If you grew up watching
The Godfather
on TV or home video - including the 2001 DVD boxed set,
The Godfather DVD Collection
- you've never really seen it.
That's the word from Paramount Pictures, which yesterday released The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration, a five-disc collection of the entire Godfather trilogy meticulously restored by Robert Harris, who is best known for resurrecting David Lean's epic, Lawrence of Arabia, from the grave. The project was supervised by the film's director, Francis Ford Coppola.
For once, the Hollywood hype is justified.
A glance at the opening scenes of The Godfather provides ample proof.
When we first meet Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), he is ensconced behind a large desk in his dark study doling out favors to various supplicants to mark his daughter Connie's wedding day.
In the restored version, Brando's face emerges from a deep, jet-black pool of darkness that threatens to engulf the entire room. (At the time, Coppola remarked that the underlit scene alarmed his studio bosses.) In previous theatrical and DVD releases, what we get are washed-out grays.
Harris said The Godfather was a victim of its own success: As its popularity grew, the original negatives were copied so often that they were virtually destroyed. New prints had to be made by copying copies - and copies of copies - which degraded the picture quality.
"What was being released came from third-, fourth-, even fifth-generation dupes made from heavily damaged negatives," Harris said on the phone from his office in Hollywood. "It was a masterpiece held together literally by spit and tape."
Nothing brings home the continuing vitality of Coppola's three-part epic than watching it again in the era of
The Sopranos
- whose very structure, plotline and characterization are deeply indebted to it
.
Godfather helped overthrow and update the conventions of the gangster genre, which had remained virtually unchanged in 40 years. The mob - embodied in the 1932 Howard Hawks yarn Scarface by Tony Camonte, a cartoonish maniacal killer with disturbing relationships with his sister and mother - became in '72's Godfather a symbol for family unity and success. While Hawks' movie featured an embarrassingly stereotypical turn from Paul Muni as an Italian American, the trilogy celebrates the Corleones' ethnic and religious heritage.
But the Godfather films go far beyond this. Coppola always intended them as morality plays. He was deeply disappointed that fans applauded Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) at the end of the first film. And he ended up creating an extraordinary series of exciting gangster flicks that both pay homage to and transcend their genre by providing a complex critique of the moral contradictions inherent in the myth of the American Dream.
As Coppola once famously declared about Godfather: Part II, "the film always was a loose metaphor: Michael as America."
A master of irony, Coppola shows how the Corleones undercut every apparent success they achieve. He shows how their always precarious family cohesion and their financial and social success are won only through intimidation, theft, extortion and murder.
By the third film, Michael Corleone rubs shoulders with the nation's most powerful men and women. But again Coppola reminds us that the mobster is trying to buy respectability. Even his philanthropic ventures - fronted by his daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) - turn out to be nothing more than a money-laundering scheme.
Like the early pioneers who conquered the West and the robber barons who brought America into the 20th century, the Corleones establish their dynasty through violence and dishonesty. Ironically, as we find out early on in Part II, Michael's deepest wish is for the family to achieve the same respectability the Carnegies and Rockefellers won after a couple of generations.
Irony also runs through Coppola's treatment of the family's pretensions to piety. Through the course of the three films, he either directly depicts or alludes to each one of the Catholic Church's seven sacraments - albeit by intercutting each with an equally powerful though evil ritual, usually a murder.
The first film opens with the wedding of Michael's sister Connie to Carlo Rizzi. As the guests party outside under the bright sun, Don Corleone plots murder in his dark study. The film ends with the so-called baptism of blood, an extraordinary sequence that cuts back and forth between the baptism of Mi-chael's nephew and a series of brutal killings. Even as Michael renounces Satan - as the baby's godfather is asked to do in the ritual - his henchmen are assassinating his competitors.
In Part III, Michael does manage one earnest expression of piety. Having flown to the Vatican to finalize a questionable $600 million deal with the Church, Michael confesses to one of the film's only genuine, incorrupt clerics, Cardinal Lamberto. But as the cardinal points out, the gesture is self-defeating since Michael will never renounce the family business.
In the end, even the one excuse Michael uses to justify his malfeasance falls apart - that everything he does is for the welfare of the family. It's an excuse he inherited from his father, who inherited it from his father before him.
"I worked my whole life - I don't apologize - to take care of my family," Don Corleone tells Michael in the first film. But Michael's journey leads to the loss of not only his own humanity but also his family: By the close of Part II, he has lost both his parents, killed his brother Fredo (John Cazale), and divorced his wife Kay (Diane Keaton). As Coppola told film historian Gene D. Phillips, "by the end of this picture, Michael Corleone, having beaten everyone, is sitting alone, a living corpse."
While Michael tries to consolidate the family in Part III, the gesture feels hollow. His grand show of familial solidarity in Sicily, where he travels to see the operatic premiere of his son Anthony (Franc D'Ambrosio), leads to his death.
It's fair to ask if a moral reading of the Godfather trilogy is still convincing: After all, the temptation to idolize characters such as Michael - or Tony Soprano, or Brian De Palma's Tony Montana - as cool heroes has become too great.
As John Milton argued in his own gangster saga, Paradise Lost, a defiant but vibrant Satan is much more interesting than any dutiful angel. Is it better to be interesting or good?