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 (‘Godfather Part II,’ Oscar-Winning Sequel, Opens)

Dec. 20, 1974—Two years after The Godfather broke box-office records, the sequel went into general release in the U.S., in a production that was more generously budgeted, longer, more ambitious—and with a far more tragic vision of the American Dream.

The Godfather Part II duplicated its predecessor’s success, garnering six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Many critics regard it as even superior to the first. 

Though it mirrored the original in many respects, it departed from it in relying less on memorable killings (e.g., the toll-booth murder of Sonny) and one-liners (“leave the gun, take the cannoli”) and more on narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism.

While Francis Ford Coppola was initially reluctant to direct Part II (even suggesting Martin Scorsese for the job), he came around to the idea because of two factors.

First, he insisted on—and won—greater creative control, largely sidelining his nemesis on the first film, Paramount studio exec Robert Evans, in the process.

Second, he was so disturbed by the audience’s delight at a sneak preview for the first film—the final scene, where the door is closed on Kay Corleone as her husband Michael conducts “business” as the new don—that he wanted to leave no doubt whatsoever that a fissure had appeared in their marriage and that the crime boss had endangered his soul.

In other words, he wanted to definitively disprove critics who thought the first film had romanticized the Mafia by depicting them as devoted family men rather than as killers. By the end of Part II, Michael Corleone sits utterly alone, as his focus on “business” has left him paranoid and questioning how it could have all gone so utterly wrong.

What went wrong for the Corleones, the film suggests, is also what went wrong with the American empire.

The movie, while covering roughly the years from 1957 to 1960, actually reflects America’s dark post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood, in which cynicism about government lies and corruption became the order of the day. 

Coppola settled on the architecture of this epic with parallel stories of two fathers of roughly the same age, Vito and Michael Corleone, tracing the rise and decline of their family—their personal one as well as the criminal one they head.

I discussed Part II briefly 10 years ago in this post. I had seen bits and pieces over the years, both in The Godfather Saga (a chronological TV presentation beginning with nine-year-old Vito Corleone in Italy through the death of his son Michael roughly three-quarters of a century later) and on AMC (where, over the last few years, Parts I, II and III have been run as holiday mini-marathons).

But a couple of days ago, for the first time, I saw Part II as a complete entity in its own right, reel to reel. The richness I (re)discovered convinced me it was worthwhile exploring in greater depth.

Its nearly half-hour more of running time compared with Godfather I gave co-screenwriters Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo more time not only to convey atmosphere, but also to offer hints about character motivations and relationships.

This time, knowing the major plot points of the movie, small, seemingly minor moments loom larger, as with the pills that Michael takes on the way to meet partner Hyman Roth—perhaps a means of alleviating the tension and anxiety of running a far-flung criminal enterprise and of surviving an assassination in his own home.

Coppola has likened the film to a saga about a king and his three sons. The imperial theme resonates most loudly and mournfully when Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen and “soldier” Frankie Pentangeli muse on the Roman Empire:

Hagen: “You were around the old timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman Legions, and called them 'Regimes'... with the 'Capos' and 'Soldiers,' and it worked.”

Pentangeli: “Yeah, it worked. Those were great old days. We was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.”

Hagen (sadly): “Yeah, it was once.”

While thoroughly of its own time, Part II anticipated much of the disillusionment in America over the last few decades by detailing the costs of the intersection of entertainment, politics, business, and crime.

Perhaps the most vivid example is when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista meets with United Fruit Company, United Telephone and Telegraph Company, Pan American Mining Corp., South American Sugar—and Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth.

Visually, it echoes the scene from Part I when a grief-stricken Vito Corleone calls a summit meeting of the Mafia families to call a halt to their bloody vendetta—as the inclusion of Corleone and Roth with the more conventional companies implies that little difference exists between ostensibly non-criminal and criminal enterprises.

That sense is reinforced when Batista thanks a group member for the Christmas “gift” of a solid gold telephone, and later when Roth confides to colleagues: 

“There’s no limit to where we can go from here. This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it…We can thank our Friends in the Cuban government, which has put up half of the cash with the Teamsters on a dollar-for-dollar basis and has relaxed restrictions on imports. What I'm saying is that we have now what we have always needed: real partnership with the government.”

Roth is voicing the code of businessmen that has prevailed so often from Adolf Hitler to the wanna-be dictators of today: the transgressions of government heads matter little so long as they can forge a “real partnership” that allows them carte blanche to operate.

