Godfather (25 page)

Once Michael has become permanently alienated from his wife, he is
left a lonely, disconsolate man, living in virtual isolation in his heavily guarded compound at Lake Tahoe. Michael may have built the Corleone family into one of the strongest Mafia clans in America, but he has at the same time lost most of his own immediate family: he murdered his only remaining brother, his first wife was killed by his enemies, and his second wife has been banished.

Michael has always contended that the harsh measures he has taken were motivated by his determination to protect his family, and “the fortified compound” where they live is a grim, physical emblem of that commitment.
²⁵
Yet by film's end the vile family business has invaded his home and all but destroyed it. As Talia Shire puts it, “Francis felt that he had to knock this family off” to show how their criminal activities destroyed the family.
²⁶

Even though Frankie Pantangeli has recanted his intention to testify against him, Michael is convinced that Frankie should pay for his initial willingness to do so. He sends Tom Hagen to visit Frankie, who is still in the FBI's witness protection program and is living at an army base. How a Mafia consigliere gained access to Frankie while he is sequestered in an army compound is never explained. In any case, Tom has a discussion with Frankie about how traitors were dealt with in the days of the Roman Empire, which is, after all, the structural model for the Mafia. “If they committed suicide, their families were taken care of by the Roman regime.”
²⁷
Coppola affirms that “Mario Puzo wrote this scene, based on the old Roman idea that a man's family would be spared if he did the right thing and opened his veins and bled to death in the bathtub.” Frankie obliges, and his demise is “a Roman death.”

The climactic sequence at the end of
Godfather II
in which Michael's principal enemies die in a series of brief vignettes recalls the similar montage at the conclusion of
The Godfather
. In quick succession Frankie Pantangeli slashes his wrists in the bathtub at the army base, Hyman Roth is assassinated at an airport as he is interviewed by reporters, and Fredo is shot in a rowboat while fishing on the Tahoe estate.

Says Coppola, “There's no doubt that by the end of this picture Michael Corleone, having beaten everyone, is sitting alone, a living corpse.” The final image of Michael, sitting in a thronelike chair, brooding over the loss of so many of his family, recalls the shot in the film's first flashback in which the sickly young Vito Corleone sits in an enormous chair in a lonely hospital room at Ellis Island right after his arrival in the New World. The lad, we know, came to America because of a vendetta against his family in his own country, and he will grow up to wreak vengeance on the man who slaughtered his loved ones back home.

Years later his son Michael will in turn take it upon himself to avenge the murderous attack on his father's life. By so doing, he will inevitably become an integral part of the ongoing pattern of vengeance that began with the massacre of his ancestors long before he was ever born. Hence, there is a direct connection between the frail little boy sitting alone in the oversized chair early in the movie and his grown son sitting alone in a majestic chair late in the movie. Coppola articulates that connection in his remarks that in
Godfather II
his purpose was “to show how two men, father and son, were … corrupted by this Sicilian waltz of vengeance.”
²⁸

The last major flashback takes place at the outbreak of World War II, December 7, 1941, just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Corleone family, including Michael, Sonny, Fredo, Connie, and Tom are waiting for Don Vito to come home for a surprise birthday party in his honor. Coppola had negotiated with Marlon Brando to make a cameo appearance in this scene as Don Vito, just as James Caan was willing to appear as Sonny. But Brando vacillated right up to the day that the scene was shot: “he was mad at Paramount for gypping him on the payment he received for
Godfather I,”
Coppola explains in his DVD commentary. When Brando finally failed to show up to shoot the scene, Coppopla improvised a variation on the scene as written—keeping Vito offscreen while everyone waits for him in the dining room.

