The last major flashback takes place at the outbreak of World War II, December 7, 1941, just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Corleone family, including Michael, Sonny, Fredo, Connie, and Tom are waiting for Don Vito to come home for a surprise birthday party in his honor. Coppola had negotiated with Marlon Brando to make a cameo appearance in this scene as Don Vito, just as James Caan was willing to appear as Sonny. But Brando vacillated right up to the day that the scene was shot: “he was mad at Paramount for gypping him on the payment he received for Godfather I,” Coppola explains in his DVD commentary. When Brando finally failed to show up to shoot the scene, Coppopla improvised a variation on the scene as written—keeping Vito offscreen while everyone waits for him in the dining room.
Michael takes this occasion to announce that he has enlisted in the Marines. The scene as originally written is in the second draft of the script, dated September 24,1973, which is in the Paramount Script Repository. In it Vito chides his son for risking his life for strangers, adding “I have hopes for you.” In the revised version of the scene as it appears in the published version of the screenplay Vito is not present, so the volatile Sonny is given Vito’s line about risking his life for strangers, while Tom says, on Vito’s behalf, “Your father has plans for you.”29
In retrospect, Coppola is convinced that the scene plays better without Brando. Vito is “a ghost that haunts the entire picture. It might have thrown the whole thing out of whack, had Brando been in the final flashback. So maybe God took care of me.”30 In any event, the flashback concludes as the family runs out of the room to greet Vito—except for Michael, who is left sitting alone at the dining room table. That he sticks to his decision to join the Marines indicates that he is already a loner, a willful, self-reliant individual who will live his life his own way.
In the movie’s last shot of Michael, he is ironically still wearing his wedding ring. It is an empty symbol of his pose as a family man, for he is as pensive and alone at this moment as young Vito was in the quarantine cell on Ellis Island. In contemplating Michael at film’s end, one recalls Robert Warshow’s remark in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” his seminal essay on the gangster film: “We are always conscious that the whole meaning of this kind of career is a drive for success; the typical gangster film presents a steady upward progress followed by a very precipitous fall.”31 One might say that the happy ending of a gangster picture is in the middle of the movie, when the racketeer is enjoying the fruits of his nefarious endeavors before his appalling and tragic descent at the end.
In Godfather II, Coppola tells me, he wished to show Michael “damning himself” because, at the final fade-out, he is just a lonely man, “sitting with these horrible ghosts inside his head.” Elsewhere Coppola has added, “He’s prematurely old,” like the hero of The Picture of Dorian Gray.32
As already mentioned, Coppola had to trim the rough cut drastically to bring the final cut of the movie down to two hundred minutes. For my money, the only deleted scene that should have been retained was that in which Michael tracks down Fabrizio, his treacherous bodyguard from The Godfather who was responsible for Michael’s first wife Appolonia being killed in a car explosion. Michael discovers that Fabrizio is now known as Fred Vincent and runs a pizzeria in Buffalo. One night Fred shuts up shop, gets into his car and it blows up, just as Appolonia’s did. Had this brief episode been retained, it would have constituted another link between father and son: Michael’s identifying and catching up with his wife’s killer after more than a decade recalls his father’s unerring ability to track down and murder, after more than fifteen years, Don Ciccio, who slaughtered his immediate family. As Coppola comments on the DVD, “Mario says in the novel that the Corleones believe that revenge is a dish best served cold.” The Fred Vincent episode is included in the group of deleted scenes in a special section of the DVD of Godfather II.
“When Godfather II came out it did not get many good reviews,” Coppola recalls in the documentary. “When it won all those Oscars, I was astonished that people liked a picture when I thought they didn’t.” Some of the early notices were nothing short of devastating, with one reviewer going so far as to say that Godfather II was a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from leftover parts of The Godfather. Leading the group of critics enthusiastic about the movie was Pauline Kael. “The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film,” she cheers. “[T]he sensibility at work here is that of a major artist …. How many screen artists have been able to seize the power to compose a modern American epic?”33
As time went on, Coppola was hailed for having the courage to make an expensive mainstream motion picture that did not pursue a simple narrative line but constructed a contrapuntal movement of two generations of the same family—with many of the flashbacks (one-third of the entire picture) having Sicilian dialogue with English subtitles. Furthermore, Coppola was complimented for making a movie that, overall, was vigorously acted and sharply edited. Godfather II was a box-office hit, grossing $46 million domestically, but it was far behind the box-office bonanza that was The Godfather, one of the biggest moneymakers of all time.
On Oscar night Coppola became one of the few filmmakers in cinema history to win the triple crown: he received Academy Awards for directing Godfather II, for coauthoring the screenplay, and for producing the best picture of the year. Coppola also became the only filmmaker to be nominated for two best picture and two best screenplay Oscars in the same year, for he received nominations in both categories for The Conversation as well as Godfather II. He therefore was competing with himself, and he won both awards for Godfather II. Moreover, Godfather II is the first sequel ever to win best picture.
