2,647 words

Jew: “And the Romans? Where are they now?”

Tony Soprano: “You’re looking at them, asshole.”

Francis Ford Coppola thought he was out of making Godfather movies in 1974 when he released The Godfather Part II. But Paramount pulled him back in when his 1982 musical One from the Heart bombed, and he needed money. Coppola had a standing offer for another Godfather sequel, so he decided to tell the Michael Corleone story for the third time. The danger, of course, is falling into mechanical derivativeness and farce. Neither sequel entirely avoided those problems, but both succeeded in spite of them.

Mario Puzo, author of the original novel of The Godfather,  returned to help Coppola write the screenplay. Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and Talia Shire reprised their roles. Robert Duvall wanted too much money to return as Tom Hagen, so he was written out of the story. Andy Garcia played Vincent Mancini, Sonny’s illegitimate son; Sophia Coppola played Michael’s daughter, Mary; singer Franc D’Ambrosio played Michael’s son, Anthony; Joe Mantegna played gangster Joey Zasa; and Eli Wallach played the treacherous Don Altobello.

Released in 1990, The Godfather Part III was a critical and commercial success, but everyone agreed that it was not as good as the first one. It is, nevertheless, an excellent film, and in many ways I prefer it to Part II. It is shorter, more artfully directed, and packs a much bigger emotional punch.

The first two movies open with a party at which the don of the Corleone family conducts some business. So as not to be derivative, Part III opens with Michael Corleone writing a letter to his children inviting them to join him at a ceremony in a New York church. Michael’s ongoing quest for legitimacy is approaching its summit: he is being awarded a medal by the Vatican. Next, we see the ceremony in which Archbishop Gilday awards the medal. (This scene was cut from the rerelease of the film, which is a pity, because it is splendid.)

Then we see the party. Unlike the party in Part II, this time there is Sicilian music and a performance from Johnny Fontaine, which returns us to the first movie. It seems more authentic, but that’s because Michael’s quest for legitimacy has brought him closer to his Catholic and Italian roots. At the party, we see how Michael earned his medal from the Vatican: the Corleone family donates $100 million to the church to help the poor of Sicily.

Naturally, Michael also conducts some family business at the party. His smug liberal WASP ex-wife Kay wishes to announce that their son Anthony is quitting law school to become an opera singer. And although Michael has now gotten out of business with the mafia, the mafia very much wants to stay in business with him. First, Don Altobello wants to donate a million dollars to the Vito Corleone Foundation. Then Joey Zasa comes to Michael about a beef with his nephew Vincent Mancini. Michael tries, and fails, to mediate between them. In fact, matters only get worse.

The opening scenes nicely set up the main conflict of the film: Michael seeking to trade mafia entanglements for legitimacy while the mafia has other ideas. But both Zasa and Mancini are crudely realized. Mancini is particularly problematic. He is established as a dangerous hot head like his father Sonny, but he doesn’t seem to have many virtues to balance that out. As for Zasa, he’s supposed to be a media-savvy dandy, so why cast an ugly actor with no charisma? Perhaps Coppola wanted him to be contemptible.

Archbishop Gilday is the head of the Vatican Bank. Under his watch, 769 million dollars have been embezzled. He asks Michael to help the bank become solvent again. If Michael will deposit $600 million, Gilday will transfer the Vatican’s 25% share of Immobiliare, a real-estate conglomerate worth $6 billion. (How is this even possible?)

Naturally, when Michael’s old mafia buddies hear about the deal, they want to “wet their beaks” a little. This would defeat Michael’s whole purpose, which is to go legit. So he comes up with a way to placate the old dons. He asks Don Altobello to set up a meeting of “the Commission” in a rooftop pavilion at an Atlantic City casino. At the meeting, Michael announces that he is not including the dons in the Immobiliare deal, but he has now completely liquidated his casino holdings and has their final checks for their investments, which Vincent passes out. (One don mentions that his check is for $50 million. $600 million here, $100 million there, now hundreds of millions more. Michael really has a lot of cash.)

Joey Zasa then makes an angry speech about how he feels like he is getting no “respect.” It is a string of mafia movie clichés, and it is not exactly clear what his beef is. He apparently didn’t invest in the casinos, so he has no reason to get a payout. Is he upset because he cannot invest in Immobiliare? Maybe. In any case, he storms out. Don Altobello follows to placate him. Soon, they hear the sound of a helicopter. From it, machine guns fire into the pavilion. Michael, Vincent, and Corleone assassin Al Neri manage to escape. But most of the dons are killed.

