Godfather (21 page)

Before Michael shoots the two men at close range, “he tries to summon the nerve to stand up and start firing,” writes Karen Durbin. “Pacino's dark eyes dart around frantically in his otherwise immobile face. His whole future—his rise to power and his incalculable loss of humanity—is anticipated in that moment.”
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Little wonder that this scene helped to convince the Paramount bosses that perhaps both Coppola and Pacino knew what they were doing.

After he liquidates Sollozzo and the rogue cop, Michael escapes into temporary exile in Sicily in order to be out of the reach of reprisals. While in Sicily Michael meets and marries Apollonia, a beautiful peasant girl. Despite the bodyguards that surround Michael and his new bride, Apollonia dies in an explosion that had been intended to kill Michael. Embittered and brutalized by this never-ending spiral of revenge, Michael returns to America, where his tough methods of dealing with other mafiosi continue to impress his father, and he gradually emerges as the heir apparent of the aging Don Vito.

Friction between the Corleones and the other Mafia clans continues to mount, and the volatile Sonny is gunned down as the result of a clever ruse. He is lured into making a hurried trip to New York from the Corleones' compound on Long Island without his bodyguard. En route he stops to pay the toll on a causeway, where he is pulverized by an execution squad with submachine guns. A barrage of bullets blasts Sonny's Lincoln Continental and riddles Sonny's body as he writhes in agony.

The tollgate massacre was inspired by the death of the outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Arthur Penn's film
Bonnie and Clyde
(1967). Penn depicted the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde by police officers as a montage sequence, which became known as “the ballet of blood,” and Coppola's tollgate ambush is equally stunning. “My Dad used to say, ‘Only steal from the best,'” says Coppola in his commentary.

Coppola was not satisfied with the last conversation in the movie between Vito Corleone and Michael in the don's garden, which occurs just before the don's demise. In it Vito passes on the leadership of the Corleone family to his son. The scene as originally written appears in the shooting script dated March 29, 1971, which is on file in the Paramount Script Repository. It fails to convey clearly the transition of power from one generation to the next. Coppola turned to Robert Towne, a renowned script consultant, to rewrite the scene.

“Towne needed to create new material that combined … a subtle transfer of power, expressions of love, respect, and parental regret,” Lebo explains. “Vito is obliged to pass the cup, and Michael is obliged to take it.”
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Towne's rewrite, as it appears in the published version of the screenplay, includes Vito's explanation to his son of the life that the don has lived:

“I never wanted this for you. I worked my whole life—I don't apologize—to take care of my family…. I thought that, when it was your time, you would be the one to hold the strings: Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something.” Michael responds affectionately, “We'll get there, Pop.”
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Despite the brevity of this three-minute scene, Towne created a pivotal moment in the film.

Brando's time on the film was running out, and Coppola still had to do the don's death scene. So the front office decreed that it would have to be done immediately or not at all—they were not prepared to pay the star overtime for staying on to do the scene after his contract ran out. As Coppola prepared to shoot the scene, he recalls, “We were already losing the light,” so it had to be filmed quickly. In the course of the scene Vito is playing with his grandson Anthony in his tomato patch.
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While rehearsing the scene Brando said, “I have a little game I sometimes play with kids.” He made fangs out of an orange peel, wedged them in front of his teeth, and growled like a bear. Coppola set up two cameras in order to be sure that he captured the scene. “Brando shoved the orange peel into his mouth, and the lad playing his grandson really got scared.” Here was the godfather “dying as a monster!” says Coppola, for shortly afterward the old man keels over and expires among the tomato plants. It is a touching scene, he concludes, “and it came close to never being shot.”
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When the ailing Don Vito dies, the Corleone family closes ranks under Michael's leadership, and the new don effects the simultaneous liquidation of their most powerful rivals by having them all killed on the same day and at the same hour. Coppola intercuts these murders with shots of Michael acting as godfather at the baptism of his little nephew. The ironic parallel between Michael's solemn role as godfather in the baptismal ceremony and the stunning “baptism of blood” he has engineered to confirm his position as godfather of one of the most formidable Mafia clans in the country is unmistakable.

