Fuck The Godfather Part III

Warning: As Senator Geary tells Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, "I am a blunt man and I intend to speak very frankly to you."

Following the near-universal deploration with which it was met in 1990, The Godfather Part III saw a secondary wave of "Oh, it's not as awful as all that!" and "The first two were so good, this one was bound to disappoint"—under which boo bankie of charitable forbearance most fans of the franchise have snuggled ever since.

At 25 years old, it is high time to reclaim The Godfather Part III as the rancid, festering cinematic abomination it is.

I will always remember reading, as a kid, John D. McDonald's strident warning against "author intrusion" in fiction: "Author intrusion is: 'My god, Mama, look how NICE I'm writing!'"

Basically it's anything so awkward or precious it startles you out of your fictional rêverie and makes you look at the method or process of fictioning instead.

The first two Godfather movies contain, to my reckoning, one bracing instance of voice-over intrusion:

... and a smattering of minor actor intrusions:

...also Deanna Corleone's drunken "woppery"; Don Fanucci's dialog and/or delivery in his two important scenes with Vito; and—I say with some ambivalence—Lee Strasburg's noisy sinuses.

And... well, let's be honest: we've all been charitably suspending disbelief for 40+ years of the fact that Don Vito selects, to undertake a delicate double-agent mission, the hands-down stupidest person he or anyone he has ever met has ever met. 

And just look where that shit gets ya.

 

Part III, on the other hand, is littered with such intrusions like goose shit or land mines—impossible to miss—and not just the famous ones such as Sophia Coppola's entire performance. I'm talking about turds like:

• The infuriating saloon cliché of stopping the music when Joe Zasa walks into the party; also Ant Squigliaro's miming a trombone in the same few seconds of awfulness.
• Kay Corleone: "But you became my horror."
• Rude, inelegant cuts scattered throughout, such as at the end of the first Vatican sequence, in Michael's hospital room, and the horrendous "Michael's over there, no now he's over here" cut while he's having his diabetic tantrum in the kitchen.
• Every single fucking thing Eli Fucking Wallach does with his hands.
• "It's my lucky coat! It's my lucky coat!"
• Andy Garcia's life-and-death need for manscaping.

And an entire class of intrusion, the frequent and idiotic resort to iconic motifs from the first two movies:

• Don Lucchesi: "It's not personal. It's only business."
• Connie to Michael: "Now they'll fear you."
• Michael to Vincent: "Never let anyone know what you're thinking."

By virtue of that last one, Francis Coppola deserves the rack, or possibly the strappado: The line is meant to recall Don Vito's angry chiding of Santino for betraying, in a meeting with Virgil Solozzo, enthusiasm for the latter's drug distribution deal—which is, in fact, the transgression that spawns everything bad that happens to the Corleone family in Part One. All things being equal, a reprise of that moment could have been pulled off as intended—as a demonstration of how good business practice transcends generations.

But all things are not equal. Vito's advice was actually: "Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking again!" In Part III Michael and Vincent are sitting in a kitchen with Al Neri and Connie—i.e., All in the Family. There is no reason Michael should offer, or Vincent heed, a whole drawer full of 'TSS!' Michael's recall of his father's line is incomplete and therefore perfectly nonsensical. This incomprehensible lapse in scriptorial judgment "insults my intelligence... and makes me very angry."

And there's actually score intrusion in III! Nino Rota's music and Coppola's use of it were flawless in Parts I and II—seriously, it's like a master class in film scoring; the only possible quibble I've ever considered was that the "send Michael to Sicily" montage in Part I—with Carmine Coppola's "This Loneliness" played on a tinny, out-of-tune, but still somehow gorgeous piano—could have used a parallel montage in II: something to take us out of the orchestral score and into the scene itself. 

But for III, Coppola had lost his consiglieri: composer Nino Rota died in 1979 and the fill-in composer, Francis's dad Carmine—who had contributed music to I and served as musical director on II—was terminally ill during the shooting and production of III. As a result the score is incongruous with I and II and damn near incoherent on its own. Plus it's hard for me to believe Anthony's "gift" to his father makes the latter cry because of nostalgia for his dead Sicilian first wife; it seems way more likely he's mourning the rendition. "I paid how much money to train this kid to sing?"