Robert De Niro won an Academy Award for his supporting role—in which he delivered nearly all of his lines in Sicilian, a language he did not understand. In addition, Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola won Oscars for the musical score. When his father’s name was announced at the Oscar ceremonies, Coppola whistled excitedly through his fingers, and when he accepted the Academy Award for best picture, he added, “thanks for giving my dad an Oscar.” Later he explained that he was gratified that he had finally provided his father with the big break he had always wanted as a composer. Ironically, Pacino did not win an Oscar, although he was nominated. Yet Michael Corleone is still considered Pacino’s greatest role, “because Michael is one of the few movie characters to achieve an authentically tragic dimension.”34
In mid-November 1977, NBC-TV broadcast, on four successive nights, “The Godfather Saga,” a mini-series that was a seven-hour compilation of The Godfather and Godfather II. Coppola asked Barry Malkin to reassemble the footage of the two movies into chronological order. The mini-series, says Malkin, began with the “early 1900s scenes from Godfather-II and continued with Godfather-I in the middle, ending with the more contemporary stuff from Godfather-II.”35 Coppola points out in his DVD commentary on Godfather II that when the film was edited for TV in straight chronology, according to his specific instructions, the story of young Vito and the story of Michael were not as compelling alone as when they were intercut in the original movie. This is because, as previously described, there are significant parallels between the father’s life and the son’s life, and these parallels are lost when the story is presented in chronological order.
For example, in the course of Godfather II Coppola switches between a family scene in Vito’s young manhood to a family scene in Michael’s time to illustrate how the warmth and radiance of young Vito’s family is no longer discernible in Michael’s chilly, bleak family setting. Vito sits on the front stoop, saying to his baby son, “Michael, your father loves you very much.” This scene from the past gives way to the adult Michael returning to a frigid home, his son’s toy car abandoned in the snowy yard, while inside his mother sits isolated and forlorn by the fire, a relic of the older generation of the Corleone family. It is the juxtaposition of scenes like these that caused Coppola to decide to “
keep the parallel structure in Godfather II ever since, even now when the three film’s make one saga.”
With the critical and popular success of the first two Godfather films—which won Coppola a total of five Oscars—he was riding high. He was regarded, because of his phenomenal success while still a director in his thirties, as a beacon to the younger generation of filmmakers.
It would be sixteen years before Coppola made the third and final installment of the Godfather trilogy. In the intervening years, while he busied himself with other projects, he steadfastly resisted all efforts on the part of successive regimes at Paramount to cajole him into making another sequel. “I couldn’t see doing a third Godfather film,” Coppola explains in his DVD commentary on Godfather Part III, “because Michael has damned himself in the second movie. He has lost his family and everything that he values. When I finished that film, with Michael in the hell he had created for himself, I thought I was done with The Godfather. There seemed to be nothing further to be said.” Over the years Paramount sent him a variety of scenarios for a third film, churned out by different scriptwriters. None of these scripts focused on Michael, Coppola states in the documentary. “I thought it was crazy to make a third film without him being at the center of it.” The scripts in question invariably wandered too far from the original plot line and went off on tangents involving Latin American drug cartels, South American dictators, and even the assassination of President Kennedy.
By 1989 the first two Godfather film’s had grossed over $800 million. At that point, Frank Mancuso, Paramount’s chief executive, came to Coppola and said with some desperation, “Francis, we offer you Godfather-III, do it any way you want.” Total creative control over the picture was “the magic word,” Coppola concludes. “I felt that, if they gave me carte blanche to do Godfather-III, I might have an opportunity to do something artistic.”36 Indeed, Coppola wanted to link the final act of Michael’s story to the tragic grandeur of Shakespearean tragedy. He refers to Michael’s affinity with King Lear—the tormented, aging man whose empire is slipping from his grasp—as a source of inspiration for the film.
“The studio’s blandishments became more honeyed”: in addition to artistic control of the movie, Paramount offered Coppola $4 million to direct and coauthor the screenplay for the film.37 In short, they “made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” to cite a line from The Godfather that has become part of our language. Finally, Coppola took on the project, committing himself to making a third film that was worthy to stand beside the first two Godfather movies.38
The Godfather Part III (1990)
Coppola would again be collaborating with Mario Puzo on the screenplay of Godfather III. As in the case of Godfather II, Puzo had already worked on a preliminary draft of the script before Coppola came on board. Mancuso had enlisted Talia Shire to present Puzo’s screenplay to her brother early on. At the time, Coppola took one look at it and tossed it into the fireplace. He was favorably impressed by one element in the discarded script, however: Puzo had introduced Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son Vincent, who, in The Godfather, had been conceived at Connie’s wedding reception during Sonny’s sexual encounter with bridesmaid Lucy Mancini. Since Michael was now in his middle sixties—the same age as Don Vito in The Godfather—Vincent would replace Michael as the young male lead in the picture, the role that Michael himself had filled in the previous two Godfather films. Nevertheless, Michael would continue to be a pivotal character in the present film, for in Coppola’s mind Michael is the tragic figure of the drama.