It has been a devolutionary process even near the start of the movie, when nine-year-old Vito and other passengers gaze longingly at the Statue of Liberty, coming just a few scenes after we see what has happened over 50 years later: Vito’s now-grown son Michael tangling with a zenophobic U.S. senator over a bribe to secure a Las Vegas casino gambling license.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Godfather: Part II,’ With the Kiss of Death)

Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino): “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!”— The Godfather: Part II (1974), screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, based on characters created for Puzo’s novel The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The Godfather: Part II, which premiered 40 years ago today in New York, didn’t have the propulsive drive and shock of its predecessor, but it surpassed it in demands on the audience, ambition, and assessment of the soul-deadening costs of a life of crime. In the process, it became the first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar.

One of the most common criticisms of the first Godfather film was that it romanticized mobsters as family men. Part II, in many respects, seemed to be a direct answer to that complaint, as Michael—whose progress from idealistic war veteran to head of a crime family was detailed in Part I—now finds himself progressively isolated from all members of his clan.

Michael adheres all too well to the advice of his father: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” To expand the “family business,” from Las Vegas to pre-revolutionary Havana, he embodies the cold, coiled lethality of a snake.

In fact, perhaps he displays more passion here, in his confrontation with weak, unwary sibling Fredo (played by John Cazale), than throughout the rest of the film. A slip of the tongue by Fredo confirms his younger brother’s suspicion that Fredo not only connived with Hyman Roth, but that he helped the older gangster set up a hit on Michael.

And so, in a scene more shocking and devastating than the violent scenes (16 deaths) throughout, Michael plants a “kiss of death” on Fredo at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Havana. The act functions as an inversion, turning an affirmation into a negation, a vow of good faith into a naked avowal of betrayal, and a year’s beginning into an unmistakable mark of a life’s ending.

It is hard not to see how bleak his entry in The Godfather Saga has become. The first film, opening the year of the Watergate break-in, was cynical about both government and law enforcement, yet continued to hold the banner of family aloft. No such solace is offered this time.

Cold, manipulative, deceptive Michael has so often broken his promise to go legitimate that wife Kay decides to punish him by aborting his son. That is not the only promise he will break to a family member, however: he also reneges on his agreement with his sister Connie that he forgive Fredo. That radical act of love could have broken the endless cycle of violence, perhaps, but it is impossible given the life Michael chose more than a decade ago.

The last extended flashback in the film—Pearl Harbor Day, when a birthday party for Vito Corleone is being planned by Michael and three family members who will die from violence, future brother-in-law Carlo and brothers Sonny and Fredo—is followed with the muted, desolate scene of Michael, sitting alone and lost in the family garden at Lake Tahoe. He may have turned his family-owned business into an enterprise "bigger than U.S. Steel," but at what cost?

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Godfather,’ on Family)

Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino): “When Johnny [Fontane] was first starting out, he was signed to a personal services contract with this big-band leader. And as his career got better and better, he wanted to get out of it. But the band leader wouldn't let him. Now, Johnny is my father's godson. So my father went to see this bandleader and offered him $10,000 to let Johnny go, but the bandleader said no. So the next day, my father went back, only this time with Luca Brasi. Within an hour, he had a signed release for a certified check of $1000.”

Kay Adams (played by Diane Keaton): “How did he do that?” 

Michael:  “My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.” 

Kay: “What was that?” 

Michael:  “Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract....That's a true story.” [Cut to Johnny singing again for about 10 more seconds before going back to Michael] "That's my family, Kay, that's not me.”—The Godfather (1972), adapted from the novel by Mario Puzo, screenplay by Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Coppola

For an adaptation of a shameless potboiler, The Godfather—which premiered on this date 40 years ago—yielded a screenplay as notable for its memorable lines as for its sturdy structure. Today’s quote illustrates both. 

I didn’t select these lines because of the line in the middle about “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” nor because of the thinly veiled anecdote about how the Mafia induced recalcitrant jazzman Tommy Dorsey to release lead singer Frank Sinatra from his contract so he could pursue a solo career. No, it’s the last line, about family, that intrigued me.

In 1972, a protracted, dishonest foreign war that had lost any real purpose was winding toward a conclusion in keeping with the way it was conducted, and the reelection campaign of an American President was authorizing dirty tricks in a race he was unlikely to lose. In that atmosphere, the Puzo-Coppola screenplay would resonate with its insights into business, crime, power, and even the American Dream. (Kay: "Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed." Michael: "Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?")

But it might have been in its perception of the American Family that the film cut most deeply.

