Flashback, December 1990: ‘The Godfather Part III’ Ends Saga in a Dying Fall

The Godfather Part III arrived in American theaters over the 1990 holiday season burdened with reports of a troubled production that eventually outweighed the hopes for a repeat of its two Oscar-winning predecessors. 

Though not a disaster, it didn’t live up to box-office expectations either, grossing approximately $136.9 million worldwide against a $54 million budget—hardly the record-shattering blockbuster that the original was.

Much of the pre-release bad press concentrated on the decision by director Francis Ford Coppola to cast daughter Sofia in the pivotal role of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. This derision had an element of Schadenfreude, in the way that many critics have of taking an award-winning filmmaker down a peg after a string of successes.

More in a minute on alternatives to Sofia Coppola. But there was another casting choice—a refusal to bring back a key cast member from the earlier films—that had just as critical an impact on the project.

Viewers expecting to see Robert Duvall as consiglieri Tom Hagen were in for a big letdown. The actor, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the role in The Godfather Part I, wanted more than the $1 million he was offered for this second sequel, believing it wasn’t close to what Al Pacino ($5 million) and Diane Keaton ($1.5 million) would be receiving.

Coppola, facing financing and scheduling restrictions by studio Paramount Pictures, couldn’t accommodate the demand. But he incurred stiff creative consequences for rewriting Hagen out of the script.

It wasn’t just that Hagen’s straight-arrow son, Fr. Andrew Hagen (played by John Savage), was only a shadow of his dad, given how little he figured in the final cut. It wasn’t even that the bland WASP lawyer character invented to replace Hagen, B.J. Harrison (played by George Hamilton), was likewise a pale reminder of Hagen.

No, it meant that Michael couldn’t turn to Hagen as his natural choice to run the foundation meant to launder the Corleone family’s blood-stained reputation, but instead would select Mary. 

Moreover, the new movie would abruptly short-circuit a running thread of the first two films without explanation: Hagen’s struggle to balance his intense loyalty as an adopted member of the Corleones with his conscience.

Though Duvall was sorely missed, it was by casting his daughter that Coppola turned himself into the pinata for critics. In his defense, it was a decision made under tremendous duress.

Julia Roberts was originally cast as Mary Corleone, but had to withdraw because of scheduling conflicts in finishing the film that would lift her to superstardom, Pretty Woman.

Her replacement, Winona Ryder, was a seasoned actress who could have brought heat to the love scenes with illegitimate cousin Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia, in an explosive Oscar-nominated performance), and personified an independence strongly suggestive of her mother, the family outsider Kay Adams-Corleone.

But what was described in press reports as “nervous exhaustion” (i.e., working nonstop on several films back to back) led to a prolonged medical absence for the actress.

Coppola could have waited for Ryder to recover, or he could have gone with two other rising young actresses, Laura San Giacomo (recently in Sex, Lies, and Videotape) or Annabella Sciorra (Jungle Fever). But the director had decided that Mary Corleone should be a teenager, and in looking around for a member of that age group who saw someone close at hand: Sofia.

Sofia Coppola was 19 years old at the time of production, with neither experience nor interest to date in becoming an actress. Her mother Eleanor, a documentary filmmaker who had observed and chronicled the excesses of her husband, feared that this was another one of his mistakes.

With a production deadline bearing down on him and a belief that she was closer to his conception of Mary Corleone, Francis chose to go with her, perhaps believing he could elicit a fine performance from the neophyte. The decision was reminiscent of John Huston’s in casting his similarly inexperienced teen daughter, Anjelica Huston, in the 1969 movie A Walk With Love and Death.

But Francis Ford Coppola was dealing not with a one-off art house historical drama as Huston was but a high-stakes movie franchise. Sofia became collateral damage.

The vacuums caused by the absence of Duvall and Ryder led to frenzied rewrites, a process that had begun a decade before Coppola and novelist-screenwriter Mario Puzo formally committed to the project. By the time it was over, 16 script variations had been produced.

All this rewriting resulted in problems with plot and characterization. The real-life scandal that became intertwined with Michael Corleone’s effort at redemption—the Vatican Bank—wasn’t introduced until 40 minutes into the film. And why did Connie Corleone (played by Talia Shire) evolve from the wayward and outraged sister of Michael in Parts I and II to one not only wholly supportive but exceeding him in calculation and cunning in Part III?

Given all of these issues, as well as Coppola’s acceptance of the project as a means of extricating himself from his financial reverses of the prior decade, the wonder is not merely that The Godfather Part III was made at all but that it turned out as well as it did, with seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture. (Inexplicably, Pacino wasn’t nominated for Best Actor.)