Michael takes this occasion to announce that he has enlisted in the Marines. The scene as originally written is in the second draft of the script, dated September 24,1973, which is in the Paramount Script Repository. In it Vito chides his son for risking his life for strangers, adding “I have hopes for you.” In the revised version of the scene as it appears in the published version of the screenplay Vito is not present, so the volatile Sonny is given Vito's line about risking his life for strangers, while Tom says, on Vito's behalf, “Your father has plans for you.”
²⁹

In retrospect, Coppola is convinced that the scene plays better without Brando. Vito is “a ghost that haunts the entire picture. It might have thrown the whole thing out of whack, had Brando been in the final flashback. So maybe God took care of me.”
³⁰
In any event, the flashback concludes as the family runs out of the room to greet Vito—except for Michael, who is left sitting alone at the dining room table. That he sticks to his decision to join the Marines indicates that he is already a loner, a willful, self-reliant individual who will live his life his own way.

In the movie's last shot of Michael, he is ironically still wearing his wedding ring. It is an empty symbol of his pose as a family man, for he is as pensive and alone at this moment as young Vito was in the quarantine cell
on Ellis Island. In contemplating Michael at film's end, one recalls Robert Warshow's remark in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” his seminal essay on the gangster film: “We are always conscious that the whole meaning of this kind of career is a drive for success; the typical gangster film presents a steady upward progress followed by a very precipitous fall.”
³¹
One might say that the happy ending of a gangster picture is in the middle of the movie, when the racketeer is enjoying the fruits of his nefarious endeavors before his appalling and tragic descent at the end.

In
Godfather II
, Coppola tells me, he wished to show Michael “damning himself” because, at the final fade-out, he is just a lonely man, “sitting with these horrible ghosts inside his head.” Elsewhere Coppola has added, “He's prematurely old,” like the hero of
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
³²

As already mentioned, Coppola had to trim the rough cut drastically to bring the final cut of the movie down to two hundred minutes. For my money, the only deleted scene that should have been retained was that in which Michael tracks down Fabrizio, his treacherous bodyguard from
The Godfather
who was responsible for Michael's first wife Appolonia being killed in a car explosion. Michael discovers that Fabrizio is now known as Fred Vincent and runs a pizzeria in Buffalo. One night Fred shuts up shop, gets into his car and it blows up, just as Appolonia's did. Had this brief episode been retained, it would have constituted another link between father and son: Michael's identifying and catching up with his wife's killer after more than a decade recalls his father's unerring ability to track down and murder, after more than fifteen years, Don Ciccio, who slaughtered his immediate family. As Coppola comments on the DVD, “Mario says in the novel that the Corleones believe that revenge is a dish best served cold.” The Fred Vincent episode is included in the group of deleted scenes in a special section of the DVD of
Godfather II
.

“When
Godfather II
came out it did not get many good reviews,” Coppola recalls in the documentary. “When it won all those Oscars, I was astonished that people liked a picture when I thought they didn't.” Some of the early notices were nothing short of devastating, with one reviewer going so far as to say that
Godfather II
was a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from leftover parts of
The Godfather
. Leading the group of critics enthusiastic about the movie was Pauline Kael. “The daring of
Part II
is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film,” she cheers. “[T]he sensibility at work here is that of a major artist …. How many screen artists have been able to seize the power to compose a modern American epic?”
³³

As time went on, Coppola was hailed for having the courage to make
an expensive mainstream motion picture that did not pursue a simple narrative line but constructed a contrapuntal movement of two generations of the same family—with many of the flashbacks (one-third of the entire picture) having Sicilian dialogue with English subtitles. Furthermore, Coppola was complimented for making a movie that, overall, was vigorously acted and sharply edited.
Godfather II
was a box-office hit, grossing $46 million domestically, but it was far behind the box-office bonanza that was
The Godfather
, one of the biggest moneymakers of all time.

On Oscar night Coppola became one of the few filmmakers in cinema history to win the triple crown: he received Academy Awards for directing
Godfather II
, for coauthoring the screenplay, and for producing the best picture of the year. Coppola also became the only filmmaker to be nominated for two best picture and two best screenplay Oscars in the same year, for he received nominations in both categories for
The Conversation
as well as
Godfather II
. He therefore was competing with himself, and he won both awards for
Godfather II
. Moreover,
Godfather II
is the first sequel ever to win best picture.

