If you love The Godfather, you haven't really seen it until you've seen "The Godfather Epic: A Novel for Television." In 1977 Coppola recut it in chronological order for TV viewing and restored what must have been at least an hour of deleted scenes. However great a movie The Godfather is, the TV version is another level entirely, the extra scenes only adding to what we think we already knew. This is James Caan's best scene in the whole movie, and hardly anybody ever sees it because people only see the theatrical version - which they usually watch on their TV's.
The Godfather is one of the few three hour movies that seems too short. Not just because it's so good, but because it always feels like there are scenes missing that explain certain references. When Sonny exclaims to Tom in anger 'Pa had Genco, look what I got?' you're left wondering 'Who's Genco?' That's explained in a deleted scene when Vito comes to a hospital with all his sons to visit Don Vito's lifelong Consigliere whom Tom Hagen replaces, the dying Genco Abbandano, who literally pleads with Don Vito 'Godfather, call off the angel of death!'
If it were just a straightup 2 hour crime thriller that led to an exciting climax, nobody would have cared after 1972. But The Godfather movies showed that you can have a 3-3 1/2 hour movie with all the detail of a novel in which the visual only adds to the vividness of the experience. The line from The Godfather to Breaking Bad and Mad Men has no curve. Before The Godfather, long movies were usually historical epics that had pomposity baked in. But The Godfather was a movie which treated evil lowlives with all the dignity of Ben-Hur and Scarlett O'Hara, and consequently had more to say about life than Gone With The Wind ever did, in America and everywhere else. The Godfather is not just about crime, or about the immigrant experience, or about capitalism. At it's bottom it's about three subjects:
1. It's about the transition of American vice from alcohol to drugs and how drugs made cities much more violent places.
2. It's about how the Old World impacts the new. In 20th century New York, the most progressive dynamic city in the world, organizations control it whose code of conduct was defined by the Roman Empire.
3 and most important: The Godfather is the key movie, one of the key works of art ever made in any form or time period, that explains to us the appeal, the inevitability, the temptation, perhaps even the necessity, of evil.
Evil will always be with us. Everything that's created will be destroyed, and every morally good objective in life requires some things actions along the way that wade into, to say the least, moral grey areas. If the world is already filled with murderers, do we simply work to make a world without unjust murders and all the nearly as grisly things which accompany it, and if we do, what are we prepared to do to make it happen? If we're on the right, are we prepared to advocate for authoritarian methods? If we're on the left, are we prepared to advocate for terrorist methods? And if those methods fail to rid the world of murder, are we prepared to take those matters into our own hands and be the change we wish to see in the world? Or, do we just shrug and accept that injustice is simply part of the world that we can't change? Certainly the latter path is easier, which means that most people will choose it over the former, which makes life for those who choose the path of activism will become that much more exponentially difficult.
You can apply all that if you like to The Godfather or our current situation or just shrug that last paragraph off as stupid pomp. All the rest I'll say is that in this year, the 50th anniversary of the release, the age of TV bingewatching, and when Coppola is about to make the magnum opus he's threatened to make for 40 years, I don't know how this version hasn't been re-released with a publicity blitzkrieg.
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