Pacino, Keaton and Garcia turned in superb performances, the cinematography was excellent, and, for all its imperfections, the Puzo-Coppola screenplay contained its share of excellent lines (e.g., Michael’s oft-quoted, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”).Coppola’s 2020 re-edit prompted a more positive reappraisal of this conclusion to this indispensable crime family epic.

This Day in Film History (Edward G. Robinson—Public Tough Guy, Private Softie—Dies)

January 26, 1973— Edward G. Robinson, who shot to fame in gangster roles in the Thirties that contrasted sharply with the cultured, thoughtful figure he was offscreen, died at age 79 in Hollywood of bladder cancer.
 
The actor’s death came two months before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was due to present him with an Oscar—albeit an honorary one, rather than in a competitive category—in recognition of more than four decades of diverse and compelling screen appearances, the latest for a sci-fi neo-noir he had only just finished shooting, Soylent Green.
 
Personal and professional challenges had filled Robinson’s entire career:

*a fellow Warner Brothers lead who shocked the entire crew by publicly cursing and shoving him on set (George Raft, in Manpower);

*another, more powerful entertainer whose fast pace meshed poorly with Robinson’s deliberate style of rehearsal and preparation (Frank Sinatra, in A Hole in the Head);

*“graylisting” in the McCarthy era for leftist associations that even an appearance as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee could not mitigate;

*an expensive divorce that saw him lose a substantial portion of his prized art collection; and

*a son struggling with drink, depression and run-ins with the law.
 
But only a lifetime of professionalism—and precautions taken by caring, admiring on-set colleagues—got Robinson through the final scenes of his career, in Soylent Green. He had not said anything to his co-workers about his cancer diagnosis.
 
The film’s insurance company felt squeamish about the actor’s age and prior health issues (e.g., a cardiac condition that had forced him to withdraw as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes), so his scenes were shot first and he was allowed to leave the set each day at five.
 
But now another health complication emerged: Robinson could barely hear, including when director Richard Fleischer yelled “cut.”
 
Robinson correctly saw that this supporting role, as father figure and mentor to Charlton Heston’s detective, was a great, scene-stealing part to play. So he worked relentlessly with other actors to get down the timing of the scene right—even though he could not hear the lines.
 
At the start of production, when Fleischer was introduced to Robinson, “The entire crew stared at him like a bunch of fans or tourists,” the director later recalled in an interview. That respect only grew during filming.
 
Heston brought Robinson a variety of wines and cheeses from all over the world each day the elderly actor was on set. In mid-December, the crew held a birthday party for him where their admiration was evident.
 
Heston concisely depicted Robinson’s heroic struggle—and the crew’s respect for it—in The Actor’s Life: Journal 1956–1976:
 
“He knew while we were shooting, though we did not, that he was terminally ill. He never missed an hour of work, nor was late to a call. He never was less than the consummate professional he had been all his life. I’m still haunted, though, by the knowledge that the very last scene he played in the picture, which he knew was the last day’s acting he would ever do, was his death scene. I know why I was so overwhelmingly moved playing it with him.”
 
As Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1931), Robinson paved the way for James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in later Warner Brothers gangster roles. His small stature and a homely face often likened to a pug prevented him from taking on the romantic leads that later came to these younger actors.
 
Yet DVDs—not to mention prolonged exposure to his filmography on TCM—should be enough to convince anyone of the range that Robinson could display, even with his physical limitations. He could turn naturally to film noirs (The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street), biopics (Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet), Biblical epics (The Ten Commandments), westerns (Cheyenne Autumn), and even comedies (A Slight Case of Murder).
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Robinson in what I regard as his best performance: here with Fred MacMurray, as Barton Keyes, the dogged insurance investigator and moral center of Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir classic, Double Indemnity.)

Flashback, March 1972: Brilliant Brando Briefly Revived in ‘The Godfather’

The Godfather, released 50 years ago this month in the U.S., did more than just update the gangster film genre of the Great Depression, introduce a host of memorable movie catchphrases, and lift the profiles of rising actors such as Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan.

No, the top-grossing film of 1972 and winner of the Best Picture Oscar for that year also marked a return to brilliance, however brief, of the most influential actor of the postwar period: Marlon Brando.

The recent death of William Hurt, with a decade of glory in the 1980s, reminded me more than a little of Brando: another performer with a string of Oscar nominations and one statuette in a concentrated period; another character actor whose unexpected success as a leading man made him uncomfortable; and another conflicted personality whose youthful idiosyncrasies and self-indulgence reduced the quality of the projects he was given in middle age.

