Cinematic trilogies. There, you probably weren’t expecting that proposition on a Tuesday, but bear with me, as a trilogy - in fact, a trilogy of trilogies - have been somewhat on my mind of late. The trigger was sinking into The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau’s brilliant Disney+ Star Wars series, which fits into the original nine-film George Lucas canon by portraying events in the galaxy far, far away in the period five years after the events of Return Of The Jedi (sorry, Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi).
The Star Wars series is a perfect example of trilogies created by storytellers with a narrative vision to fulfil. In the case of Peter Jackson’s exhaustive adaptation of Tolkien’s three Lord Of The Rings books, it was the ambition of realising them into 11 buttock-numbing hours of celluloid (the third and final part, The Return Of The King, came in at 4.1 hours, and my gluteus maximus still hasn’t recovered). Other examples appear to be a mixture of directorial hubris and studio cash-ins, and you can take your pick of those featuring Indiana Jones, Mad Max, Spider-Man, Jason Bourne, Hannibal Lector and Austin Powers, George Romero’s zombie collection and the similar ‘Mariachi’ trio from Robert Rodriguez, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, Back To The Future, the Toy Storys, Terminators 1-3, X-Men and The Naked Gun. And then, of course, there are the franchises that have gone on beyond their third instalments, such as Die Hard and the Alien series.
There are many, many more. Some are good, a few are very good, while others suffer from the law of diminishing returns. And while some trilogies serve a purpose of character evolution (as opposed to just creating box office queues), there is one instalment of a noted trilogy for which the jury is still out. Or at least was: The Godfather Part III. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 epic was released 16 years after The Godfather Part II and, two years before that, the original Godfather set the standard for modern film-making. They also established Coppola at the fulcrum of that club of Italian-American auteurs that also included Martin Scorcese and Brian De Palma. But between his second and third Clan Corleone films, Coppola had been somewhat eclipsed by these peers: Scorcese’s Goodfellas, released three months before Part III, had somewhat redefined the mob drama (using many of the actors Coppola had brought to the screen himself), while De Palma’s The Untouchables, which appeared in 1987, was even more uncompromising in its excoriating view of the Capone-era that pre-dated the rise of the fictional Corleones.
So, when The Godfather Part III came about, the question was raised: did we need a closing chapter to the Skywalker-esque arc of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, who’d made his own journey from innocent college boy at the start of The Godfather to the dark side of becoming ‘Don’ at the end of Part II? Coppola’s first two chapters were faithful interpretations of Mario Puzo’s novel, manifesting themselves as engrossing depictions of the American Dream mixed with Shakespearian and Greek tragedies. Part III, co-scripted by Puzo, was an attempt to bring some closure to the Corleone story, though many at the time felt there was something disjointed about suddenly presenting Michael, now in his 60s, as seeking redemption, freeing his family from crime, and finding a suitable successor to his business empire.
Look through any online film forum and it’s easy to see how Part III has been long maligned. It even became a running joke in The Sopranos, with cheeky references every now and again. Coppola’s daughter, Sofia - cast as Michael and Kay Corleone’s daughter Mary - became something of a lightning rod for criticism, owing to what critics felt was an underwhelming performance (especially in her on-screen romance with Andy Garcia’s Vincent Mancini, the illegitimate son of Michael’s dead brother Sonny). It shouldn’t be forgotten that she was 19 when she made Part III, and largely new to the profession (though she’d made her debut in The Godfather, playing her infant brother Michael). 30 years on, her performance is probably not as bad as you remember, not that she would care, having gone on to become a justifiably celebrated director (fun fact: when I lived in Paris, my French tutor had coached her during the making of Marie Antoinette).
Part III has continued to be something of the unloved child of Francis Ford Coppola's film career. Thus, the new version feels like, in Mob parlance, ‘unfinished business’. The idea came from Paramount Pictures: with the 50th anniversary of The Godfather coming up in 2022 the studio approached Coppola with the idea of cleaning up the original print, frame-by-frame, with modern technology. He responded by saying that it was Part III that needed the work. Painstaking restoration from the film's original negative began, a process that included sifting through original takes to replace sequences with better imagery, often cleaning up flaws that 1990 technology had been able to deal with. At the same time, the film was given a 5.1 audio mix. But, perhaps, the real magic in the new version comes with the chopping back of some scenes and new dialogue being recorded, rendering Part III - according to those who’ve seen it - as tighter and with greater emotional impact than the original had. This gives something of a clue to the original purpose. “In musical terms, a coda is sort of like an epilogue, a summing up, and that’s what we intended the movie to be,” Coppola has said, reflecting on the fact that, critics-be-damned, Part III was never meant to be a third and equal to the first two. “You’ll [now] see a film which has a different beginning and ending; many scenes throughout have been repositioned, and the picture has been given, I think, a new life.”
Despite the new title, it’s certainly not a new film. The technical and editorial changes will be subtle, but they are effective. We still find Al Pacino, doing Pacino-doing-Rob Brydon-doing-Pacino, as Michael Corleone, wrestling with legitimising the family business at the end of the 1970s amid new, more nefarious threats from rivals (most notably Joey Zasa, played by Joe Mantegna), while addressing his faith, his failed marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton continuing in the role she first played in The Godfather) and succession. Perhaps, if Part III didn’t sit well with you the first time around, it still might not. But weirdly, it was something of an anachronism in 1990. The first two parts, sequenced into post-war America felt like period pieces in 1972 and 1974, but Part III seemed more contemporary when it came out, set just over ten years after the period in which it was set. It still might seem like an afterthought, but it was a sumptuous one.
If you haven’t ever seen Part III - either because you were disinclined at the time it came out, have been deferred by the snark, or are simply too young, you may find the recut version’s title the ultimate spoiler. But that, I’d wager, is a bit like revealing, in 2020, that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Get over it. My recollection of Part III first time around is of a thrilling film which, while unable to scale the critical heights of its unassailable predecessors (and the debate over Part II being better than The Godfather will go on forever), it is still a classic.
There was even talk, at one point, of a fourth instalment, but it never surfaced. I’m glad. Michael Corleone’s death at the end, slumped in a chair in the garden of Don Tommasino's Sicilian villa, is the closure the arc needed. Any more - even with Garcia continuing as Vincent - would have been exploitation. Part III really wasn’t that bad. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, which don’t get handed out by default. I suspect this new version will warrant serious revision of some of the haters' views. As Michael Corleone says himself in the film: “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment. “
No comments:
Post a Comment