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It is all very cinematic, but it makes no sense. Zasa is clearly behind it. Did he go into the meeting planning to kill everyone? Or did he always keep a helicopter on standby, in case he decided to massacre his colleagues? And why? Honestly, Michael had a much stronger motive, namely to rid himself of his old mafia ties. Of course, if he planned to kill them, he wouldn’t have handed them checks immediately beforehand. Nor would he have allowed himself to be locked in the room when the guns went off. The whole thing is as incoherent as the assassination plot in Part II.

In the aftermath of the hit, Michael has a diabetic stroke and lapses into a coma. This plot twist seems very arbitrary. It is clearly modeled on Vito Corleone’s hospitalization in the first film, during which Michael comes into his own and assassinates two of the men who tried to kill his father. While Michael is sick, Vincent assassinates Joey Zasa with the help of Al Neri and the approval of Michael’s sister Connie. But unlike Michael’s transformation in the first film, we see no real deepening of Vincent’s character.

After Michael recovers, the action then switches to Italy. This for me is where the film really takes off. The Immobiliare deal needs the approval of the Pope but is put on hold when he falls gravely ill. Michael’s son Anthony will also have his operatic debut as Turiddu in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana at the Theatro Massimo in Palermo.

Michael begins to suspect that Archbishop Gilday and associates are swindling him. He asks the advice of an old family friend, Don Tommasino, with whom he is staying in Sicily. Don Tommasino recommends that Michael speak to Cardinal Lamberto, a man with connections who is also a man of conscience.

This is one of my favorite scenes. It is set on a cold morning in a cloister filled with rose bushes. Lamberto, played by the former footballer and movie heartthrob Raffaele Vallone, is a man of great dignity. To explain what Michael is up against, Cardinal Lamberto takes a stone from a fountain:

Look at this stone. It has been lying in the water for a very long time, but the water has not penetrated it. [He breaks the stone against the side of the fountain, revealing its inside.] Look. Perfectly dry. The same thing has happened to men in Europe. For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity, but Christ has not penetrated. Christ doesn’t breathe within them.

What were the Italians before Christianity? They were Romans. The Godfather Part III is Coppola’s celebration of the paganism of the Roman Catholic Church, the Corleone family, and Italian culture in general. This pagan sensibility is reflected in the film’s sumptuous settings and costumes. Rich reds and warm browns predominate, as well as gold, copper, and bronze. Most of the architecture is renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical. But if Lamberto is right, it doesn’t have to be ancient Roman, for Rome never ended and is present in all later styles.

What is Rome? It is grandeur and luxury. It is sensuous, cynical, avaricious, clannish, and proud. It is violent and vengeful. It is the inversion of everything Jesus blesses in his Sermon on the Mount. It is the Corleones.

Of course a cardinal would claim that bad businessmen are “unchristian”, but there’s nothing Roman about the people behind the swindle: a drab Swiss banker named Frederick Keinszig (Helmut Berger) and the even drabber Don Licio Lucchesi (Enzo Robutti), who is as smug, slow-moving, and uncharismatic as a lizard in the sun. Archbishop Gilday’s offices look like renaissance ballrooms. By comparison, Lucchesi’s lair looks like an accountant’s office.

Michael has reason to suspect Don Altobello of being in cahoots with Zaza based on his convenient departure before the gunfire began. But Michael also comes to believe that Altobello answers to Lucchese, who was ultimately behind the attack on the Commission. But why? What was his motive? Was it to prevent Michael from taking over Immobiliare? But why would he want the Vatican bank to fail? Why would he kill the other dons?

Michael’s inference that Lucchesi is behind Altobello is similar to Vito’s inference in the first film that Don Barzini was behind Philip Tattaglia and Virgil Sollozzo’s attacks on him and his family. But in the first movie, Barzini’s motive was clear (an interest in the narcotics trade), and there was plausible evidence for Vito’s conclusion (the way Barzini ran the peace conference). In Part III, all such considerations are fudged. It is bad screenwriting.

When Michael comes to Sicily, Lucchese and Altobello hire an assassin to kill him. Why? When the assassin kills Don Tommasino, an ailing Michael hands control of the Corleone family to Vincent, who then arranges both Michael’s protection and the assassination of the family enemies.

As in the first movie, the assassinations take place during an important family event: in the first movie, the baptism of Connie’s son, in Part III, Anthony’s operatic debut. Opera, of course, was born in Italy as a conscious revival of pagan Greek and Roman drama. Matters are complicated by the fact that Michael’s enemies are hunting him while he is hunting them. It is a bravura sequence, even better than in the original film. In The Godfather, the mood was merely bitterly ironic, whereas The Godfather Part III ends in gut-wrenching tragedy.