Hurt’s late-career Best Supporting Actor nomination as a crime boss in A History of Violence called to mind, albeit fleetingly, his great string of performances in The Big Chill, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Children of a Lesser God, and Broadcast News. But it came in a film that he did not anchor and that never became a landmark in cultural history.

In contrast, Brando’s turn as Mafia chieftain Vito Corleone did all of that.

Moreover, the character couldn’t be more different from the roles that made him a legend in the 1950s: brutal, animalistic Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire; rebellious gang leader Johnny Strabler in The Wild One; and the anguished washed-up boxer turned informant Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.  

As marvelous as he was in those films, his time onscreen in The Godfather represented a master class in cinematic character creation—as well as one of the most remarkable comebacks a leading man has ever made back to relevance.

What Brando himself called 10 “dank, dismal” films made over the prior decade had given him more than a reputation for high maintenance: they had also rendered him box-office poison. 

His defiance of convention (e.g., reading cue cards placed discreetly off camera rather than memorizing lines), once tolerated if not celebrated, was now simply abominated.

Virtually none of the executives at Paramount Pictures wanted Brando as Mafia patriarch Vito Corleone, including the late producer Robert Evans. 

(I almost burst out laughing when, at Sunday night’s Oscars, director Francis Ford Coppola thanked Evans. You would never have known how much they clashed about virtually everything during the movie’s production.)

After butting heads with studio bosses over his lone directing gig, the 1961 western One-Eyed Jacks, and being blamed for the costly bomb Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando had largely lost interest in movies. Some of his projects (e.g., The Ugly American) stemmed from his well-intentioned idealism; others (e.g., Reflections in a Golden Eye), from a belief that directors like John Huston and Arthur Penn could create compelling films. None had really worked out.

In considering an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling potboiler in 1970, Hollywood execs wanted someone, anyone, else besides Brando to play Vito: Laurence Olivier, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn, Carlo Ponti, even comedian-TV producer Danny Thomas. 

Maybe only two people with responsibility for how the character would be created saw Brando as ideal for the part: Puzo and Coppola, then looking to make the leap from highly regarded screenwriter (Patton) to director in his own right.

The very thought of Thomas—who, through his own long-running comedy series (Make Room for Daddy) and others he had produced for others (e.g., The Andy Griffith Show), had enough capital to buy a controlling interest in Paramount and enjoy a clear path to the role—was enough to rouse Puzo to action.

Writing from a fat farm where he had gone to shed weight, Puzo wrote a letter urging Brando to take on the role: “I think you’re the only actor who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony (the book is an ironical comment on American society) the part requires.”

At first, Brando dismissed the idea. But a deep look at the script roused him from his torpor by convincing him that it was not strictly about the Mafia so much as “the corporate mind.”

Or, as he elaborated to journalist Shana Alexander for a Life Magazine cover story: “The Mafia is so American! To me, a key phrase in the story is that whenever they wanted to kill somebody it was always a matter of policy. Before pulling the trigger, they told him, ‘Just business, nothing personal.’ When I read that, [Vietnam War architects Robert] McNamara, [Lyndon] Johnson, and [Dean] Rusk flashed before my eyes.”

Although this realization informed his general consciousness of the story’s larger meaning, the genius of his characterization lay in the thousands of details he used to bring it to life, in these ways:

*Physical transformation: The appearance of Vito Corleone evolved during what Coppola told the actor was a “makeup test” but which was, instead, a de factor audition for the benefit of doubting Paramount heads. Coppola had a cameraman on hand to record how Brando, a blonde in his late 40s from the Midwest, turned himself into an Italian two decades older: pulling his hair back, applying shoe polish, and then, to effect the look of what he called a “bulldog,” stuffing his cheeks with Kleenex. (During the actual filming, he used a mouthpiece made by a dentist--and, to solidify this impression of an older man, he would walk around with weights around his stomach and in his shoes.)

*Voice: Two decades after Brando made an indelible impression on American culture with the primal yell “STELLA!!!” in A Streetcar Named Desire, he did the same by lowering his voice to barely above a whisper in The Godfather. He did so because of his conviction that this is how Vito, previously shot in the throat, would sound now. Moreover, he had been struck by the raspy voice of mob boss Frank Costello in the 1951 Kefauver hearings. “Powerful people don’t need to shout,” Brando realized. This mumbling forced those who interacted with The Don—as well as the audience—to lean forward to pay closer attention.

