The Godfather gives birth to a robust 10-part look at itself
The making of Coppola’s revered cinema classic The Godfather is the subject of a 10-part TV series.
In 1972, Francis Ford Coppola directed a gangster movie unlike any other. The Godfather won the producer Al Ruddy a best picture Oscar and Marlon Brando won the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Don Vito Corleone.
Then, in 1974, there was the sequel, which consolidated Al Pacino’s characterisation of Michael Corleone, the smooth respectable looking son who becomes his father’s successor as head of the mafia dynasty. And it also backtracked to present the youthful career of Vito Corleone, now played by Robert De Niro.
In 1990, there was The Godfather: Part III, which is now called Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.
The three films are available on Stan and revisiting the almost nine hours of Coppola’s saga is an education in modern cinema like no other, a revelation of how melodrama and mobsterism can edge into tragedy and create a dramatic poetry which is filmic and which represents a zenith of artistic achievement. The Godfather series ranks so high that a whole 10-part TV series has just been released by Paramount+ that depicts the making of the first film and which has Miles Teller as Al Ruddy, the producer, and Matthew Goode in a staggeringly stylish performance as that legendary head of Paramount, Bob Evans.
You only have to hear a thread of that catchy, eerie score by Nino Rota to be taken back to the extraordinary exploration of systematic murder and the consequent heartbreak. So it’s no wonder The Offer is presenting an archaeology of this legendary mountain of filmmaking that Paramount created out of Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, for which he co-wrote the script with Coppola.
And what a story it is. Think of the long, elaborate opening sequence, which presents the wedding of the Don’s daughter, Connie (Talia Shire), and the way it is punctuated by Al Martino as Johnny Fontane the crooner coming cap in hand to the old Don and asking him to get him a film role.
Brando with that jutting jawline he created for the role of Don Vito Corleone has an extraordinary quiet authority: he exudes power and the desire to exercise it deliberately and responsibly. What’s the line from Milton? “Evil, be thou my Good”. He says he’ll make the producer – Lee Strasberg – an offer he can’t refuse and, before we know where we are, his recalcitrant victim is waking in horror to the severed head of his favourite horse, one of the most shocking scenes in the history of cinema. Everything is being done carefully in the name of an articulate form of justice, in honour of the idea of family.
There is an attempt on the Don’s life which leads Michael, the Pacino character, to forsake his Ivy League destiny, his status as a civilian. Remember the sheer credibility of Sterling Hayden, his brilliance as the corrupt cop McClusky, his casual all-too-human brutality, and the way the born-to-be-don finds the gun hidden for him in the old fashioned toilet with the chain and then kills McClusky in what could be cold blood, if the act of vengeance were not so charged with the love of his father.
But the rules of The Godfather game do not allow for the scruples of a Christian conscience, even though a sort of Catholic sense of order is parodied at every point. The Don – first Brando, then Pacino – is the substitute parent who sustains his children in the faith, even though he does the opposite of renouncing the glamour of evil, he embodies it.
Remember the scene in The Godfather Part II where he’s an actual godparent and renounces the devil and all his pomps and all his works? Like so much of Coppola’s vision it is so grim because it has such a comprehensive sense of its opposite.
And these Corleones are a sympathetic extended family. There’s the ring-in Irish American consigliere played by Robert Duvall and there’s the hot-headed Sonny of James Caan. We feel for and with these people, even though it will all lead – inexorably – to what Pacino, as Don, allows to be done to his brother Fredo, in Part II. Fredo, who has betrayed him out of weakness and who sits in the boat, the cool blue shroud of the ocean all around him, as he recites the words of the Hail Mary. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners …” All of this is executed with an energy of such magnificence, a command of light and shade, both literal and metaphorical that evokes Caravaggio and his sense of chiaroscuro, as well as his swift stabbing sense of a drama at once extroverted and austere.
In Part II, some philistine racist politician denounces these silk-suited Italians and demands money with blatant greed. But the Corleones are the aristocrats of the mafia world with a sense of style that is the outward sign of concentration on family as the governing value.
There’s the lyricism of the way Brando, the old Don, dies in sunlight, amidst butterflies, as any grandfather might die. There is a constant sense of life in The Godfather story, with its flashes of a sunlit world amid all the stateliness and massacre of the stage lighting, and the horrors it spotlights. But, yes, the fact that the Corleones are the natural lords of the domain they administer is part of their virtue, in the Machiavellian sense. They rule, as Macbeth did, by virtue of their power and the amoral or post-moral virtue they exhibit is all to do with this natural election, this possession of prowess.
They are worlds away from the gangsters of Brian de Palma or Martin Scorsese in Goodfellas. To echo Raymond Chandler on Dashiell Hammet, Scorsese gave organised crime back to the working thugs it truly belonged to, whereas the Corleones are princes of a darkened world.
This in turn is related to the grandeur of the acting talent that the Coppola films exhibit. The Godfather Part I was Al Pacino’s first big film and he took to it like coming into his kingdom, and it made perfect sense when Brando died, so casually and inevitably, so humanly that it was shocking, that his younger self – administering justice like a Robin Hood steeped in blood – should be played by Robert De Niro. After all, Shelley Winters had said to him, backstage at some off-Broadway show, “You’re the greatest American actor since Brando. What are you doing here?” And there is a comprehensive brilliance about the way the high and mighty art of the actor should be paid such lavish homage in The Godfather films.
The Godfather Part I initiated the cycle and it needed Brando like a papal blessing and the kissing of a papal ring. But it’s Pacino who gives this trilogy its riveting dramatic coherence.