But of all the things that are painfully awful about The Godfather Part III, the worst is that the entire film is built on imaginary drama. In the first half, Joe Zasa is never, not even once, seen to behave in any way that validates the calumnies everybody keeps spouting about him, or to warrant Vincenzo's homicidal loathing. And in the second half we're supposed to come along with Michael on a redemptive journey of the soul and cheer as he's turned into a hero before our eyes— because:

1. He confesses and cries—to a Cardinal whose Christly goodness couldn't be more bluntly telegraphed—about having killed Fredo.
2. Poor iddle Mikey's soooo sicky-poo, boohoo! Of course sick people can't be evil. "I've never seen you helpless before," Kay actually says, in an appalling push to tell the audience how to feel.
3. Suddenly everybody else is even eviler than he—like Snidely Whiplash, mustache-twirlingly evil—and everybody wants to kill him in retribution, I gather, for his having made them fabulously rich all their adult lives. 

In the final insult, Michael's "father's most trusted friend whom nobody's ever heard of before" puts a contract out on him for no better reason than that somebody has to shoot that fucking plywood board posing as an actress posing as Michael's daughter at the end. And so she gets shot and she dies and Michael cries and everybody cries and very, very, very stupid humans walk out of the cinema and say, "That was like a Shakespearean tragedy!"

No. No, really, it wasn't. That was like a 3-hour Dudley Do-right cartoon. Except Nell could act.

Last night

Many things have happened and been forgotten; but I decide to review some of the recent dialog that I found pretty. Said review entails sorting through the fairy garland that reaches from the back deck at Bambúria out into the backyard and beyond; the garland is made of vines, cobwebs, and, seemingly, paper on which the preceding dialog is writ. All the text is in blank verse but it's not clear that it is Shakespeare; indeed, it's not clear that it was written down before it was spoken—this may be transcript rather than dialog. In any case, I am looking specifically for a speech made by a young woman in a white dress—who may be a young Helen Mirren—enumerating, with the names of early flowers and plants, the ways in which the coming of spring reminds her of her lover returning to her.

I find the speech I was looking for but am immediately distracted by Stately Old Man, whose natural stately state it is to arrange everyone else's activities. Just at the moment, he is giving instruction to a woman about the coming of certain guests for the Christmas season; the setting appears to be a hybrid of a holiday resort and some sort of "home" for people unable to care for themselves—elderly or emotionally fragile, I cannot say. The woman taking instruction from Stately Old Man cheerfully goes about her business, which, through the magic of editing, results pretty much immediately in a Christmas pageant—I'd say holiday pageant but we seem to be in a previous era when fuck minority religions.

And it's a little bit Peanuts TV special and a little bit Ice Capades with just a hint of Superflat Monogram. After singing a song, the children undertake a series of decorative displays in which their vividly colored and geometrically patterned costumes work in synch to create tableaux suggestive of, say, a spray of orchids, or a tropical beach. Like a marching band doing shapes on a football field, it's not clear until the children are close to their final position what the tableau will represent. It's an impressive trick, very nicely choreographed.

For some reason an old woman gets thrown into the mix of children; and she very quickly brings the proceedings to a halt by shouting, "RAPE! RAPE! RAPE!" Then, befuddled by the immediate silence her screams have produced in the auditorium, she says, more calmly, "Someone was raping me. Who was raping me? Or was I raping somebody else?"

In response, a voice that is both I and not I, and that is directed both to the woman and to the television, says, "I don't think anyone was raping anybody, Grandma." And that ends the show, which is a show on television that Bob and I are watching from the living room couch. I am glad that it's over because I have a place to be. I dump my beverage cup—the ice clinging therein is absurdly tenacious—put my tumbler in the stack with the others, and head out the door.

Counting down...