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By
NICK ZEGARAC
Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" trilogy represents a landmark achievement in American cinema. Okay, maybe not Part III, but cumulatively. The first film established the benchmark of excellence that by Part III was starting to look rather cliché. In "The Godfather" we are introduced to Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), a Mafia kingpin who rules his underworld empire with compassion and family honor at heart. What is fascinating about Coppola's interpretation of the Mafia is that it examines them not as criminals per say, but as struggling immigrants unable to secure their place in the new world without being forced to resort to intimidation and violence. In the first film, the Corleone empire is threatened almost from the start. After the jubilant wedding of the Don's only daughter, Connie (Talia Shire) the Don is almost assassinated. Michael (Al Pacino), the son who has been groomed for legitimate business, vows revenge and achieves it in assassinating the rival Don whose orders almost killed his father. But when the heir to Vito's throne, Sunny (James Caan) is brutally murdered at a tollbooth, Michael is forced to step in and assume control of his father's underworld empire.
Stemming from a prior incident, Paramount didn't want Brando on the film. Ditto for Al Pacino, though in that instance their apprehension seems to have been predicated on the fact that Al was then an unknown quantity in Hollywood. Shire had to practically beg Coppola for her role. It all worked out in the end. "The Godfather" set a benchmark for cinema violence and took home the Best Picture Oscar. Two years later, "The Godfather: Part II" would sweep the award, winning more Oscars than its predecessor.
In Part II Coppola's formula film making is cemented by a parallel storyline: the first picks up where part one left off, with Michael now married to Kay (Dianne Keaton) and living near Lake Tahoe where they raise their children. However, as part two progresses the marriage disintegrates into a bitter custody battle. The other plot point of Part II regresses to 1930s New York and charts the rise to power of Don Vito, on this occasion played to perfection by Robert De Niro. Part II is by far the most intricately balanced and thoroughly explorative of "The Godfather" trilogy.
Part III is something of a rehash and a disappointment. It assumes a straightforward story involving the aged Michael. Reconciled with Kay -- at least on speaking terms -- and now a struggling diabetic, Michael's hopes for his children are shattered when his son refuses to pursue a law degree and his daughter Mary (Sophia Coppola) is accidentally assassinated on the steps of the La Scala Opera House. The penultimate showdown of Part III is reminiscent of the final acts of the previous two films. It offers nothing new or viscerally stirring to the saga of this crime family. Evidently, the Academy of Arts and Sciences agreed. "The Godfather: Part III" took home no Oscars.
The DVD transfers of these three films from Paramount Home Video are in short a dismal disappointment. Although Coppola did shoot his films with a decidedly dated look, none of the transfers included in this collection are anything but dated by the ravages of time. Color fidelity and balance are inconsistently rendered. Flesh tones are either faded pink or too orange. Blacks, browns, dark grays and blues all appear as one gigantic muddy brown mess. Fine detail is completely lost. Digital compression artifacts, film grain, aliasing, fine detail shimmering and video noise are prominent throughout.
Oddly enough, out of all the transfers, Part I looks the best while Part III, the newest of the bunch, represents the worst example of tiling and color bleeding that I've seen in any film from the eighties. In addition, Part II is inexplicably spread across two discs. Paramount's reasoning is presumably to avoid compression related problems on a lengthy film -which still abound -- yet Part III, which shares almost the same running time, is compressed onto one disc. Chapter references on all three films is bare bones -- for a three hour movie, twelve chapter stops is inadequate. All the extras for these films are lumped together on a separate disc, but with all the problems I've just listed and the added disappointment of not being chapter referenced. Unfortunately, for fans of these immortal classics, Paramount Home Video has given us an offer all too easy to refuse! |
