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The godfather 1/3 movie#
Paramount understandably balked at the notion of treating the first Godfather movie in 16 years as, in Coppola’s words, a “summation” instead of an event, but by releasing it as “ The Godfather Part III” (on Christmas Day, no less), they were priming audiences and critics for a grand finale the filmmaker had no interest in delivering ergo, much of the initial criticism of the movie, which was rushed through production to meet that prestigious release date, hammered the film for a slow-to-develop plot that felt like a retread of its immaculate predecessors. Indeed, that onerous title was the preferred moniker of both Coppola and The Godfather author Mario Puzo, who partnered with the director on the screenplays for all three films. 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. What Coppola accomplishes is less a magic act than an elegant threading of a needle. But what, realistically, could be done to enhance Sofia Coppola’s awkward performance as Michael’s daughter Mary, or fill the void left by Robert Duvall when he turned down Paramount’s paltry offer to reprise his key role as Corleone family consigliere, Tom Hagen? Coppola may be the maestro of the Director’s Cut, but to fully address these shortcomings he’d have to weave some kind of editorial sorcery that does not yet exist. 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. And just last year, the filmmaker returned to the catastrophic failure of The Cotton Club for a reworking that, if nothing else, gave the sluggish gangster flick some much-needed musical oomph.
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In 2001, Coppola unveiled Apocalypse Now Redux, a massive, meticulously restored expansion of his Vietnam masterpiece that some critics felt eclipsed the already-worshipped theatrical release. 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. No filmmaker has made better use of the Director’s Cut format than Francis Ford Coppola.