The Godfather Part III- part one

The Godfather Part III (1990)

(It started on AMC at 8pm. I was just looking and saw that it's running until midnight. I had thought it would be over by 10pm or 10:30pm. I don't know if I'll be up past 11pm. We'll see. So I'm starting to post now.)

There is a general opinion that the original Godfather movie is one of the greatest movies ever and most critics say that The Godfather Part II is even better.

As for The Godfather Part III, nobody is saying that it's a bad movie. Just that it's the weakest of the three.

The year 1990 was an odd time for movies. There were already a great deal of sequels coming out in the late 1980s. But 1990 saw the release of four sequels to classic films from the early 1970s.

The Exorcist III: Legion
The sequel to The Exorcist (1973) which was written and directed by the author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty.

The Two Jakes
Roman Polanski directed Chinatown (1973) and the star, Jack Nicholson, directed the sequel.

Texasville
Peter Bogdanovich directed this film as well as The Last Picture Show (1971).

Expectations were high for all of these films, but especially The Godfather Part III.

Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the first two films, returned to do the third. He had been resisting Paramount's offers for years, but in the 1980s he had made a lot of bad business decisions and he really needed the money.

But wait. This is all too much backstory. Let's get to the movie that's on right now...
There's a shot of a framed photograph hanging on the wall. It's a photo of Michael and Kay. After a moment you can see a reflection in the glass. It's Kay (Diane Keaton). She's got a tight perm and is wearing a shiny gold bathrobe. A few minutes later you see party guests dancing to disco music, but this is the first sign that the movie is set in the late 1970s.

We're introduced to Vincent, Sonny's son with his mistress from Part I. Vincent meets a reporter, played by Bridget Fonda. Moments later he gives her info about one of the gangsters at the party. "He dips his bullets in cyanide." It's a chilling statement, but it seems an odd touch- isn't there a code of silence, or, at the very least, isn't there some discretion?

It doesn't matter, because her character disappears. I don't mean something happens to her or she goes missing. She just doesn't show up again after the scenes from the morning after. She spends the night at Vincent's house, they hook up, and then the two of them are attacked by a couple of hitmen sent by Joey Zasa, Vincent's enemy.

I never understood what Fonda's character was doing in the movie. That is, not until I came across a quote from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. She's known for taking strange, unlikely roles. After playing the girlfriend of one of the Baldwins in Backdraft she said: "In mainstream movies, the woman's role is mostly just to prove that the leading man is heterosexual".

Well said, and so true.

Francis Ford Coppola got slammed hard for casting his daughter Sofia in the role of Mary after Winona Ryder dropped out. Sofia got slammed pretty hard too. Critics said she was a poor actress but I think she's a good actress and she's also perfect for the role.

So right now it's 10:10pm. Michael has just come out of a diabetic coma and Vincent and Connie tell him that Vincent has killed Joey Zasa. Michael's pissed but he lets it go. His main concern is that Vincent stop dating his daughter.

Now Michael is dealing with Don Altobello, a longtime friend of the family. He's played by Eli Wallach. The name looked familiar so I looked it up and was surprised to find out that he played the skinny sinister-looking guy with the thin mustache from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. He looks so different here. You'd never know it was the same guy.

I'm going back to the loveseat. I'll be here again later.



Note: I just found out today (3-21-11) that Don Novello (Father Guido Sarducci) plays the press agent at the beginning of the film- "You think you know better than the Pope?" I read Bob Woodwards Wired last week, and Novello co-wrote the movie script Noble Rot with Belushi in the months leading up to his overdose.