Godfather (27 page)

In the scene that portrays the high-level meeting in which Michael engineers his takeover of Immobilare, Coppola points out that “there is a sinister gentleman present who is based on another one of the mysterious men I saw in the elevator in the Gulf and Western building.” In the scene in question Helmut Berger plays Frederick Keinszik, a financier with a shady reputation whom Coppola modeled on Roberto Calvi, who was ironically known as “God's banker” because of his involvement with the Vatican Bank. Coppola makes the Calvi character Swiss instead of Italian, in order not to identify him too closely with his real-life counterpart. In the film Keinszik, whom Vinnie refers to contemptuously as “the Swiss banker fuck,” instigates an elaborate swindle to bilk Michael out of a substantial amount of the profits from his dealings with Immobilare.

Coppola balances the portrayal of the sly, oily Archbishop Gliday, who represents the Roman Catholic Church as secular institution, with the depiction of the pious, sincere Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Valone), who represents the Church as spiritual community. Lamberto is patently more interested in the state of Michael's soul than in the business proposition Michael brings to him. In fact, Michael achieves some solace from making a sacramental Confession to the cardinal, admitting the heinous sin of fratricide he committed when he had Fredo killed. When Lamberto soon after becomes Pope John Paul I, he vows to do some moral housecleaning in the Vatican Bank, but his untimely death prevents him from carrying out his reforms.

Principal photography commenced on November 27, 1989, at Cinecittà Studios in Rome where there would also be extensive location work around the city. The Sicilian village of Taormina, which served for the village of Corleone in the first two films, appears again in
Godfather III
. The Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Sicily, was selected for the opera house where Michael's son Anthony makes his opera debut in
Cavalleria Rusticana
at the climax of the movie.

When shooting in Europe was completed, the production moved to New York for more location work. Michael's receiving of the Order of St. Sebastian was filmed in the old St. Patrick's Cathedral, a neo-Gothic Church on Mott Street in Little Italy—the same church where the baptism of
Connie's son was filmed for
The Godfather
. Racketeer Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), one of Michael's most ambitious and dangerous adversaries, is in attendance. Joey Zasa, whose character was derived from Mafia hood Joey Gallo, is impeccably dressed for the occasion. He marches down the aisle and cavalierly hands his hat to his bodyguard before genuflecting to the altar. “Even before God, the Mafia preserves distinctions of rank,” writes Barbara Harrison. “[I]t is the kind of detail only a director of Coppola's background and acuity would know to include.”
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Before shooting began, Coppola had an artist make storyboards for all of the scenes. He then recorded them on videotape, with extras reading the dialogue for each scene. “If I got bored looking at the storyboards” for a particular scene, he notes, “I knew I should work on that part.”
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He used his customary method of encouraging the cast to improvise during rehearsals in order to improve a scene that was not working well. Andy Garcia testifies that he for one flourished in the spontaneous working atmosphere Coppola fostered on the set. “A good director like Francis will do takes where he is very specific,” Garcia explains, and then he will say, “Okay, this is a free one; say whatever you want. I don't have to use it, but then again you might say one line that I can use.”
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Coppola would sometimes experience periods of discouragement in the stressful atmosphere of shooting a major commercial picture on a tight schedule. Eleanor Coppola records in her notes on the making of the film that on March 6, 1990, while Coppola was still filming at Cinecittà, she discovered her husband “sitting on a sofa in Michael Corleone's living room, very depressed.” He spoke of “how he hated that he was doing the same material he had done nearly twenty years ago” and how he hated the great amount of time it took to make a movie.
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Shooting wore on until May 25. Eleanor Coppola records that the wrap party was rather subdued: the cast and crew that had been together for 125 shooting days were sorry to see it all end, even if Coppola was not.

The director then had to supervise the ending of the film for its premiere on December 20. He had only six months to whittle a mountain of footage down to a final cut of just under three hours running time. The pressure on Coppola increased as he worked around the clock to meet Paramount's deadline. He collaborated with principal editors Walter Murch, Barry Malkin, and Lisa Fruchtman and also supervised a battery of assistant editors who were brought in to expedite the finishing of the final edit on schedule. For the record, Coppola met the studio-imposed deadline, and the film opened on Christmas Day, 1990.