While casting about for story ideas, Coppola began to read press accounts of the Vatican Bank scandal, in which the Mafia figured, and he thought he could work that into the story line somehow. “I felt I had a fertile story context,” says Coppola, “one that wasn’t just going to be about Venezuelan drug lords and machine guns.”39 He created the character of Archbishop Gliday—based on Bishop Marcinkus, an American bishop stationed in Rome who was implicated in some questionable Vatican financial transactions. (The real bishop happened to hail from Cicero, Illinois, Al Capone’s old stamping grounds.) Archbishop Gliday is a highly fictionalized version of Bishop Marcinkus—for example, in the film Gliday is assassinated, while his real-life counterpart was relegated to forced retirement in Arizona by the Vatican after the Vatican Bank scandal broke. He was never officially charged with any financial improprieties.
“On Godfather-III, I worked more closely with Francis than on the other two scripts,” Puzo remarks in the documentary. They checked into the Peppermill Hotel Casino in Reno, where they batted out a preliminary outline of the scenario. Then they moved on to New York where they continued their collaboration. Like the two previous Godfather films, this one was slated to be a Christmas release. That meant that they had to produce the first draft of the script in a brisk six weeks so that shooting could begin in late 1989, with the premiere in December 1990.
Coppola enjoyed devising the screenplay without studio interference. “It’s a lot easier to write a script of this sort when you have freedom from the studio, rather than having to write a custom job,” he explains. He and Puzo found themselves “involved in some extremely rich research into contemporary history,” e.g., the Vatican Bank scandal. Then they placed their existing characters into a fictionalized version of these events.40 They followed their customary procedure of writing separately and then revising each other’s work. Coppola composed the first half, Puzo the second half, and then they “nailed them together.” The script went through twelve revisions between April and November of 1989. Later, when the press reported that Coppola engaged in “endless rewrites” during production, he replied that, given the short time he and Puzo had to write the original draft of the script, it was inevitable that he had to revise the screenplay further, even during shooting.
The final shooting script of the third film is set twenty years after the end of the second film, when Michael is at long last endeavoring to make all of the Corleone family’s investments legitimate—something he promised Kay when he married her.
In order to ensure continuity between the third film of the trilogy and its predecessors, Coppola reassembled most of the members of his production crew. This team of regulars included cinematographer Gordon Willis, production designer Dean Tavoularis, composer Carmine Coppola, and film editor Walter Murch, who had previously been sound engineer for Coppola. Furthermore, some of the key actors were once more on deck, including Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and Talia Shire. Working closely with each of his creative collaborators unquestionably enabled Coppola to place on all three films, not the stamp of the studio, but the unmistakable stamp of his own directorial style—which is one of the hallmarks of an auteur.
The one major cast member from the first two films who did not return this time around was Robert Duvall. He found the salary he was offered to be unacceptable and was likewise dissatisfied with the size of his part. The actor felt that Tom Hagen simply did not play the vital role in Godfather III that he did in the previous two films. “Not having Duvall in Godfather III,” Coppola notes in his DVD commentary, “was a profound loss to me and to this movie.”
Duvall was replaced by George Hamilton, in the role of B. J. Harrison, an unctuous corporate attorney. But Harrison, Michael’s slick WASP lawyer, is not a member of the family, as was Tom, Don Vito’s adopted son. So Harrison would not be Michael’s confidante and ally in the manner that Tom had been. Coppola passed that function on to Connie, making her the first female member of the Corleone clan to have a say in family decisions.
Another new member of the cast besides Hamilton was Andy Garcia as Vincent Mancini, Sonny’s bastard son. Garcia says that Coppola gave him valuable advice on how to play the part. “He said that Vinnie had the temper of Sonny, the smarts and ruthlessness of young Vito, the kind of calculation and coolness of Michael, and the warmth of Fredo.” During filming he and Coppola adopted a sort of shorthand. Coppola would say, “This is a Sonny scene; this is a young-Vito scene; this
one is a Michael scene; this one is a Fredo scene.”41 In short, Garcia became a repository for different aspects of the Italian family’s complete male personas. “Vinnie is an outsider,” says Garcia, and Michael Corleone takes him in. “The closer he comes to Michael, the more Vinnie becomes like him.” Indeed, Garcia comes across in the movie like the young Al Pacino of The Godfather—very intense, very serious, and somewhat dangerous.
“The thing that is different about Godfather III,” Coppola recalls in the documentary, “is that Michael is different.” The third film begins twenty years after the close of the second film. Michael is getting ready for death, and he wants to rehabilitate himself. “So I wanted him to be a man who was older and concerned with redemption,” Coppola continued. “Michael Corleone realized that he had paid very dearly for being a cold-blooded murderer, and was a man now who wanted to make peace with God.” In brief, Michael is aware that his final reckoning is drawing near.
Coppola saw Godfather III as the epilogue of the story because Michael is asking, “what have I done with my life, what have I done with my family?”42 “The screenplay deals with the themes of redemption and reconciliation close to Coppola’s heart.”43 Godfather III depicts Michael as “a Mafia boss yearning to achieve respectability and craving forgiveness from the Church for his manifold sins.” To the dismay of other Mafiosi, Michael is determined to sell off his casinos and other Mafia-related enterprises and to assume the role of a respectable international financier.
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