He had found himself disillusioned with acting after a number of financial and creative disappointments ( Revolution was an example of the former, Scarface an example of the latter) and had also gone broke in the meantime. #THE GODFATHER CODA THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE SERIES#This last entry in the series might be widely regarded as the least of the three films, but it finishes things off with one of cinema’s greatest gut punches.īack in 1990, this climax also represented a high point for Pacino, who had just begun to resurrect his career after an extended absence from the screen. After all those years of quiet brooding, this is a shocking way to end a Godfather picture. It’s almost as if Michael is screaming from another dimension, as if he’s already in hell. Michael does finally let out a bellow we do hear - but as soon as he does, the sound fades out again and his voice becomes more distant. Michael’s silent scream brings the whole film and series together because it forces our imaginations to complete the moment (thus subconsciously drawing us more fully into Michael’s anguish), and also because it denies him any kind of release. “It was Walter Murch who removed the sound from it and created the ‘silent scream.’ It was not me,” Coppola told me when I interviewed him last year, crediting his legendary editor. We don’t initially hear Michael’s screaming the sound cuts out, so we only see it, while hearing the immortal Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (the opera they’ve all just been watching), which both highlights and tempers the melodramatic intensity of the scene. It goes on for so long, in fact, that even the other distraught members of the family seem surprised by his grief. Michael wails over the body of his dead child in an extended scene that goes on for a lot longer than such scenes are usually allowed to last. This time, after once again doing away with his remaining foes, Michael loses his daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola), when she gets in the way of a bullet intended for him (fired, it should be noted, by an assassin dressed as a priest). Then, he closed it all out with a truly grandiose, explosive ending - one that works not just as a finale to a single film, but to the entire series. But for this third installment of the Godfather saga, Coppola replicated the somber atmosphere and moody photography of the earlier entries. By the time Francis Ford Coppola returned to the story in 1990 for The Godfather Part III (which he recently reedited and rereleased under a new title, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone), his style as a director had become more florid, more emotionally extravagant and expressionistic (his next project would be Bram Stoker’s Dracula). The Godfather films have their wildly emotional moments, but they are in many ways defined by their grim, submerged tension this is probably the quietest blockbuster series in American cinema. It’s amazing how subdued Michael is during these scenes. #THE GODFATHER CODA THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE MOVIE#The brief, final image of the movie is of a much older Michael, alone, his name now virtually synonymous with the Corleone crime family. By the end of the scene, as everyone else goes off to greet their father, Michael remains at the dinner table - the odd man out, determined to evade the influence of his family. The film ends on a flashback to a family dinner in 1941, when a fresh-faced Michael announced to his stunned brothers that he had dropped out of college to enlist. By killing Fredo, Michael effectively condemns himself. So much of Part II is about Fredo’s betrayal and the growing divide between himself and Michael. The Godfather Part II closes on a similar irony - this time, Michael’s victims include his brother Fredo (John Cazale). But in truth, it is Michael who has consigned himself to the darkness. If you read the basic action on the screen, it’s Kay who is being condemned, the one pushed outside the inner circle. At the end of the first Godfather, after Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) vanquishes his foes, we see him at home, greeting his underlings as one of them closes the door on his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton). And the movies’ respective endings often hold the keys to their meaning. All these films are about people who’ve been damned, whether they know it or not. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think of the Godfather saga. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by Paramount Picturesĭamnation.
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