Press reports circulated that the production had gone out of control
and had been plagued by “spiraling budgets.” He responded that, admittedly, the original budget, $44 million, had finally swelled to $55 million, but a substantial part of the overage was due to finishing the film for the Christmas opening, which involved hiring additional editors. “Working with an army of editors,” he said, meant that “we're paying maybe fifty times what it would cost if we could just mix with one editor.” As usual, he concluded, certain journalists were determined to make him look like a crackpot and “inflate his troubles for a good story.”
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The movie begins with the celebration of Michael's papal knighthood, which is Michael's bid for respectability. During the course of the reception Connie is at pains to pay lip service to the traditional ethnic customs of the Corleone clan. She sings with the band an Italian folk song, the same Tarantella that was played at her own wedding in
The Godfather
, and which Frankie Pentangeli had failed to get the orchestra to play at the First Communion party in
Godfather II
.

During the reception it seems likely that Vinnie will be Michael's heir apparent as head of the Corleone crime family. (Peter Cowie mistakenly refers to Vinnie in his Coppola book as the illegitimate son of Michael, rather than of his brother Sonny.) As the film unreels it becomes increasingly clear that Vinnie is the black sheep of the Corleone clan. He cleverly insinuates himself into the family business by systematically eliminating members of rival Mafia clans who are plotting against Michael and by seducing Michael's daughter Mary.

One of the Mafiosi that Vinnie liquidates is the truculent Joey Zasa, who envies the Corleones' wealth and power. Connie endorses Vinnie's assassination of Zasa because he is a threat to the family. “Connie emerges as a strong figure in this film,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. Now far removed from the victimized wife she was in
The Godfather
, she has evolved into “a combination of Lady Macbeth and Lucrezia Borgia.”

Connie, a malevolent figure wrapped in a black shawl, is out for blood. She schemes to control and murder the Corleones' enemies with the pitiless efficiency once displayed by her brother Michael and by her father Vito. She sees Vinnie as her ally. The hotheaded Vinnie is like a young colt, and she views him as the only one of Michael's henchmen who possesses the muscle and drive to protect the family from rival gangs. With Connie as Vinnie's sponsor, it is not surprising that Michael eventually recognizes him as a surrogate son, made clear when Michael officially changes Vinnie's surname from Mancini to Corleone.

Some of Michael's underworld enemies conspire to thwart his negotiations with Immobilare and the Vatican Bank. There is, for example, the
elderly Don Altobello (Eli Wallach), who, like the aging Hyman Roth in
Godfather II
, pretends to be Michael's friend but is really his arch enemy. His partner in crime is a cut-throat Italian politician named Lucchesi, whom Coppola based on a powerful Italian political figure. In addition, Archbishop Gliday has sold Michael out to his opponents. The unscrupulous Don Altobello, however, is the most evil and dangerous of Michael's enemies. He wants Michael dead and hires an assassin to gun Michael down while he is attending his son's debut in
Cavalleria Rusticana
.

For his part, Vinnie arranges to have his minions slaughter the Corleone's enemies while the family attends the opera performance. The film's finale, then, takes place during a majestic performance in Palermo of Mascagni's opera, which, appropriately enough, is about a vendetta in a Sicilian village. The melodramatic events onstage parallel the violent events offstage.

Connie takes it upon herself to personally exterminate Don Altobello. “Connie is almost satanic in this film,” Coppola observes, “so ruthless has she become.” She gives Altobello a box of poisoned cannoli to eat during the opera. Cannoli, Coppola reminds us, “was associated with murder in
Godfather I”
(“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli,” Clemenza said to the hit man who murdered Paulie.) Moreover, Connie's poisoning Altobello was suggested to Coppola by the poisoning of Sindona in the wake of the original Vatican-Immobilare scandal.

The intercutting of the opera performance with the baroque orgy of murder Vinnie has orchestrated recalls the montage of violence and death that climaxes
The Godfather
and
Godfather II
. In quick succession we once again see a series of murders.

