by John Paul Russo
Francis Ford Coppola resisted filming a third Godfather and succumbed only because of financial duress. He ‘asked for six months to develop a story and script. [Paramount head Frank] Mancuso gave him six weeks.’¹ Coppola and Mario Puzo rented a suite in a Reno hotel: ‘We’d work for hours, and when we ran out of ideas, we’d go down to the casino.’² Coppola was attempting not only to unify a complex narrative quickly but also to connect it (however loosely) to the two earlier Godfather films shot a decade and a half earlier. His difficulties with Apocalypse Now might have shown that such an approach is too uncertain for a large-scale work.³ On top of all this, Coppola wanted to bring the saga to a definitive conclusion. While The Godfather: Part II concluded on a note of despair, with Michael Corleone’s death-in-life existence at Lake Tahoe in 1958, Coppola planned to end The Godfather: Part III (1990) with his actual death some thirty-nine years later in Sicily. Why was Coppola in such a hurry to kill the golden don? The epic potential of the materials could be expanded in many ways: forwards, backwards, sideways; films filling in the gaps in Michael’s life; films working out the fate of other family members; films taking up new characters and moving in new directions. He might have given thought to Zola’s Rougons-Macquart series, some twenty novels, which captures an epoch, or Balzac’s even larger Comédie Humaine, which attempts to capture all the aspects of humanity. In his attempt, Coppola might have succeeded in his goal of making the Godfather films a ‘metaphor for America’—or the Italian-American experience.⁴ As it stands, we have two masterpieces, and a curiously unsatisfying coda.
Religion in all its forms—spiritual, institutional, popular, ceremonial, commercial—informs The Godfather: Part III. The central action links the Corleone family to the Vatican banking scandal, which began in the early years of John Paul II’s papacy and led to the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, a period that The film compresses into 1978–9. Religious ritual in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II had marked the stages of life and emphasized the disparity between formal ideals and human depravity. In The Godfather: Part III, religion takes on an even more varied role. There are, for example, circuitous views of the Vatican, crowds waiting for the white smoke of election, and noise based on the rumour that reformist-minded John Paul I was poisoned after little over a month on the papal throne. Then, in the person of Archbishop Gilday (gilded, gliding, slippery) who heads the Vatican bank, the plot involves the Church in a giant swindle, making a forced parallel between the operations of the Vatican and the mob underworld. ‘It’s the Borgias all over again,’ Michael expostulates; actually, it is the Rome of modern scandal and canard. Puzo and Coppola apothesize the Church, and perpetuate the old, ‘northern’ prejudice at variance with their otherwise southern Italian perspective, but they also capitalize the Church, which permits their laboured broadsides against corporate business. Finally, the film contains perhaps the only moment of genuine spirituality in the entire trilogy: Michael’s confession scene with Cardinal Lamberto, soon to be elected pope.
Religious ritual informs Michael’s efforts towards familial reconciliation in the deftly handled opening sequence of The Godfather: Part III. A lonely trumpet solo plays Nino Rota’s tragic Godfather theme. The camera pans across the desolate estate at Lake Tahoe; autumn leaves blow across the grounds under cold, cloudy skies; a statue of the Madonna stands neglected. As the orchestra enters quietly, flotsam clogs the docks, the camera moves into the dusty interior of the house with a doll and toy cart, at which point, in voiceover, Michael begins: ‘My dear children, it is now better than several years since I moved to New York, and I haven’t seen you as much as I would like.’ But these images of the house in decline are now set definitively in the past; with a sense of incipit vita nova (here begins the new life), Michael invites his children, Mary and Anthony, to his investiture into the Order of St Sebastian in New York (at a personal cost of $100 million) to demonstrate his long-sought public acceptance and to unite the family.