Coppola told me that it was his idea to include the baptism in the film. When Puzo said the script lacked real punch at the end, Coppola responded, “We'll have Michael's enemies murdered while his nephew is being christened.” Elsewhere he explains, “I decided to include some Catholic rituals in the movie, which are part of my Catholic heritage. Hence the baptism. I am familiar with every detail of such ceremonies, and I had never seen a film that captured the essence of what it was like to be an Italian-American.”
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William Reynolds was assigned to cut the first half of the picture and Peter Zinner to edit the second half. Accordingly Coppola worked closely with Zinner to create the baptism scene. “Intercutting the baptism with the slaughter was not in the script,” Coppola explains. The two sequences were to be presented separately. When he opted to intercut the two sequences, Peter Zinner suggested that they add the powerful organ theme, which then became the unifying force that tied the two sequences together musically. In short, the montage choreographed mayhem with religion by intercutting multiple murders with the baptism of Michael Corleone's godson, Michael Rizzi, the son of Connie and Carlo.

The scene starts with the baptism liturgy, along with the organ playing solemn tones. The escalating organ music builds to a frenzied crescendo with the wave of killings. Thus the blaring organ accompanies the priest who asks Michael, according to the baptism liturgy, if he renounces Satan and all his works, and Michael, speaking for his godson, responds that he does renounce them. “The effect,” says Sragow, “sealed the movie's inspired depiction of the Corleones' simultaneous dueling rituals—the sacrament of Church and family, and the murders.”
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As for the killings, Moe Greene (Alex Rocco), a casino owner who refused to sell his holdings to the Corleones, looks up from a massage table, puts on his glasses, and stares at his killer, who shoots directly into Greene's glasses. The lens cracks as the bullet goes into his eye and blood pours out. Another enemy of the Corleone clan is gunned down while trapped in a revolving door, and his blood splatters the glass in the door.

The baptism sequence illustrates the immeasurable gap between the sacred rituals of the Church and the unholy rites of the murderous Corleone mob—“in the end the gap between good and evil,” writes Naomi Greene. And the sacrilegious lies Michael utters demonstrate “how far he has fallen from grace, how binding is the pact he has made with the devil” he claims to renounce.
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One of the casualties of Michael's purge is Carlo Rizzi, who, besides mistreating Connie, had sold out to Barzini's rival Mafia family. Connie accuses Michael of killing her husband, but he coolly denies it. By this time Michael has married again, and his second wife Kay (Diane Keaton) likewise demands to know if he has murdered Carlo. Michael again lies and declares that he did not murder his brother-in-law.

The movie ends with Kay standing in the doorway of the study where Don Vito once ruled, watching the members of the Corleone Mafia family kissing Michael's hand as a sign of their loyalty to him. The camera draws away and the huge door of Don Michael's study closes on the scene, shutting
out Kay—and the filmgoer—from any further look at the inner workings of the Mafia.

Sound designer Walter Murch emphasizes in his foreword to this study the importance of the shutting of that door. He accompanied the image of the door closing not with a simple click but with a slam. “It was even more important to get a firm, irrevocable closing that resonated with and underscored Michael's final line, ‘Never ask me about my business, Kay.'” By the end of the picture, Kathleen Murphy notes, Pacino has seamlessly morphed from the clean-cut Marine veteran at the wedding reception into a “Saturnine, Machiavellian, masked Mafia assassin,… given to molten rage.”
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During postproduction the musical score was added to the sound track. Coppola commissioned Nino Rota, the distinguished composer of several film scores for Italian director Federico Fellini—like
La Dolce Vita
(1960)—to furnish the underscore for
The Godfather
. (Carmine Coppola composed the incidental music for the dance band at the film's wedding reception.) In his score Rota utilized a symphonic structure to comment on characters and situations. Evans initially feared that the score was too highbrow and operatic, but Coppola as usual stuck to his guns and insisted that the Rota score be used in the film.

Subsequent critical reaction to Rota's music was unanimously positive. “The score was laced with intricate melodies, Italian-tinged passages, and hauntingly tragic themes,” Lebo comments.
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Some of the themes are among the most memorable in film history—for example, “The Godfather Waltz,” first played by a lone trumpet during the opening credits and repeated throughout the film in various combinations of instruments.