Keinszik, the Swiss embezzler, is smothered with a pillow by Vinnie's hoodlums, and his corpse is discovered hanging from a bridge in Rome (though his real-life counterpart, Roberto Calvi, was actually found suspended from Blackfrier's Bridge in London). Lucchesi is killed by Carlo, who was Michael's bodyguard during his sojourn in Sicily in
The Godfather
(again played by Franco Citti). Carlo smashes Lucchesi's thick glasses and rips open his aorta with a jagged piece of glass, as the blood gushes out. “This is a classic bit of carnage, served with gore sauce.”
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Archbishop Gliday is shot on the grand staircase of his episcopal mansion by Al Neri. He falls toward the camera and lands on the floor far below.

As the opera continues, Connie watches through her opera glasses as Altobello slumps over dead in his private box. Viewing the murder from a distance allows her to distance herself from her crime. Meanwhile, Altobello's hired gun attempts unsuccessfully to murder Michael in the course of the performance.
That the murderer is disguised as a priest implicitly gives a diabolical cast to his character.

The febrile and ferocious assassin makes his second desperate effort to kill Michael outside the opera house after the performance. Tragically, Mary stops the bullet aimed at Michael and dies in the arms of her anguished father. With dreadful irony Michael unwittingly brings about “the last act of this tragedy of family power and ruin”: the death of Michael's daughter on the steps of an opera house—cut down by the bullet that was meant for him.
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The scene brings to mind Michael's observation, made earlier in the film, that “the only wealth in this world is children, more than all of the money and power on earth.” As Michael crumples on the steps of the opera house, his mouth gapes open in a silent scream of agony and despair. “Walter Murch removed Michael's scream from the sound track, making it seem so much more agonizing,” says Coppola. The movie's vigorous final thirty minutes is inspired moviemaking as a panoply of deaths both inside and outside the opera house coincides with Mascagni's brutal revenge drama.

In the original script Michael, and not Mary, was supposed to be struck down by the assassin's bullet, Coppola confides on the DVD. He was able to be ambushed by a gunman while leaving church on Easter Sunday. “But I decided that just to kill him at the end wasn't enough,” given his record of bloodshed. “I finally came up with an ending which was worse for Michael than just dying”—he is left to live with the horrors of his life. In the ruined face of Michael Corleone,
Godfather III
locates an emotional gravity that is rare in American film. The movie is a slow fuse with a big bang—it ends with the tragedy of a man “aching for things past and loved ones lost.”
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Godfather III
premiered with a strong box office, despite mixed reviews. Surprisingly, the film earned $67 million in domestic rentals, $20 million more than
Godfather II
. One recurring source of criticism for the film was the casting of Coppola's daughter Sofia as Mary, Michael's daughter. Coppola chose her while she was visiting the set in Rome during the Christmas holidays. “I only put her in the role because the day before we were to shoot a scene with Winona Ryder as Mary, Winona dropped out,” Coppola explains on the DVD. Ryder was diagnosed as suffering from exhaustion, the result of making two movies back-to-back without a break and then going on to
Godfather III
.

“The studio sent me a list of possible replacements,” including Madonna and Julia Roberts, but they were all too old for the role. “I wanted an eighteen-year-old girl for the part. Granted Sofia was not an experienced
actress, but it was Sofia that I had in mind when I created the character of Mary, the apple of her father's eye,” a girl who is “sweet and kind.”

Admittedly, Sofia Coppola was a movie actress who lacked the credentials for such a key role in an important picture. Still Coppola did not want to endure the costly delay involved in waiting for the studio to send over a replacement for Winona Ryder from Hollywood. He had been promised autonomy over the production, including casting, “so I exercised my rights and decided on Sofia. My decision was vilified by some critics, but I never regretted it. I was thrilled to have her play the part… because I saw her as just like the vulnerable kid Mary was supposed to be.” Eleanor Coppola adds that her husband believed that the criticism leveled at Sofia “was meant for him, and that Sofia received the criticism the way Mary Corleone got the bullet intended for Michael.”
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