Still Incomplete
“Godfather should have never had more than one movie,” Francis Coppola has told Movieline in an interview. Meaning what? That The Godfather Part II never should have been made? Or that the Corleone family saga should have been released in an epic, all-in-one sequential form from the get-go? Either way it’s a silly and unrealistic thing to say.
I’ve always wanted to see a decent DVD mastering of the Godfather Saga — the beginning-to-end version with added footage that showed on network television in the late ’70s. Why doesn’t Paramount Home Video put it out? Where would be the harm? Hasn’t Coppola said somewhere that he prefers this way of absorbing the Corleone history above all?
No offense to Mr. Coppola but if I could choose only one of the three Godfather films to have in existence to watch, it would be Part II (it wouldn’t be a difficult choice at all).
here’s the link to the interview: http://www.movieline.com/2009/06/francis-ford-coppola-to-movieline-godfather-never-should-have-had-more-than-one-movie.php
to be fair to FFC, in context, he’s responding to rumors of a godfather 4. he’s probably thinking more about godfather III than part 2 in saying it. here’s the full quote:
There were reports that a few years ago that you were involved in a potential fourth Godfather film. Care to clarify?
I don’t think Godfather should have had more than one movie, actually. It was not a serial, it was a drama. Basically, making a movie costs so much money that they want it to be like Coca-Cola: you just make the same thing over and over again to make money, which is what they’re doing now. But Godfather was not really a serial, you know? I mean, how would you spin off Hamlet?
More ghosts!
Ghosts are good. [laughs] You know what I’m saying. Some things lend themselves to being serialized, but there’s also a law of diminishing returns. I mean, even as demonstrated with Godfather, once it shows you its stuff and has all these things you’ve never seen before, then each time you make it again, it’s gotta be less interesting.
The Godfather Saga is not the preferred way to see it Jeff, that’s blasphemy – removing the flashbacks from part makes it far more soap opera-y and low-brow.
No serious Godfather fan prefers the Saga. Coppola doesn’t either – he just thinks it’s a different way of presenting it.
He is not saying anything that is “silly or unrealistic” what he’s saying makes perfect sense. It’s not a serial and yes, Gf II is a masterpiece and GF III has its merits.
That isn’t his point obviously. He’s not disparging them.
that should say “removing the flashbacks from Part II” of course
Jeff, you do remember that the saga was chopped up to run in chronological order, right?
I like the back and forth, so I am perfectly content to simply swap out Part I for Part II (and continue to deny that III even exists…)
Last year, I saw the new prints of I and II back-to-back, II came off as feeling much more flawed than I had ever remembered. It’s not a bad film, by an stretch, but it’s a 70s TV Drama compared to I’s epic scope and operatic notes. I don’t necessarily agree with FFC, but I can kinda see where he’s coming from.
That’s kind of funny, circumvrent, because I feel the exact opposite about I and II. Part I has always seemed to me to be flawed and too linear and simple in its storytelling while Part II has a true epic scope (effortlessly going from Lake Tahoe to 1950s’ Cuba to early 1900s New York to the Washington D.C. mafia congressional hearings) with a thematically richer and more complex plot.
I still have the laserdisc boxset “The Godfather Trilogy” and it is exactly what Jeff is clamoring for. It incorporates (most of?) the deleted scenes found in the DVD set and puts most everything in chronologic order. It retains the flashback structure of Part II. I believe it is basically a re-working of something Paramount created for the television airing in the ’70s, when the first two parts were shown like a miniseries. It is absolutely fascinating. Not as good as watching the movies separately but well worth the time. Few movies warrant such treatment. These do.
Yeah, I definitely remember “The Godfather Saga” being available on VHS.
They showed it on cable a couple of years back. The deleted scenes are boring, mostly stuff from the book, like when Don, Michael, Sonny and the Tom visit the Don’s original Consigliere on his deathbed. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….
They should just do an HBO series based on the original book, show Sonny’s mistresses giant vagina, the orgies that Johnny Fontaine’s friend goes to. The works.
He’s often made comments that gave you the impression that he thought The Godfather was a just a genre piece. Funny how he seems to disregard the thing he did best. All the art for art’s sake movies he made have been pretty week. One From The Heart, Rain People, Youth w/o Youth. All three, pretty but boring. Really when you think of it he’s made four great movies. GF 1 & 2, Apocalypse, The Conversation. Rumble Fish is quite good. The Outsiders and Dracula are guilty pleasures. Peggy Sue is way overrated. After that you really don’t have much. If you really think about it, he only has one more “great” film than William Friedkin (Excorcist, French Connection, To Live And Die In LA). And Billy ain’t nearly so revered.
