Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola has stepped back into the cutting room to re-edit (and rename) his 1990 crime epic The Godfather Part III, the final part in his century-spanning trilogy about a New York Italian-American mafia family. Coppola, now 81, has tinkered mainly with the beginning and end – throwing us more directly into the former and making the latter less final.
What sticks out now, 30 years on, is how unfairly one member of the cast was treated at the time of the film’s release. Sofia Coppola – now a celebrated director herself, then just her father’s teenaged daughter – took a bashing for her performance as Mary, the daughter of crime boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). Young Coppola has an awkward, child-adult presence that’s still one of the film’s most fascinating elements. There’s an unpolished, needy but powerful presence to her that suits the idea of this innocent rich girl put on a pedestal by her father’s infamy. It also adds another dimension to the father-daughter tension at the film’s core – a tension stoked by Mary’s romance with her hothead cousin Vincent (Andy Garcia), the new Corleone on the block. Just like Michael himself was in the first film.
Elsewhere it’s the film’s corporate-gangster high jinks – served with a side order of corruption – that have aged less well. Coppola and writer Mario Puzo drew heavily on a couple of real events to suggest that crime and the boardroom co-existed in Corleone’s world. It allows for a soapy pleasure, but it’s not entirely convincing.
The consensus that The Godfather Part III doesn’t live up to the grandeur and smarts of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II remains fair – but this is still a world well worth revisiting. By
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Andy Garcia
Released: Now available on iTunes and GooglePlay