*Improvisation: Sometimes Brando would work with a prop supplied by Coppola, such as a stray cat that the director found on the set (and which the actor then held throughout a scene). Once, it was a spontaneous decision, an outgrowth of the needs of the scene and Brando’s frustration with another actor: a slap across the face of Al Martino, playing the Sinatra-like singer Johnny Fontaine. “Martino didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” remembered Caan. The most ingenious improvisation, though, occurred during Vito’s death scene, a sequence that studio executives initially scorned as unnecessary. Coppola was struggling with how to believably depict the sickly, elderly mob boss playing with his grandson.  As the director later told Playboy: "[Brando] said, 'Here's how I play with kids,' and took an orange peel, cut it into pieces that looked like fangs and slipped them into his mouth." “Of course!” Coppola continued. “The godfather dies as a monster!" But that wasn’t the only reason the scene suddenly became effective. Stylistically, it formed part of a leitmotif with the earlier scene when oranges roll on the street after Vito is shot. (The bright colors formed an ironic contrast with the doom represented by the action). Furthermore, this death scene, surreptitiously and hastily filmed to avoid the prying eyes of visiting studio personnel, had become so memorable that they couldn’t dream of cutting it.

*Interacting with cast members: In an interview with Parade Magazine to commemorate the movie’s 50^th anniversary, Talia Shire, who played daughter Connie Corleone, praised Brando’s “tremendous elegance”: “Look at the way he dances with me in that wedding scene. But what I found was that he was also incredibly charismatic, generous and disciplined. He really wanted you to be great in a scene.” The rest of the cast, already awestruck just to be in the same movie as this seminal influence on postwar screen acting, bonded with him from the start of the production during dinner at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan.

*Trusting his director: Many of Brando’s problems with the movies of the prior decade had been caused by disillusion and even disgust with individual directors. But from the beginning, he had placed his faith in Coppola, a novice behind the camera, and he had not been disappointed. Coppola’s extensive pre-production rehearsals with actors, for instance, reminded him of a similar method used by Elia Kazan, who had guided him to Oscar-nominated performances in Streetcar, Viva Zapata!, and On the Waterfront, according to William J. Mann’s biography of Brando, The Contender. In the end, Brando’s confidence in Coppola saved the film and arguably altered the course of the director’s career after studio execs, disgruntled with the movie’s early rushes, contemplated replacing Coppola with Kazan. Hearing the news, Brando threatened to quit—a major risk for someone whose troublesome reputation had rendered him persona non grata in the Hollywood. It is impossible to imagine another director, lacking Coppola’s feel for the Italian-American milieu of the story, conjuring up similar cinematic magic.

The dominant actor of his era, Brando also dominated The Godfather; though present in less than 40% of its screen time, he consistently remained the focus of its attention. At least partly in recognition of that fact, he won an Oscar for the role. 

Yet Brando couldn’t help but display his contempt for the industry once again, as he asked actress Sacheen Littlefeather to appear at the ceremony to reject the award on his behalf as a protest against Hollywood’s stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans.

Brando had one more performance that drew on all his emotional resources, as a haunted widower in the sexually explicit Last Tango in Paris. But director Bernardo Bertolucci's demands were too much for his psyche, and he would never invest so much of his energy in roles thereafter.

Even after the shock and tumult created by his films has faded, Brando remains a complicated, even controversial, figure for his off-screen life. (Actress Rita Moreno, who attempted suicide in frustration with his cheating during their eight-year relationship, told fellow Oscar winner Jessica Chastain that he was “a bad guy when it came to women.”)

But the mysterious power of his best work onscreen endures as well. In particular, The Godfather has inspired two generations of actors, and even evoked tributes of another kind: parody. 

Disguising himself as The Godfather in The Revenge of the Pink Panther, Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau accidentally swallows a cotton ball he’s stuffed in his mouth, and Brando himself sent up his character in the 1990 comedy The Freshman.

Movie Exchange of the Day (Cagney and Clarke, Having It Out in “Public Enemy”)

Tom Powers (played by James Cagney): [shuffling to the breakfast table in his pajamas, hungover] “Ain't you got a drink in the house?”
Kitty (played by Mae Clarke): “Well, not before breakfast, dear.”
Tom: “I didn't ask you for any lip. I asked you if you had a drink.”
Kitty: “I know Tom, but I, I wish that... “
Tom: “...there you go with that wishin' stuff again. I wish you was a wishing well. So that I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya.”
Kitty: “Well, maybe you've found someone you like better.”
[Enraged, Tom shoves a grapefruit in her face as he leaves the table]—The Public Enemy (1931), written by Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, adapted by Harvey Thew, directed by William W. Wellman

A complete revolution in audience attitudes has occurred in the 80 years to the day that filmgoers first witnessed this scene, but I doubt if the visceral shock has faded a bit. 