Loved I & II, didn’t like III, although I believe the intent was to have Andy Garcia in line to do 4. Talk about a flawed movie that was 3.
One thing he says that I’m sure directors of his age and ilk agree: Hollywood is repeating itself over and over and over….it’s so boring…but the youngsters who go to the movies, they don’t care because they can play the same video game over and over again. They’re programmed for that sh**t.
Interesting what he said about Public Enemy being made before and better with Warren Oates…I’m going to see it next week and really was looking forward to it, but now the reviews are coming out and I’m anticipatory. It looks like another Bonnie & Clyde or another Untouchables. Like, I may have seen this before. But hey — it’s a free screening, so I’ll go.
Sumo-pop, the point isn’t that he “only” made 4 great movies, it’s that he made 4 of the greatest movies in American history, in a row, in different styles, in different genres.
Apocalypse Now is the greatest war film ever made. The Godfather 1&II are the greatest crime films ever made (and quite different from each other), and The Conversation is among the great mystery/suspense films.
No one matches Coppola’s big 4 in modern American film – at his best he was THE best.
I also like a lot of his post AN work – Tucker, Rumble Fish, GF III, Dracula. Nothing “guilty pleasure” about any of them. Fine films all……just not great ones. Actually he’s only made a couple flat out duds – Jack, Life Without Zoe, etc.
There’s something worthy in all his films.
The world isn’t divided into masterpieces and crap.
Godfather III is so underrated it hurts. What were people expecting from a third and final Godfather? Coppola took the correct path.
The Puzo novel was pretty salacious. There’s definitely enough material to do a completely separate film. Hell, Luca Brasi could have his own vehicle.
I’ve never once been bored while watching GF I or II…not for a second, and I’ve seen each at least 20 times (mostly during high school and college) but I still watch them every time they’re on tv. Have only watched GF III twice from start to finish. Not great, but nowhere near as bad as its rep.
I hate to say it, but I think what FFC says about the Godfather saga is completely true. The Don Corleone prequal in 2 is completely superfluous, and the Michael Corleone arc in 2 and 3 only spells out what what is pretty much implicit at the end of the first Godfather film. The Conversation is Copola’s greatest moment.
JJgittes,
No doubt those four pics are amazing. My only point is that for such an esteemed director he hasn’t made a very good film in a long time. I did forget about Tucker. That’s a handsome film. And I actually like GF 3. However, I do stand by the Friedkin comparison. And I will also say that with every film Coppola’s batting average goes down.
Markj, I completely agree that GF3 is underrated. Watched it recently and found myself liking it much more than I did way back when. It’s a very solid film and has a heartbreaking ending. Also, it features Andy Garcia’s best performance to date.
“Za-Za!”
Sumo Pop, for my money you can also add “Sorcerer” to that Friedkin list. Now if they’d only put out a decent DVD version of it…
I forgot Sorceror!
I’ve said this before, but it deserves repeating. One From the Heart is brilliant. Tucker, Rumble Fish and Dracula are, as jjgittes says, great films.
Dracula is by no stretch of the imagination a “great film”. It’s quite shit indeed. Keanu’s worst performance ever.
Drackula, I dunno….take a cinematic icon, give him a hairstyle that looks like a big upside down scrotum. I think Drakula was an over-stylised disaster.
The documentary made during the shooting of ‘Apocalypse Now’ says it all. Coppola practically lost his mind during filming, and quite frankly was not the same man or filmmaker since.
To ask a man who just lowered himself & directed the wretched Vincent Gallo should not be making Godfather movies anymore.
Casting Reeves and Ryder killed Dracula, but Oldman’s performance was fun and there is some great visual inventiveness in the film.
One From The Heart is “brilliant?” Wow, I’m glad that I’m seated at this moment. Then you double down with that Dracula is great stuff. Oldman is excellent but the whole thing is so overheated even if it’s beautiful to look at. I sincerely hope he makes another great film but as more time passes, I just don’t see it. He’s been living off his 70′s rep for a long time.
Oh, I get it, it’s “Second Guess The Filmmaker Day” at HE. Well, way to pump up comments threads, I guess.
Useless.
I’m surprised that no one has thought to ask this, but…..Movieline is still around???? I used to love that magazine and have not seen anywhere, lately.
And I’m going to join the fray on this, but I happen to also think that Godfather II is overrated and Godfather III is actually underrated – sorry, but I found the second movie to be a bit choppy (blasphemy, I know) and the Vito backstory, as good as DeNiro’s performance was, just didn’t add anything.
And Part III was overlong and convoluted, but wow, that 40 minute climax just blew me away, the scenes between Pacino and Keaton really popped, and Garcia just delivered the goods with his role.