In a post for the Koldcast blog, “How The Godfather Trilogy Changed the Face of the Crime Family,” Dan Berry took a now-standard view that the saga paid “homage to the traditional romanticized idea of the noble gangster as a ‘man of honor’ – one who acts outside the law but with an exemplary devotion to both the biological family as well as the crime family.” Some of this longstanding belief was propagated by Puzo himself, who once said he had presented "a highly romanticized myth" about the Mafia, as he had never met a gangster before he wrote his novel.

On the contrary, I don’t think that Coppola and Puzo romanticized the story of Vito Corleone anymore than the sagas of King David and King Lear were. In all three cases, the sins of a powerful man were visited upon him multiple times over in the divisions and deaths among his children.

If parents bask in the good fortune of their children, then Vito Corleone could only groan about how his turned out:

·        *  Connie is abused by her husband, who will pay for his sins—not merely physical mistreatment but betrayal of a family member to enemies—with his life;

·      *   Sonny’s hair-trigger temper makes him so unwary that he steps into a trap that leads to his blood-splattered end;

·        *  Fredo is a weakling chafing at his sidelined status within the family; and

·        *  Michael—the smart one that everyone hoped would lead the family to respectability—becomes a coldly calculating capo who orchestrates multiple hits that occur as he stands at the baptism of his wife’s child, where he hears the traditional Catholic ritual language about renouncing Satan and his works. 


     The film is, in fact, an ironic reversal of the opening scene of Connie's wedding to Carlo. Michael will eventually not only order Carlo's murder in retaliation for betraying Sonny, but also will advise the older, weakling Fredo, working for Vegas casino owner Moe Greene, never to side with outsiders against the family.


     The full import of Michael's transformation--in theological terms, his fall from grace--becomes underscored in a brilliant scene commissioned from screenwriter (and ace script "doctor") Robert Towne when Coppola sensed there was still something missing from the film. What Towne supplied works perfectly, not only in providing a plot hinge but also in yielding character insights and underscoring a principal theme of the film. Vito, increasingly relinquishing control of family operations following the attempt on his life that thrust Michael into the family business, now sits with his youngest son in the family patio, warning him about another crime family. 


     Vito: "So Barzini will move against you first. He'll set up a meeting with someone that you absolutely trust... guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting, you'll be assassinated." (as the Don drinks from a glass of wine as Michael watches him) "... I like to drink wine more than I used to. Anyway, I'm drinking more..."

Michael: "It's good for you, Pop."

Vito: "I dunno. Your wife and children. Are you happy with them?"

Michael: "Very happy..."

Vito:  "That's good. I hope you don't mind the way I...I keep going over this Barzini business..."

Michael: "No, not at all..."

Vito:  "It's an old habit. I spent my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men. How's your boy?"

Michael: "He's good."

Vito: "You know he looks more like you every day."

Michael: "He's smarter than I am. Three years old, he can read the funny papers."

Vito: (laughs) "Read the funny papers. Oh...well... eh, I want you to arrange to have a telephone man check all the calls that go in and out of here because..."

Michael: "I did it already, Pop."

Vito: "Ya know, cuz it could be anyone..."

Michael: "Pop, I took care of that."

Vito: "Oh, that's right. I forgot."

Michael: (reaching over, touching his father) "What's the matter? What's bothering you?" (after the Don doesn't answer) "I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it."

Vito: (as he stands) "I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this. And Fredo...well... Fredo was...well…. But I never...I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life - I don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all those - big shots. I don't apologize; that's my life. But I thought that...when it was your time that - that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone, or something...This wasn't enough time, Michael, it wasn't enough time."

Michael: "We'll get there, Pop. We’ll get there."

Vito: (after kissing Michael on the cheek) "Now listen. Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting – he's the traitor. Don't forget that."

The admonition that begins and ends this long scene can be seen in another way besides the running of Murder Inc.: an aging, weakened parent's attempt to pass along the secrets of the family business--or, more benignly, the wisdom accumulated from a lifetime.

But sandwiched in the middle of this is Vito's half-strangled cry of pain. "What's bothering" Vito? A life of suspicion and violence is not what he had hoped for this son with the most impeccable credentials: a college education, an enviable war record, a beautiful fiancee. This son could have ascended to heights that the father, fighting to make his way forward in a country that maligned his ethnic group, could never achieve. Its lack of fulfillment leaves a regret that won't go away, any more than the loss of Sonny will.

You could imagine Joe Kennedy nodding his head in agreement with Vito's sentiments--just as you can imagine the political patriarch's similar anguish over the dark fates coming to his children.