The Godfather Part III Is Not Nearly As Bad As We Remember
Francis Ford Coppola never wanted to make a third Godfather film. Then again, he never really wanted to make a second Godfather film either. But the fickle fortunes of the movie business have a way of getting talented directors to compromise their dreams or put them on hold for the fool’s gold of a fat paycheck and the promise of artistic freedom that may or may not lay somewhere down the road. And no one knows this Faustian bargain more intimately than Coppola.
The first two Godfather films were, are, and will always be indisputable American masterpieces. No one is going to argue that. And if they do, they’re idiots. Both films are the sort of sprawling, big-canvas epics that, if we’re lucky, we get once every generation. Both would win the Academy Award for Best Picture (in 1973 and 1975 respectively). And both would sluice gigantic rivers of loot into the Paramount vaults. But throughout his confounding ‘What If’ of a career, Coppola has always given the impression that, as brilliant and wildly successful as the first two Godfather films were, they were detours. Distractions that got in the way of the smaller, more personal kinds of films he always intended to make like 1974’s paranoia-soaked Gene Hackman thriller, The Conversation. “To me, the first Godfather was the Godfather, and everything else is greed,” he said before undertaking those sequels anyway.
