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The three Godfather pictures, especially the first two-and in particular, Part II-stand apart from the usual Hollywood fare or foreign-language films as a work of art on par with the greatest art in other mediums. Lovingly, daringly, meticulously, Francis Ford Coppola and his brilliant cast and crew nurtured something that the presiding studio, Paramount, never believed in - and indeed, always wanted Coppola off the project. In adapting Mario Puzo's trashy novel (a commercial hit after the failure of his critically-acclaimed novel, A Fortunate Pilgrim), Paramount presumably expected a low-budget gangster film on the order of the lowbrow Mafia comedy written by Jimmy Breslin a year earlier, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. 

The new movie was offered first to Costa-Gavras, who had successfully directed the European rough-and-tumble thrillers Z and State of Siege, and then to Arthur Penn, whose breakthrough crime drama Bonnie and Clyde five years earlier, brought a new sensibility to the movies. Throughout much of the first Godfather film, like a punishment from the Gods, Coppola was followed around by a "replacement" director who could step in at any moment at the studio's nod. 
  
What the disparate elements combined-Brando and Pacino's unwanted casting; the slow theme music by Fellini's composer, Nino Rota; the textured cinematography by Gordon Willis reminiscent of the charioscuro of George de la Tour; Coppola's refining Puzo's pulp-when presented onscreen was something even the studio heads understood was closer to theatre, to literature-to opera, really. 

Sitting in a darkened theater watching Brando materialize out of the darkness and Pacino turn from a young naïf into a cold-blooded killer was aheightened experience, like being at Bayreuth listening to Die Walküre. When you watch The Dark Knight with its moody lighting and synthetic violence, or any number of gun dramas built for pseudo-psychological fishing, it is the long tail of the comet that was The Godfather Trilogy still lighting the way; by now, substance has shriveled to style for most of Coppola's followers (even if they do not consciously acknowledge him). Meanwhile, the three original movies only burn brighter.

With the digital advances now available, Coppola has supervised a massive restoration, not unlike that of Lawrence of Arabia some years ago: the newly mastered and re-recorded prints-showing at Tivoli, in Westport Square, one movie per week-are a revelation. In a special DVD released in conjunction with the special screenings, Coppola himself pronounces his astonishment at the movies' newly burnished appearance. Once more, the black hues of Don Corleone's office reveal nothing except a shadowy presence; Michael Corleone's profile is often split into darkness and light in a way far superior to The Joker's screen portrayal; while the Sicily/ Little Italy sequences with the young Vito-magisterially played by Robert de Niro-are wreathed in a golden light that would be appropriated by Zhang Yimou and other Chinese filmmakers twenty years later. Willis's seemingly revolutionary camerawork is never studied in the photographic style of Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais or Godard the 60's cinema icons who used the camera as a philosophical or propagandist instrument. 

Coppola and Willis, notably in the elaborate wedding sequence in The Godfather and in the flashbacks in Part II-here I am thinking of the complicated scenes building up to the street festival and ultimately Vito's murder of the head gangster at the time, Don Fanucci-never get entangled in their intent. They move slowly, methodically: they want the audience to enjoy the movies. It is the same thing as a 19th century novelist like Thomas Hardy painting the background of the characters and the landscape in prose to set the story not only in motion but also in tone. Coppola, it was clear then and is clear now, was not trying to out-Welles the Orson Welles of Citizen Kane with all his tricks up his sleeve. We are touched by the intimacy of the storytelling.
Of course, the look of The Godfather films is classic; but the charged atmosphere of the dialogue defines them as much more. Coppola and Puzo's scripts read like foul-mouthed librettos. What seems hokey on the page, when spoken in the right cadence and at the right moment, can bring together a scene (or an entire theme). Michael's line "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business"; Don Corleone's maxim "A man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man"; Clemenza's much quoted line after a killing, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli"; and the line of lines, repeated by the young Vito, Don Corleone, and Michael alike, "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse," in context, reverberate like Church epistles. The filmmakers made an offer no one can refuse, not if it is a matter of taking that leap, the way that Shakespeare's tragedies or Mozart's operas or Wallace Stevens's poetry demand. 

The thriller genre until then had been loosening up in America; the outré success of Bonnie and Clyde paved the way for hip studio hits like The Getaway, Bullitt-and Scorsese's Mean Streets, his take on the New York gang, which was released betweenThe Godfather and Part II. (In its cranked-up rock soundtrack and full-bore camerawork, it comes across almost as an anti-Godfather.) What the other movies of the time represented was freedom: aesthetic, cultural, and political. Coppola's epics (the first film runs three hours, Part II runs three hours and twenty minutes, and Part III is two hours and forty minutes) are on to something different: the end of the Old World as a tradition of honor first, in the face of the New World's ruthlessness and riches. In a personal sense, one can say that Coppola and Company symbolically killed off Old Hollywood. 

 The influence is indisputable. Grandiloquent epics like De Palma's Scarface (with Pacino reprising his role of the damned from a more ridiculous characterization) to, yes, The Sopranos (with its direct postmodern play on the movies' influence on small-time mobsters, who can recite the dialogue perfectly without understanding it vilifies rather than extols them) seek to evoke the original trilogy. If The Godfather movies are still blamed for making killers into charmers, the interpretation is not Coppola's; the violence is of a piece with the rest of the drama. The tragedy of following such a life is ever-present. (By Part III, which was released in 1990, Coppola and the actors seem frayed by the weight of their achievements, which is unsurprising, though the wait for the masterful revenge killings in the last third of the picture, including the scene when Don Lucchesi is stabbed to death with his own pair of glasses, is riveting as much as revolting.) As movie art, these three pictures reach for something even Coppola was never able to duplicate in his career, forcing him to look elsewhere for inspiration. How they came together is entirely onscreen for anyone to follow. If the movies are an art form especially given over to memories, rarely has the screen been the right size to contain the story presented expressly for it; in this instance, the screen is as big as our memories can contain.


REVIEW:
The Godfather Trilogy
Begins November 28 with Part I and then each film successively for one week.
Tivoli Cinemas, Westport Square, 4050 Pennsylvania Ave. 
For information and showtimes, go to www.tivolikc.com.

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups. 

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