Michael states that ‘the only wealth in this world is children, more than all the money and power on Earth.’ Perhaps the key line in the film, this is no pious sentiment, but an intensely realized commitment to the next generation that might redeem the past. The camera pans across his desk with the photograph of the children, until he appears in a reverse shot completing the letter we have just heard with the words, ‘I look forward to a new period of harmony in our lives.’ This is followed by a cut to the ceremony at old St Patrick’s on Mott Street, in Little Italy. Michael kneels at the altar, with Mary, Anthony, and his sister Connie seated in the front pew, and Michael’s consigliere B.J. Harrison, family members, and friends behind them. ‘Perhaps you might prevail upon your mother to come to this celebration,’ continues the voiceover. While Gilday officiates in Latin, the language of the sacred, Michael recalls his brother Fredo, whom he had ordered to be murdered, the sacrifice of faith. The camera cuts to Fredo in the boat on Lake Tahoe, saying his Hail Mary to catch a fish, the symbol of Christ; then, back to the ceremony; then to Michael watching from the Lake Tahoe house while Fredo is shot. Back at the church Joey Zasa, a Mafioso from another family, enters with his bodyguard, and, just as the ceremony ends, Michael’s ex-wife Kay flies in with her husband, a judge – the children persuaded her to come. Zasa shows disrespect by entering in the middle of the ceremony, and Kay shows even more by missing the entire thing. Mixing religion, family, and Mafia business, the scene is Coppola at his best – there, indirectly, applied to film. He excels in these fluid movements, here indicating the central theme of Michael’s attempt to put his life in order together with his reflections and memories, from present to past and back again. In just ten minutes, it appears that The Godfather: Part II and The Godfather: Part III have been sutured.
The following scene, which is set in Michael’s New York apartment immediately following the investiture and which comprises one-fifth of the script, oscillates between the party’s festivities and the godfather’s office. It introduces the romance between Mary and her cousin Vincent, Kay’s enduring resentment of Michael, the machinations of the rival Don Altobello, and the Vincent–Zasa feud. The basic pattern of a large family event at the outset of the film was set in The Godfather with Connie’s wedding reception in a sunny Long Island garden, contrasted with Don Vito’s ‘business’ in his dimly lit home office. The decline of the family in The Godfather: Part III was indicated by a Holy Communion party for Anthony at Lake Tahoe, concocted merely as an excuse for business, which was conducted inside the house. The repetition of this dual pattern a third time takes away surprise and saps the film of energy. One indication of the further decline of the family is that the Corleones have lost the ability to host a good festa in famiglia; there is plenitude, but only in the nature of consumption, not in personal and familial fulfilment. The lighting of the party and the office, two interiors as opposed to interior/exterior, is almost the same: the two worlds are now virtually indistinguishable. As a whole, the party scene comes off in a slapdash fashion. Coppola fails to establish a coherent sense of space – instead of feeling claustrophobic, the audience is just confused.
In the scene in the godfather’s office, Michael refuses his nephew Vincent’s request to work for him and insists that he make peace with Zasa, with whom Michael had found him a job. When Zasa and Vincent greet with a ritual kiss, recalling Judas and Christ, Zasa whispers bastardo! and Vincent responds by biting hard into Zasa’s ear. Biting the ear just enough to draw blood indicates a challenge, but Vincent bites deeply, abusing the ritual and raising the level of hatred between the two. This act may also demean Vincent in the eyes of the viewer and create sympathy for Zasa. Later, after Michael suffers his first diabetic attack and the family is vulnerable, Vincent plans to eliminate Zasa, jumping to the conclusion that he must be the source of Michael’s problems – the first sign that Vincent does not possess the intellectual competence to be a godfather. The assassination occurs during a religious procession of the Madonna in Little Italy, a sacrilege that links this scene to the broader religious thematic of the film as a whole. Beneath a deathlike, whitish-gray sky (which minutes before had been clear and sunny), Zasa runs down an empty street and is shot by Vincent, who is disguised as a policeman on horseback. This scene suffers, in comparison to its model in The Godfather: Part II. In the earlier film, the crowds were thick and jostling, the atmosphere tangible with festivity; in the later one, the crowds are so thin that the atmosphere seems joyless. In the earlier film, young Vito Corleone crosses the rooftops in a movement counter to the street procession (thereby crossing or violating its spirit) and kills the local don, Fanucci, inside Fanucci’s apartment building, where Vito had unscrewed the bulb in the hallway lamp, once again underlining the transition from light to dark; in the second, most improbably, the assassins are participants in the procession, wearing masks and white robes and carrying machine guns, and yet, despite the element of surprise, they miss their prey and are all gunned down. It is an additional irony that the earlier scene, though shot on a Hollywood set, looks far more realistic than the later one actually shot on the streets of New York.