Robert De Niro won an Academy Award for his supporting role—in which he delivered nearly all of his lines in Sicilian, a language he did not understand. In addition, Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola won Oscars for the musical score. When his father's name was announced at the Oscar ceremonies, Coppola whistled excitedly through his fingers, and when he accepted the Academy Award for best picture, he added, “thanks for giving my dad an Oscar.” Later he explained that he was gratified that he had finally provided his father with the big break he had always wanted as a composer. Ironically, Pacino did not win an Oscar, although he was nominated. Yet Michael Corleone is still considered Pacino's greatest role, “because Michael is one of the few movie characters to achieve an authentically tragic dimension.”
³⁴

In mid-November 1977, NBC-TV broadcast, on four successive nights, “The Godfather Saga,” a mini-series that was a seven-hour compilation of
The Godfather
and
Godfather II
. Coppola asked Barry Malkin to reassemble the footage of the two movies into chronological order. The mini-series, says Malkin, began with the “early 1900s scenes from
Godfather-II
and continued with
Godfather-I
in the middle, ending with the more contemporary stuff from
Godfather-II
.”
³⁵
Coppola points out in his DVD commentary on
Godfather II
that when the film was edited for TV in straight chronology, according to his specific instructions, the story of young Vito and the story of Michael were not as compelling alone as when they were intercut in the original movie. This is because, as previously described, there are
significant parallels between the father's life and the son's life, and these parallels are lost when the story is presented in chronological order.

For example, in the course of
Godfather II
Coppola switches between a family scene in Vito's young manhood to a family scene in Michael's time to illustrate how the warmth and radiance of young Vito's family is no longer discernible in Michael's chilly, bleak family setting. Vito sits on the front stoop, saying to his baby son, “Michael, your father loves you very much.” This scene from the past gives way to the adult Michael returning to a frigid home, his son's toy car abandoned in the snowy yard, while inside his mother sits isolated and forlorn by the fire, a relic of the older generation of the Corleone family. It is the juxtaposition of scenes like these that caused Coppola to decide to “keep the parallel structure in
Godfather II
ever since, even now when the three film's make one saga.”

With the critical and popular success of the first two
Godfather
films—which won Coppola a total of five Oscars—he was riding high. He was regarded, because of his phenomenal success while still a director in his thirties, as a beacon to the younger generation of filmmakers.

It would be sixteen years before Coppola made the third and final installment of the
Godfather
trilogy. In the intervening years, while he busied himself with other projects, he steadfastly resisted all efforts on the part of successive regimes at Paramount to cajole him into making another sequel. “I couldn't see doing a third
Godfather
film,” Coppola explains in his DVD commentary on
Godfather
Part III
, “because Michael has damned himself in the second movie. He has lost his family and everything that he values. When I finished that film, with Michael in the hell he had created for himself, I thought I was done with
The Godfather
. There seemed to be nothing further to be said.” Over the years Paramount sent him a variety of scenarios for a third film, churned out by different scriptwriters. None of these scripts focused on Michael, Coppola states in the documentary. “I thought it was crazy to make a third film without him being at the center of it.” The scripts in question invariably wandered too far from the original plot line and went off on tangents involving Latin American drug cartels, South American dictators, and even the assassination of President Kennedy.

By 1989 the first two
Godfather
film's had grossed over $800 million. At that point, Frank Mancuso, Paramount's chief executive, came to Coppola and said with some desperation, “Francis, we offer you
Godfather-III
, do it any way you want.” Total creative control over the picture was “the magic word,” Coppola concludes. “I felt that, if they gave me
carte blanche
to do
Godfather-III
, I might have an opportunity to do something artistic.”
³⁶
Indeed, Coppola wanted to link the final act of Michael's story to the tragic
grandeur of Shakespearean tragedy. He refers to Michael's affinity with King Lear—the tormented, aging man whose empire is slipping from his grasp—as a source of inspiration for the film.