Part of this shock derived from Mae Clarke’s reaction to James Cagney’s grapefruit pushed in her face. (Later, the actress claimed that the scene was supposed to climax only with verbal abuse, while he said that the grapefruit was supposed to brush past her but look like a real attack.) 

The surprise—the disgust—registers unmistakably on her face, as you'll see in this YouTube excerpt.

This performance, his fifth for Warner Brothers, made Cagney, in the same way that Richard Widmark’s similarly villainous turn did in Kiss of Death and James Woods’ did in The Onion Field. Impressions this vivid have a way, through no fault of the actor’s, of becoming a creative straitjacket.

It could have been especially true for Cagney, a a song-and-dance man on Broadway before this role led inevitably led to one Hollywood thug role after another. The ironic thing is, he wasn't supposed to play gangster Tom Powers when shooting began. 

Then, a few days into shooting, director Wellman realized that Edward Woods, originally cast as Powers, wasn't working out, and had the brainstorm of having Woods and Cagney switch roles.

This scene was essential for Cagney in staking out the ground for Powers. It’s not enough to show that Powers is a vicious sociopath—any shot of him with his pistol out on the street would do that. No, he is truly dangerous in his volatility, a trait best shown in a seemingly ordinary setting: a breakfast table.

It’s this upsurge of savagery that isolates Powers, as a man utterly uncomfortable with the slightest bit of domesticity, even with his moll. (One suspects he would become positively bug-eyed at mafia chieftain/affectionate papa Vito Corleone in The Godfather, as well as at Tom Hanks’ mob killer by day, devoted dad at night in The Road to Perdition.) 

Though he later dumps Clarke for Jean Harlow, he’s clearly more at ease in the company of fellow male killers than with a female. Never mind a wife—he can’t even keep a mistress without rejecting her.

The Public Enemy wasn’t the prototypical gangster film—that honor belonged to Little Caesar, the Edward G. Robinson vehicle released by Warner Brothers earlier in 1931. But The Public Enemy offered quite a variation on its predecessor. 

As Roger Dooley noted in From Scarlett to Scarface: American Films in the 1930s: “Just as Robinson made Rico, written more or less sympathetically, repellent, so did Cagney make Tommy, meant to be repellent, irresistible.”

Cagney did so through an irresistible force field emitted by his small body. There’s that same sense in another performer and movie as far removed from Cagney and Public Enemy as you can get: Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

I say “unlikely,” except for a qualifier that really makes all the difference: Growing up in the Northern Ireland of the 1960s, an area with strife to match the Prohibition Era Chicago of Tom Powers, Branagh sat enthralled before his TV by the films of the Irish-Norwegian-American Cagney. 

As soon as he had the box-office credibility to do so, he staged a drama whose title directly paid tribute to his boyhood idol: Public Enemy.

Without the matinee-idol looks of fellow Shakespearean actor-hyphenate Lawrence Olivier, Branagh, a self-confessed “short-assed, fat-faced Irishman,” made use of his plebeian looks in Henry V with a restlessness and common touch that Cagney would have applauded.

The electric charge that Branagh recognized in the American was so powerful that Warner Brothers, fearing the heavy hand of censors concerned that he would glamorize evil, began to cast Cagney in films where he would be on the right side of the angels, such as G-Men.

But so outsize is the impact made by Cagney’s gangster roles—Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, White Heat, even the late Love Me or Leave Me—that you wonder where it all came from. That mystery only grows when you recall the nickname bestowed by fellow Hollywood “Irish Mafia” friend Pat O’Brien: “the faraway fella.”

Cagney was far, far removed from Hollywood mainstream in both living arrangements and attitudes. Sure, he would battle the studios when he had to for better parts, but he was instinctively inclined offscreen to trade pugnacity for pensiveness.

Start with his single marriage, of more than 60 years. Only once during that time was he tempted to stray—on a train ride with Merle Oberon—and even then he stopped before anything really happened. This product of the Lower East Side, as soon as he could, bought farmland in upstate New York, where he raised horses, and became proficient at painting as well.

Maybe the eye he trained in painting enabled him to pick up visual clues that enabled him to become an emotional sponge, to embody those he saw on the mean streets of New York without falling victim to their pathologies. 

The quintessential "New York actor," he would sketch the outline of a broad character type, but fill the space between with different psychological shades and hues that made each role uniquely human, vibrant, still able to burst the bounds of screens all these years later.