The film’s emotional climax takes place in the Vatican, where Michael has gone to warn Cardinal Lamberto that he is the victim of a swindle, with the Vatican bank as the mediator and guarantor. In retrospect, it seems natural that a respected cardinal would take counsel from a Mafia don. Yet this secret knowledge will soon be helpful to Lamberto when he is elevated to the papal throne. During their conversation in a cloister, Lamberto takes a stone from a fountain and cracks it open: it is dry. So, he says to Michael, Christianity has surrounded Europeans for centuries and has not penetrated the core. At this point Michael suffers the onset of a second diabetic attack that is checked by a glass of orange juice, orange being the symbol in The Godfather saga of danger and approaching death. Michael looks weak, vulnerable, and even undignified. As he recovers, Lamberto asks him if he wants to make his confession. Taken aback, Michael says he has not confessed in thirty years and is ‘beyond redemption.’ Yet, at Lamberto’s gentle urging, Michael proceeds, revealing one mortal sin after another. When he confesses the murder of Fredo, he breaks down in tears. ‘Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer,’ responds Lamberto, ‘Your life could be redeemed, but I know that you don’t believe that. You will not change.’ Even so, Michael’s contriteness is acknowledged by distant church bells, tolling for Paul VI.
When Connie later chastises Michael for telling secrets to a ‘stranger’ (Lamberto), Michael pursues the confessional mode: ‘All my life I kept trying to go up in society,’ he tells her, ‘where everything higher up was legal, straight. But the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes. How in the hell does it end?’ This statement mirrors Coppola’s belief that ‘it’s the same everywhere,’ his irritable penchant for making loose, indiscriminate connections between capitalism, religion, Mafia, government, Italy, and America. When Michael pithily states ‘politics and crime – they’re the same thing,’ that everywhere is corrupt, it is a cynical excuse for his own corruption, not a universal truth. The earlier films contained a few sententious one-liners, some of which have passed into common usage. However, in The Godfather: Part III, the pressure to write these (mostly for Michael) pushed Puzo and Coppola to clutch at truisms, resulting in statements like ‘never hate your enemies – it affects your judgment’; ‘even the strongest man needs friends’; ‘your enemies always get strong on what you leave behind’; ‘when they come at you, they’ll come at those you love’; ‘love your wears out those who have it’; ‘it’s dangerous to be an honest man’; ‘every family has bad memories.’ If Michael had exhibited this shady thinking from the start of the trilogy, he would never have had the brains to become a godfather.
Religion also informs the opera within the film. Why did Coppola and Puzo choose Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana to counterpoint the conclusion of The Godfather: Part III? Just as Coppola’s trilogy has a high degree of realism, this opera exemplifies verismo or ‘naturalism’; its music enhances the ‘immediacy’ of the action, ‘making it feel more direct and unmediated, rather than extending or distancing its events in traditional operatic fashion.’⁵ On the one hand, as if appropriate for a Mafia film, the opera is set in Sicily and is based on the story and play by the Sicilian Giovanni Verga. Its themes are love, betrayal, religion, sacrifice, revenge, and violent death. There is a climactic scene with a ritual biting of the ear, an action which connects the opera back to the main plotline, and which Coppola underlines heavily by cutting to Vincent, who nods and smiles. Taking place on Easter Sunday, the opera conveys the idea of redemption, which the film’s preceding scenes had stressed, most notably in Michael’s confession.⁶ On the other hand, the opera plot does not sufficiently mirror the film, and so cannot comment upon it in a compelling fashion. The Godfather: Part III is not a film about love, betrayal, and revenge, but about Michael’s search for inner peace. Moreover, its gravely nostalgic intermezzo had recently been used by Scorsese in Raging Bull (1980) and seems redundant. Coppola also re-employs some of the symbolism from the earlier films, for example, the cannoli with orange tint which Connie uses to poison Don Altobello is an association with the victim that goes back to The Godfather (‘leave the gun, take the cannoli,’ spoken in the scene where Paulie is shot in the car off the highway).