Coppola's principal concern about the rough cut of the picture during editing was the running time, as he says in his DVD commentary. “Bob Evans said that, if it was over two hours, I would have to cut the film at Paramount in Los Angeles,” meaning that the studio brass would supervise the shortening of the rough cut, probably with a meat cleaver. Coppola had originally envisioned a three-hour film, but he assured Evans he would comply with his dictum. The director started out with five hundred thousand feet of footage (about ninety hours), which he had to whittle down to a reasonable running time. Reynolds and Zinner had done a preliminary edit of each scene as it was filmed, and now Coppola had to supervise the assembly of a full-scale rough cut. In all, Coppola spent five months editing the rough cut.

“My first cut was in fact three hours, so I cut all the footage that wasn't germane to the story and got it down to two hours and twenty minutes.” It was safely below the outside limit of three hours, so that the studio would
not have an excuse to fire him and take over the editing of the film. He shipped the rough cut to Evans, who soon phoned him in a fit of rage. Coppola continues: Evans called the short version “a two hour trailer” for the movie. “You've cut all the human stuff out, and you've only got the plot left. All the best stuff is gone!”

So Evans ordered Coppola to bring the rough cut down to Paramount in Los Angeles and restore the footage he had eliminated from his first cut. “Basically I simply put back everything that I had cut from my first version,” which was three hours. Peter Bart, Evans's right-hand man in those days, goes so far as to say that because Evans was dissatisfied with Coppola's short version, he personally supervised Coppola's editing of the long version, “transforming a superbly shot but ineptly put-together film into a masterpiece.”
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Coppola flatly denies that Evans actually oversaw his reediting of the film. Coppola on his own methodically reinstated “all that wonderful stuff” he had cut originally at Evans's behest in order to bring the film in at two hours and twenty minutes. “It's true that Evans realized that a lot of the human texture, the family warmth, had been taken out in the shorter version. But there was no problem about my simply putting it all back, because it had all been there in the first place.”

A decade after the release of the film Coppola read an interview with Evans in which Evans again claimed that he personally masterminded the final edit of
The Godfather
. Coppola shot off a vehement telegram to Evans dated December 13,1983, stating in part: “Your stupid blabbing about cutting
The Godfather
comes back to me and angers me for its ridiculous pomposity.” Evans replied in a telegram dated the following day that he did not deserve “the venomous diatribe.”
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The consensus of those involved in the release of
The Godfather
, including Frank Yablans, who had succeeded Stanley Jaffe as president of Paramount, was to side with Coppola. Indeed, Yablans remembers Evans lobbying with him in support of Coppola's three-hour version of the film, but he affirms pointedly: “Evans did not save
The Godfather
, Evans did not make
The Godfather
. That is a total figment of his imagination.”
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Ruddy assured me in conversation that the release version of
The Godfather
“was Francis's cut, frame for frame.”
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Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein's documentary on Robert Evans's life,
The Kid Stays in the Picture
, premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival; in it Evans continues to maintain that he had an artistic influence on
The Godfather
. In the directors' commentary included on the DVD of the documentary, Morgen acknowledges that Coppola contests Evans's claims
about his role in shaping
The Godfather
. But, he adds, “This is Bob Evans's film; it's told from his point of view. It's the world according to Bob.”

Some of the scenes Coppola excised from the rough cut during postproduction were not reinstated. All of these deleted scenes can be viewed in a special section of the DVD. The only one that I wish that Coppola might have found a place for in the final cut of the film is the scene in which Kay is praying for Michael in church—a scene that Coppola had originally intended to use as the ending of the film. It shows Kay lighting a candle and praying for her husband's lost soul. Puzo favored this ending since this is the way the book ends. But Evans and others thought that the ending would be more effective if the picture concluded with Michael closing the door on Kay as he takes his place as the head of the Corleone dynasty, and Coppola eventually went with that ending. Still the brief scene of Kay praying fervently in church might have been inserted elsewhere in the film, since it proves a significant contrast to Michael's hypocritical participation in the baptism ceremony.