Intercut with a stunning staging and performance of Cavalleria Rusticana, Al Neri kills Archbishop Gilday, who is hilariously depicted skulking through the Vatican after hours in a purple robe and miter. Obviously this is unrealistic, but Coppola does not care. Gilday has to look like a chessman being retired from the board. Keinszig is murdered by hanging, but it is staged to look like a suicide. Lucchesi is killed with his own dork eyewear by one of Don Tommasino’s loyal retainers on a suicide mission. And Don Altobello is dispatched at the opera by Connie, his goddaughter, who gives him a box of poisoned cannoli. The sly old don invites her to take the first bite, which she does with no ill effect. She either knew where the poison was, had ingested an antidote, or knew that a single bite would not harm her.

Unfortunately, the new Pope is murdered with poison tea. The subtle suggestion that Archbishop Gilday is responsible is a beautiful touch. Lucchesi’s assassin manages to kill three of Michael’s bodyguards but fails to shoot him in the opera house. However, when the Corleones depart, the killer strikes. Michael is wounded, but Mary is killed. It is a shocking and utterly heartbreaking scene, as grandly staged on the steps of the opera house as the spectacle we have just witnessed inside. The movie should have ended here, but a brief anticlimax is tacked on of an aged Michael in Don Tommasino’s garden.

I have already pointed out some weaknesses of the script. Some plot elements don’t make sense (the financial deal, the assassination of the dons, the attempt to assassinate Michael). Characters like Vincent and Zasa are developed sketchily.

Another problem is a lack of great turns of phrase like “an offer you can’t refuse” or “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” The closest Part III comes to a great line is the scene where Michael laments, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

As for the actors, Pacino is adequate but flat. Keaton is effective as a bitch, but is she even acting? Eli Wallach is excellent as Don Altobello. Franc D’Ambrosio is very good as Anthony Corleone and has a fantastic voice. Andy Garcia is flat as Vincent Mancini. Joe Mantegna is poor casting for Joey Zasa. Most of the minor characters are well done, however.

Coppola’s daughter Sophia was widely reviled as Mary, but I honestly don’t agree. Granted, there is little chemistry between her and Vincent, even though they are supposed to be kissing cousins. But it takes two to tango, and honestly I think Andy Garcia was the weaker of the two.

Amusingly, Coppola was also accused of nepotism for casting Sophia. He also cast his sister Talia Shire as Connie, his uncle Anton Coppola as the opera conductor, and his father Carmine Coppola as the band leader (he also wrote and arranged music for the score). Frankly, a bit of nepotism in a mafia movie just adds to the realism.

Much to my surprise, my favorite character is Talia Shire’s Connie. We barely even register Connie’s face in the first two films, but here she is both a compelling presence and an agent who gains in power as Michael fades. Connie is the most pagan character in the film. She is also the best-dressed. Her jewelry looks Etruscan or Roman. She is a scheming, vengeful noblewoman from the pages of Italian history: a Livia or Lucretia Borgia or Catherine de’ Medici. Her murder of Don Altobello could have been scripted by Suetonius.

Nino Rota, who composed the scores of the first two Godfather films, died in 1979. Thus the director’s father, Carmine Coppola, took over the music, creating new cues and new arrangements of Rota’s classic themes. Aside from the opera at the end, there are other scenes where characters sing. At the party scene, Connie leads the crowd in singing “Eh Cumpari” and Johnny Fontaine sings “To Each His Own.” Later, in Sicily, Anthony sings “Bruccia La Terra” to Nino Rota’s original Godfather theme. It is gorgeous and heartbreaking. After his disastrous musical One from the Heart, Coppola still can’t resist characters who burst into song. I wish he had indulged this side of himself even more.

The Godfather Part III is far from perfect, but the movie is so beautiful to look at and listen to, and Coppola’s direction is so compelling, that it is easy to forget about the flaws. My gut feeling is that Coppola was so confident of his vision and his ability to sell it that he refused to get bogged down in some of the details. Thus it makes sense that the last nearly 40 minutes of the film center on an opera house. Opera is notorious for weak plots, but fans are willing to overlook them because of the sheer magic of the music and the spectacle.

The Godfather Part III is Coppola’s tribute to the undying paganism of Italian culture. For most of us, high tragic drama is confined to the stage and screen. But for some, like the Corleones, it becomes real life.