Coppola excels in his staged presentation of the opera itself, holding his own against Franco Zeffirelli’s 1982 filmed version. From the opera’s sixty-eight minutes, he excerpts about fourteen and preserves the main plotline, the Easter hymn alone being out of sequence. However, few separate film plotlines and sub-plotlines are intercut with the opera, a degree of traffic that the piece simply cannot bear. In Eisensteinian montage, content and technique inform and enhance each other, a technique that Coppola had used with technical skill in the finale of The Godfather. In The Godfather: Part III, collision montage turns into concatenated confusion. Adding to the blunder is the scene where the risen Christ walks on stage to bring the redemption theme to even after cliché max – but even the Son of God’s presence fails to connect cinematically or spiritually with Michael. Lamberto appears to have been right after all: he ‘will not change.’
When Coppola most needed time and resources in the making of this film, he had none to spare. His interviews present the spectacle of someone looking for excuses for the end result: ‘But I always sort of resented that the trilogy took up so much of my life, and that it’s about shooting people.’⁷ This exaggeration betrays him. The films took up a maximum of four years of his creative life, and yet he resents his greatest artistic achievements, the only films by which he may be remembered, or which made him any real money. What foolish scruple could have led to the terrible reduction of the epic scope of these pictures to ‘shooting people’? Coppola disparages the early Godfather films as moneymakers, as if their success prevented him from doing something really important, like The Rain People and Rumble Fish (two of his three ‘favourite’ films).⁸ The money he made allowed him to work independently, until he squandered it on ill-planned projects.
Around 1997 Coppola said that, while he was filming The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, he thought it might ‘ruin’ him: ‘And in some ways it did ruin me. It just made my whole career go this way instead of the way I really wanted it to go, which was into doing original work as a writer-director.’ What could have been more original than the first two Godfathers? What artists in their early thirties would not feel blessed by such results? ‘The great frustration of my career is that nobody really wants me to do my own work.’ Who are these hobgoblins? Studio executives, fans, critics, family members? Who is stopping him? ‘Basically, The Godfather made me violate a lot of the hopes I had for myself at that age.’¹⁰ It is possible that such an attitude towards his achievement in the first two films carried over into the making of the third Godfather film, marring the final panel of the triptych.
NOTES
1. Jon Lewis, ‘If History Has Taught Us Anything … Francis Coppola, Paramount Studios, and The Godfather Parts I, II, and III,’ in Nick Browne, ed., Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.
2. Michael Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life (New York: Crown, 1999), 417.
3. The problems of an ever-changing film script were compounded by severe weather, enormous cost overruns, and the production designer Martin Sheen’s heart attack during production.
4. Cited by Stephen Farber, ‘Coppola and The Godfather,’ Sight and Sound 41 (1972): 223.
5. Alan Mallach, Pietro Mascagni and His Operas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 66.
6. Don Vito assassinated Don Ciccio on Palm Sunday in 1927.
7. Gene D. Phillips, Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 142.
8. Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola, 409; Peter Cowie, Coppola (New York: Scribner’s, 1989), 228. Coppola’s third favourite film is The Conversation.
9. Cited in Michael Sragow, ‘Godfatherhood,’ in Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill, eds., Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 169.
10. Ibid.