Some people – including the great Pauline Kael of The New Yorker – think of The Godfather Part II as the greater achievement. It certainly comes with the ashen realisation that Michael has done what merits in Shakespeare’s phrase “the primal eldest curse”. But we need De Niro, too, so lithe and so lethal. By 1990, with its 1978 setting, The Godfather Part III – the Coda, as it’s now called – Pacino is a famous mafia chief, dispensing money to the church, and seeking an absolution from the man, played by the great Italian actor Raf Vallone, who will become Pope.
A lot of people hated The Godfather Part III, which is overtly masterly, perhaps for that reason. Much of it is set in Sicily, where Michael’s son is making his operatic debut in Cavalleria Rusticana, and the film has the sweeping and high-coloured dramaturgy of opera as well as its impassioned sense of ensemble and aria. The sequence where all the variegated villains meet their ends is done with a gesticulatory magnificence, which is capped and surpassed by the penultimate moment where Pacino looks as excruciated as a Francis Bacon pope as he screams at the annihilation of his life.
The objections to the film, such as Sofia Coppola replacing Winona Ryder, look completely wrongheaded now. Is that true of The Offer, this handsome series done in honour of the achievement of The Godfather?
It certainly makes an extraordinary hole in the week to watch the whole gamut of screeners, which play elaborate but somewhat screwy honour to the great Coppola endeavour.
The weird thing about The Offer, which is based on the recollections – or the fictionalisation of the recollections – of Al Ruddy, is that the fictionalisation gets weird. Ruddy did everything in his power to get The Godfather made, to get Brando in place, to make people see the genius of Pacino and all the rest of it. But The Offer, which seems at its most heartfelt in its homage to the movies, for some reason decides to take it upon itself to fill the series with gangsters of the most unsavoury, unreasonable and threatening kind.
Yes, it’s true apparently, that Frank Sinatra had a fight with Mario Puzo. But even the identification of Johnny Fontane with old blue eyes is far from clear, whatever dons he had dealings with (and it seems he did).
Yes, it’s possible that the mafia figure Joe Colombo (Giovanni Ribisi) may have looked at the script of The Godfather, but the elaborate to-ing and fro-ing between Ruddy and the mobster is a bit of a monstrous stretching of history. Some gun was fired somewhere, once, but the great Bob Evans did not get a dead rat in his bed like a miniaturisation of the horse’s head.
The weird thing about The Offer is that it’s a self-reflexive bit of filmmaking about filmmaking and that has a charm all of its own, which is at its most blatant in the last episode, where everyone is bathed in the glow not just of Oscars but of having begun a masterpiece. The difficulty, of course, plot-wise is that the debates among the producers involve foregone conclusions. Will Bob Evans succeed in getting rid of Pacino? Well, anyone interested will know the answer to this and any comparable question. So the mafia is brought in to furnish lots of coercion, violence and risk. It works to a point, but it’s the weirdest kind of tribute you could imagine because the Paramount+ gangsters are the most random lot you could dream of, where the Corleones were the most sinister and superior, the most deliberate and cool assassins imaginable, so that, if the intrusion of the mobsters in The Offer is a homage, it’s a homage that works in contrast.
And God knows where this leaves the theory that The Godfather is a deadly critique of Nixon’s America where what looked like late capitalism worked with a stiletto-like disregard for humanity. Certainly everyone’s very pleased when Henry Kissinger comes to the opening of The Godfather.
So this is a very weird form of long-form television. Partly because the gangsters seem to have blundered in by mistake and partly because the substantive differences about making the film are largely a matter of shouted assertions.
This may be the signature of executive producer Dexter Fletcher and his preference for an energetic, hyperbolic form of intensified acting.
In fact, the acting works like a bit of a dream. Miles Teller is a wholly believable hero – stolid and with a comprehensive decency and stubbornness. Juno Temple as his secretary stalwart has a wacko disarray rarely seen on a screen, and Dan Folger has presence as Coppola. Even Colin Hanks, as a maddening jumped-up suit, has his moments of glory. The real honours go to the top guys however.
Burn Gorman with a frighteningly accurate Austrian accent is a marvel as the top moneyman Charlie Bluhdorn, a monster of making money with a fugitive but intense sense of beauty. It’s a superb performance and it’s amazing that we first saw him so many years ago as Mr Guppy in the Andrew Davies/Gillian Anderson Bleak House. We imagine in The Offer that we’re watching a great Viennese actor.
Then there’s Matthew Goode as Bob Evans and he gives a fabulous performance, pirouetting, mannered, sniffing the world up his nose and not only passionately over the top but clairvoyantly credible as the sort of unhinged megalomaniac who makes a great film possible.
The Offer is worth watching for Goode alone but the whole show is a reminder of how much Hollywood wants to mine the gold of its own history. We’re told that there is another re-enactment on its way, Francis and The Godfather with Oscar Isaac as Coppola and Jake Gyllenhaal as Evans.
Well, it’s a good thing for Hollywood to contemplate its history. It’s good for the soul because, for nothing (if you indulge in hypothetical subscriptions), you can see the three-part masterpiece Coppola made so long ago and which rises before your eyes again as Rota’s earworm of a score sucks you in, and Brando and Pacino and De Niro and Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton rise up like virtual ghosts who can convey the grandeur and the ghastliness of an America which, like the Italian renaissance, was mighty with the apprehension of murder and malignity and the tears that inhere in the sins we embrace.
The Godfather trilogy is on Stan. The Offer is on Paramount+.
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