IMHO, Part 1 is one of the greatest films ever and neither of the sequels is really quite in the same league.
“He’s been living off his 70′s rep for a long time.”
And this judgment means what exactly?
Coppola’s latter films may be “good” or “bad,” but to say that he’s been “living off” his rep implies a moral failure. I don’t see this, and only some smug snot would say it here.
Coppola was, by far, the most grandly ambitious of the filmmakers of his generation, and that ambition, in part, sunk him into tremendous debt. He tried to create an artists’ paradise and this effort nearly bankrupted him. Yet he endured. He made movies. Then his bright boy was killed, and Coppola soldiered on. He put everything on the line–heart, soul, home, fortune, future–and somehow managed to regain his footing. Like a true man, he went to work and paid his debts. Did this always amount to “great art”? No, it did not. But did he “coast”? Did he lay back and “live off” his reputation? No, he did what he had to do. He walked the walk.
“I sincerely hope he makes another great film but as more time passes, I just don’t see it.”
Frankly, nobody cares what you “don’t see.”
Between Dracula and Youth he made 2 films in 15 years. The god awful “Jack” and the paint by numbers Grisham(!) adaptation The Rainmaker. The very definition of coasting. Sorry your so easily rattled.
Let me give props to The Rainmaker, which was a terrifically entertaining star-driven legal drama. it’s surprisingly leisurely and occasionally bitterly funny, but it hits the dramatic beats when it needs to. And, wow, every single minor role is filled by a known character actor and/or B-list star. You just don’t see that anymore. It’s easily my favorite Grisham adaptation and I was shocked at how much I enjoyed it back in the day. It’s no great work of our time, it’s just a damn good movie.
And, wow, every single minor role is filled by a known character actor and/or B-list star. You just don’t see that anymore.
Really? You see that in most Jerry Bruckheimer movies. And stuff like State of Play and Shutter Island have character actors galore in minor roles.
I hate coming late to a thread and just repeating what other peopele said but…
-Yeah, dude has only made 4 great movies. Yes, they are four REALLY great movies. REALLY, REALLY great. But each time he gets behind the camera now you wonder why he’s still trying, almost.
-Godfather III is not a great film but it’s not as horrible as some make it out to be. I agree that the last 45 minutes or so are truly great. Very little of it is TERRIBLE.
david F my brother!
But getting back to Wells’ point about the Godfather Saga.. sorry jjgittis ‘n Prager – I couldn’t disagree more. ‘Bout 8-9 years ago – AMC was showed the Godfather Saga about a half dozen times over a long June weekend and I couldn’t switch it off. It just flowed so well for me and kept sucking me back in (yeah, cue Pacino’s kitchen scene from GF 3). And remember, this was when AMC almost lived up to it’s initials (American Movie Classics) and showed films uncut like TCM does. I finally got out a VHS cassette and taped the thing. It’s one of the few video cassettes I still keep handy. Now.. I bought the original trilogy when it was first released on DVD. Even though I just bought a Blu-ray player, there ain’t no way I am double dipping on Godfather again unless Paramount decides to release the chronological Saga on Blu-ray. *The only complaint I had with the Saga was that there were a few more english dialog scenes (and a few less subtitles) during the first hour of the program which covered the early Vito Corleone years. Yeah – FFC had to do this for commercial television. One can dream that perhaps this can be corrected should Paramount ever decide to release this version.
Wow, the kid who said michael jackson abused him and got 22 million now admits it was a lie…wow…
The Vito Corleone segments of GFII were not meant to further the plot, they’re intrinsic to the theme being developed, that of the death of the traditional American immigrant family. Vito’s cozy, urban domesticity set against Michael’s cold, distant relations with his family in an impersonal, vast Western setting.
Shutter Island hasn’t come out yet, and yes, that’s one of the reasons that State of Play was one of my favorite movies of the year. But, in general, most casting directors these days are too lazy to even call up someone like James Rebhorn (the great cast is the main reason I want to see The Box, for example).
Coppola recently did an interview on the Adam Carolla podcast: He also said that he didn’t think Godfather I needed a sequel & didn’t want to do it, but the studio gave hime such complete creative control over Godfather II that it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. So there you are.
If I’m not mistaken, think FFC also said on the God father 2 commentary that initially, he just wanted to produce the movie and have Scorsese direct it, but that the studio said under no circumstances could Scorsese do it and FFC had to do it, or something like that.
The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was. Among other things, one remembers The Godfather’s tremendous narrative drive and the dominating presence of Marlon Brando in the title role, which, though not large, unified the film and transformed a super-gangster movie into a unique family chronicle.
Part II, also written by Mr. Coppola and Mario Puzo, is not a sequel in any engaging way. It’s not really much of anything that can be easily defined.
