Vincent remains the most fun, and was designed to be. On paper his character is less than the sum of its parts, an amalgam of characters previously seen, a little Sonny here, a little Fredo, a little Uncle Mike. Perhaps even a dose of Vito. What helps to elevate this role is Garcia’s obvious elation not only over his involvement in this sacred series, but the knowledge that he is its propulsive force, who mostly functions as kinetic thrust before gradually, but not fully, segueing into calculated malevolence. I’m not sure if the actor or indeed the character could’ve held the same or any gravitas had the series continued forward, but as necessary adjunct to the closing chapter of Michael’s story, he is essential.
Eli Wallach brings the Eli Wallach. And that was and always will be enough. If rumor is to be believed, Coppola seriously courted Frank Sinatra for the role of Don Altobello, the lurking traitor within the halls. If true it serves as appropriate, if not ironic counterbalance, as Wallach was cast and then replaced by Sinatra in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY as Maggio, the role that not only brought Sinatra back his film career but snagged him the Oscar. It’s also noteworthy that Johnny Fontaine, the Hollywood star on the outs whose career Don Vito revives, is to this day rumored to be based on Sinatra, so his participation as an actor would’ve held extra heft. As it is we got Eli. And I wouldn’t trade that man for any other actor.
Coppola at last could engage his father as sole composer on a GODFATHER film, assuming the baton once held by the great Nino Rota. Carmine Coppola, the grand patriarch of this incredibly creative and influential clan, who once served a lead flautist with Toscanini in the NBC orchestra, had first been enlisted by his son to compose the diegetic music for the first two GODFATHER films, before employing him as sole composer on APOCALYPSE NOW. The score is both beatific and elegiac, celebratory of all things family, weighted with impossible woe at the tragedies that befall it. The film begins with Rota’s iconic theme, and concludes with Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Between those book covers Carmine Coppola wove a wonderfully mellifluous denouement for this family. It must have given Francis no meager thrill to offer his father this opportunity, and to collaborate once more with him. It is no doubt an opportunity he prizes to this day: Carmine Coppola would pass shortly after the film’s premiere at the age of 80.
Gordon Willis’ work as DP was priceless to the original films, so it was never an option NOT to bring him back. His original vision was for heavy shadows, with nominal hues of yellow and orange as accent. On this final film he dances still in the dark, yet his focus seems greater on the accents, giving them equal weight, until the burnished warmth of the film nearly outweighs its ebon maws. I believe the theme of THE OUTSIDERS, “Stay Gold”, took a heavy foothold in the subsequent cinema Coppola would produce in the 80’s. There’s a quest for youth, to explain it, to forgive it, possibly to reacquire it, that runs throughout this decade, through RUMBLEFISH and its obsession with time, to PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED’s time-reversal, to LIFE WITHOUT ZOË’s recreation of Coppola clan childhood. In this final chapter of the Corleone saga, gold is the prevailing color, as the film is about Michael’s quest to change his designs, to reinvent his past, to return to his youth. No less is this evident than in the scene where he surprises ex-wife Kay as her chauffeur through Sicily, engaging her playfully, vainly attempting to recapture their initial spark. Willis’ palette embraces these golden hues, but it does so not to absolve the Corleone clan, to wrap them in opulent glow, rather it seems in constant subside, as if the angels are just without their reach, and in the end are finally ascending away, forever away, until only that darkness remains. This may be heresy, but I just might believe this is Willis’ strongest work of the three films. It is surely the saddest.
Coppola would of course continue his cinematic legacy after this movie, into his fourth decade as not merely filmmaker, but auteur. The results, however, would vary wildly. He found immediate success guiding yet another version of Stoker’s great vampire dreadful to the screen, but wouldn’t we all be damned that he found a new way to skin an old cat, via mastermind Gary Oldman, and nearly break a $100 million gross in the process? He then went on to make JACK, which I have and still refuse to see because heroes. In 1998 he made perhaps the best Grisham adap in the Grisham adap decade, THE RAINMAKER, employing a brilliant cast of the thens, nows, and to-bes, as was his career wont. He’d leave feature film production for a time to focus on a new cut of one of his early masterpieces, what would come to be called APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, which brought him both fresh relevance and coin. His vineyard became a great focus, until in 2008 he returned to low budget experimental filmmaking with a quirky gem, the Tim Roth-starring YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH. It was a welcome return for one of the cinema’s great innovators. He’d add to this late career shelf with 2010’s TETRO and 2012’s TWIXT.
These were all interesting films, still unlike the work of any others past and present, and they are noble efforts worth the viewing and study. And yet, there was something about that last grand statement in 1990, a kind of closing of a chapter of a life. There remains a sense that he wasn’t merely taking on an ultimate artistic dare, or rummaging through his last greatness in order to settle debts. There was and is a sense in the viewing of that film, and perhaps also in the selling of that film, that Francis Ford Coppola was sealing the vault on his best treasure, posting a last guard at the beacon whenever it need be lit. In giving the world its opportunity to say a proper farewell to Michael perhaps Coppola was allowing himself a farewell, to the clan Corleone, yes, but also to Don Francis, the world-beater, the cultural despot, maker of careers, reader and even informer of the zeitgeist, the benevolent king who’d built and then fought to keep his domain, the man standing above all others at the beginning of the decade, who’d now ended it in a last chance bid to save his home, perhaps his family. There is a sense that Francis Ford Coppola was saying goodbye not only to Michael Corleone, but also to the Francis Ford Coppola that Michael Corleone had made. Indeed, the Francis Ford Coppola that Coppola had made. That the weight of the construct, as prized as it once was, had by now become too great, or just not worth the effort anymore. Perhaps, like Michael in his playful subterfuge in Sicily, eluding his minders to drive Kay through his home country, Coppola was looking to get away from who he was and what he’d built and just simply embark on a joyride again, as he had before he’d built the beast that now owned him. Whatever the case, the resulting film and its finances enabled him to shed the past 2 decades, along with all of its trappings and traps, and, once freed, he forged ahead into a new era. For whatever worth we might place on his resulting work past this point, the man who gave us the GODFATHER films, THE CONVERSATION, APOCALYPSE NOW, RUMBLEFISH, and countless other films that either changed the course of cinema, inspired new storytellers, or just plain brought a couple hours respite to fans, Francis Ford Coppola had now found something that had eluded him for decades. He found liberty.
Time has passed, and as is often the case, such passage has soothed the vitriol once directed at THE GODFATHER PART III. Perhaps the neighborhood wreck has just found new life as hipster trinket, one more novelty to add production value to a pose. Perhaps it has escaped the villagers and their torches after all these miles, and has been weighed on its on virtues by those who’ve discovered, even rescued it. Myself I consider a fellow traveler, someone who’s stood by it this whole time, and am now glad to see it delivered to camps sympathetic. Michael once told Don Vito, “We’ll get there, Pop. We’ll get there.” Michael was right.