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New cut of Godfather Part 3 salvages Francis Ford Coppola’s film - Polygon

New cut of Godfather Part 3 salvages Francis Ford Coppola’s film - Polygon

New cut of Godfather Part 3 salvages Francis Ford Coppola’s film - Polygon
Dec 01, 2020 2 mins, 33 secs

A look at what ‘The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone’ salvages.

Rather than defang and truncate the first two Godfather films for network television in the 1970s, Coppola restructured them as one chronological saga – running seven hours and featuring loads of new footage – that allowed viewers a more straightforward perspective on the Corleone family tragedy.

So when Paramount announced earlier this year that Coppola had reworked 1990’s The Godfather Part III as The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, there was reason to hope, based on previous successes, that the director had at last solved some of the trilogy capper’s nagging flaws.

As he states in his introduction to the inelegantly titled The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the final installment was envisioned as an epilogue to the epic narrative of the first two movies.

Coppola cuts directly to Michael’s meeting with Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly), the overwhelmed, chain-smoking head of the Vatican Bank who desperately sells off the Vatican’s controlling shares in real estate conglomerate Internazionale Immobiliare to the Corleone family.

By repositioning the Gilday scene, Coppola makes the stakes startlingly clear: Michael is leveraging the Catholic Church’s debt to legitimize the Corleone family business and, not for nothing, become one of the wealthiest men in the world.

This is the dramatic business Coppola and Puzo have chosen for Michael in this “coda,” and the film’s busy plotting finally serves a unified theme.

According to Peter Biskind’s The Godfather Companion, Coppola referred to the final shot of The Godfather Part II, wherein Michael sits in silence outside the Tahoe compound, as “the Hitler scene”.

From Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Arthur Miller, the answer has always been an emphatic “No.” But like all great tragedians, Coppola coaxes his audience into believing there exists a catharsis that could cleanse Michael of his sins and restore the family he brushed aside?

The Michael of The Godfather, Coda has compartmentalized his business misdeeds.

The business may be settled, but for Michael, a man of ultimate conquest, the personal must be confronted.

Michael expected the “legitimate” business world to be less ruthless than the criminal underworld, but, as he confesses to Connie, “The higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.” It’s an inversion of the naiveté evinced by Kay in The Godfather when she asserted senators and presidents don’t have men killed.

Those hoping for The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone to be a revelation on the level of Apocalypse Now Redux, or a springboard to a fourth chapter in the saga, will be disappointed.

There are no surprises beyond the first 20 minutes of this version, save for the denouement, which denies Michael the release of death he received at the end of the previous cuts.

This is grist for a psychological drama, and there are moments when The Godfather, Coda takes on the intimate grandeur of Luchino Visconti’s Sicilian family drama, The Leopard.

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone premieres in limited theaters on Dec.

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