It’s a second movie made largely out of the bits and pieces of Mr. Puzo’s novel that didn’t fit into the first. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from leftover parts. It talks. It moves in fits and starts but it has no mind of its own. Occasionally it repeats a point made in The Godfather (organized crime is just another kind of American business, say) but its insights are fairly lame at this point.
Part II, which opened yesterday at five theaters, is not very far along before one realizes that it hasn’t anything more to say. Everything of any interest was thoroughly covered in the original film, but like many people who have nothing to say, Part II won’t shut up.
Not the least of its problems is its fractured form. Part II moves continually back and forth in time between two distinct narratives. It’s the story of the young Vito Corleone (who grew up to be played by Marlon Brando in the first movie) seen first around the turn of the century in Sicily and then in 1917 in New York, where he’s played by Robert De Niro, and it’s the story of Vito’s son, Michael, played again by Al Pacino, the new Mafia don who sets out to control Las Vegas in the late nineteen-fifties.
One story doesn’t necessarily illuminate the other, it’s just additional data, like footnotes. I can’t readily imagine what Mr. Coppola and Mr. Puzo were trying to do, except to turn their first film into a long parenthesis that would fit between the halves of the new movie.
Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.
Looking very expensive but spiritually desperate, Part II has the air of a very long, very elaborate revue sketch. Nothing is sacred. The photography by Gordon Willis, so effective originally, is now comically fancy – the exteriors are too bright and glowy while the interiors are so dark you wonder if these Mafia chiefs can’t afford to buy bigger light bulbs.
Nino Rota’s old score keeps thumping away like a heavenly juke box. The performers, especially those repeating their original roles, seem locked into waxily rigid attitudes. Mr. Pacino, so fine the first time out, goes through the film looking glum, sighing wearily as he orders the execution of an old associate or a brother, winding up very lonely and powerful, which is just about the way he wound up before. Mr. De Niro, one of our best young actors, is interesting as the young Vito until, toward the end of his section of the film, he starts giving a nightclub imitation of Mr. Brando’s elderly Vito.
There are a couple of nottble exceptions. Lee Strasberg, the head of the Actors Studio, makes an extraordinarily effective screen debut as Hyman Roth, the powerful Jewish mobster (reportedly modeled on Meyer Lansky) with whom Michael attempts to take over the Havana rackets under the Battista regime. Mr. Strasberg’s Roth is a fascinating mixture of lust, ruthlessness and chicken soup. Michael V. Gazzo, the playwright (A Hatful of Rain), is also superb as a Corleone captain who crosses the Family. Another more or less nonpro, G. D. Spradlin (a former politician, according to publicity sources) is absolutely right as a crooked, very WASPish United States Senator from Nevada.
The plot defies any rational synopsis, but it allows Mr. Coppola, in his role as director, to rework lots of scenes that were done far better the first time: family reunions, shoot-outs, ambushes and occasional dumb exchanges between Don Michael Corleone and his square, long-suffering wife, Kay (Diane Keaton). “Oh, Michael,” says the slow-to-take-offense Kay when Michael is about to sew up the Vegas rackets, “seven years ago you told me you’d be legitimate in five years.”
Part II’s dialogue often sounds like cartoon captions.
Sorry, forgot to add that the above 1974 NYT review is by Vincent Canby. I love the movie but I always found his review to be quite interesting.
I suppose nothing is perfect?
This from the guy who admited on The View that he has never seen an episode of the Sopronos. Im sorry but how can the director of The Godfather movies never be interested in watching one of the greatest TV shows in history that is in the same genre. I find it strange!
Looking at Canby’s review, it’s amazing how off-base a critic can be in his analysis of a particular film (especially his take on the film’s performances and cinematography). Roger Ebert himself initially gave the film only 3 stars but has nevertheless more recently added the film to his great movies collection.
Since when did linear storytelling become a pejorative? “Yeah, Part 1 is way too linear. Time only moves forward, just like in real life. Boring!”
I might have misspoken when I said too linear – I don’t think linear storytelling is in itself a demerit. I just feel like the plot and storytelling of Part II are more sophisticated and complex than those of Part I. Another thing, too, is that, while I respect and recognize the brilliance of Part I, the film has always left me cold and has never really had any emotional impact upon me whatsoever. Just for me personally, there’s nothing in the first film as emotionally affecting or sad as the tragic relationship between Fredo and Michael or the complete disintegration of Michael and Kay’s relationship and marriage as they are portrayed in Part II.
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The Godfather Saga is not the preferred way to see it Jeff, that’s blasphemy – removing the flashbacks from part makes it far more soap opera-y and low-brow.
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