Why The Godfather Part III has been unfairly demonised

The final part of the Godfather trilogy is considered such an artistic disaster that you'd think Francis Ford Coppola had forgotten how to make a film in the 16 years that followed The Godfather Part II (1974). Part III's most famous dialogue – Al Pacino as the aging Mafia don Michael Corleone snarls, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" – has become an easy laugh line.

But 30 years after its release, it is time to rescue Godfather III from its terrible reputation. Pacino's eloquent, fiery, knowing central performance is supported by several bravura set pieces that are mini-masterpieces in themselves. With deliberate echoes of the earlier Godfather films, there is singing and dancing at a family party, a bold murder during the San Gennaro street festival, a tragedy on the steps of an opera house in Sicily.

Hindsight alone would tell us how seriously the film has been undervalued, even without Coppola's newly restored, re-edited and renamed version. It now has the title Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Calling it a coda emphasises its connection to the earlier instalments, and even hints at its lesser stature. And the word 'death' signals its dark inevitability, although the meaning of that word is slipperier than it first appears.

Twelve minutes shorter, it rearranges some key episodes, eliminates a few minor scenes and trims a line here or there. But until its altered ending, it is fundamentally the same film, better in parts than as a whole. It is too flawed to come close to the accomplishments of The Godfather (1972) or its sequel, both among the most towering and influential films of the 20th Century. They have penetrated the culture, from their language ("I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse") to their quintessentially American story of immigration and upward mobility. But the new version clarifies Coppola's epic vision, revealing how much the Corleone story was always Michael's, a deeply moral saga of guilt and redemption. He just happened to be a mob boss.

For me the tragedy of The Godfather, which is the tragedy of America, is about Michael Corleone – Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola was always lucid about the trilogy's vision, even when others were confused. "For me the tragedy of The Godfather, which is the tragedy of America, is about Michael Corleone," he says in the extras on a DVD set of the three films released in 2001. He wanted The Death of Michael Corleone to be the title back in 1990, but Paramount, the studio releasing it, did not. The film's initial reception was measured disappointment, not dismissal or horror as we now assume. Roger Ebert actually loved it. Pauline Kael did not love or hate it, but offered the withering, condescending assessment. "I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation." Expectations were high because of the legacy of the earlier films, yet low because Part III came with a whiff of desperation and of selling out. Coppola had resisted making another Godfather for years, then wrote the screenplay (with Mario Puzo) and edited it in a rush to meet its Christmas Day release. It even got seven Oscar nominations, including best picture and director. It is an odd example of a movie whose reputation has declined over the decades.

Why the film is misunderstood

Then and now, the series has largely been misunderstood. Crime movies like Coppola's and Martin Scorsese's are so seductive that audiences have embraced them for apparently glamorising the love of raw power and the concept of honour among thieves. Beneath the Mafia-friendly surface, though, they are built on ethical themes their more hot-headed characters don't grasp. The Godfather Coda tells us that crime really doesn't pay when you're ready to search your soul. The young Michael struggles with the idea of killing and crime in the first Godfather. The consequences of his decision are central to Part III, which takes place in 1979, 20 years after the events of Godfather II. Michael, a billionaire living in New York, has made his businesses legitimate and is left to grapple with his guilt for so many crimes, especially ordering the murder of his brother Fredo, who betrayed him.

The film still has problems that no amount of editing can change. In a needlessly confusing main plot, Michael tries to take over a European conglomerate called International Immobiliare. By buying the Vatican's shares, he'll be bailing out the corrupt Vatican bank. The family part of the story revolves around Michael's nephew, Vincent Mancini, the illegitimate son of his brother Sonny. Andy Garcia is as good a Vincent as you could hope for, handsome, swaggering, rough around the edges, dynamic on screen. But his character never makes much sense. Vincent has his father's explosive temper and appetite for violence, but somehow goes from a not-so-bright thug to a shrewd, controlled crime strategist in a matter of months. His change is far from the engrossing, methodical character trajectory that takes the young Michael from idealist to murderer in the first Godfather.

And the film's most severely criticised element is no better than anyone remembers. Winona Ryder, who had been set to play Michael's daughter, Mary, dropped out weeks before filming started and was replaced with unabashed nepotism by Coppola's teenaged daughter, Sofia. Today, we know Sofia Coppola as a brilliant director, but it's easy to see why her amateurish performance made her another target of Godfather III jokes, particularly for the unintentionally awkward and passionless romance between Mary and her cousin Vincent. Coppola actually snipped a couple of Sofia's lines in the new version.

He makes a major change at the start of the re-edited film, eliminating the lovely original beginning. It set an elegiac tone by showing images of the abandoned family house in Lake Tahoe from Part II, and includes a flashback to Fredo's death, while Nino Rota's familiar soundtrack music evokes the past. The new version begins with a duplicitous archbishop soliciting Michael's help for the Vatican, a scene originally placed later in the film. The change highlights the finance plot without making it any clearer.

The exhilarating start

But the film soon picks up with its true, exhilarating beginning. Several generations of Corleones, along with friends and business associates, gather at a party celebrating Michael. His sister, Connie, sings an Italian song, while shady-looking visitors pay homage to Michael in his office. He now has bristly grey hair and a lined face, and controls his family and business with authoritarian power. The extravagant 30-minute sequence echoes Connie's wedding at the start of The Godfather, and the First Communion party in Lake Tahoe that began Godfather II. Michael's office even has the same light slanting through the blinds that we saw in his father's office in the first Godfather, when Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone received visitors. Throughout, these call backs to the previous films add resonance while trenchantly revealing how things have changed. Michael is burdened by conscience in a way Vito never was. "I don't apologise," Vito tells Michael near the end of The Godfather, justifying his brutality because he was trying to save his family. Godfather III is all about Michael's need to atone.

Al Pacino's performance may have become an object of derision, but he knows what he's doing.

The party scene flows easily as it brings every character up to date. Diane Keaton is as deft as ever as Michael's ex-wife Kay, who pleads with him to allow their son, Tony, to pursue a career as an opera singer. Kay can be chilling. "Tony knows that you killed Fredo," she warns Michael. Yet she has never got over him, as we see in a later scene when they have a tearful tête-à-tête in Sicily, a scene Pacino and Keaton make painfully real.

Connie, played with glorious sharpness and wit by Talia Shire, has morphed into Lady Macbeth. Mafia princesses can never run things, but they can pull the strings. It's Connie who ruthlessly tells Vincent, "You're the only one in this family with my father's strength. If anything happens to Michael I want you to strike back." She has asked the right person.

Vincent is central to many of the set pieces. During a meeting of Mafia heads in Atlantic City, when Michael announces he is out of the crime business, a helicopter approaches the window and shoots most of them dead. Vincent rushes Michael, the main target, to safety. The intrigue and rapid-fire violence in the perfectly orchestrated scene might obscure the real point: Michael can't escape his past. That attack causes his cry: "Just when I thought I was out..." Pacino's performance may have become an object of derision, but he knows what he's doing. He is raw and angrily over-the-top in some scenes, but modulates those outbursts with quieter moments. When a stress-induced diabetic attack sends him to the hospital, in his delusional state he calls out Fredo's name. Pacino shows us a conflicted Michael, weakened yet clinging to power.

The power of the re-edited finale

The tone becomes more ominous and the themes more spiritual when the entire family goes to Sicily for Tony's opera debut. (There are spoilers here, but the time limit on spoilers has expired after 30 years.) Michael grapples with the Sicilian Mafia, for reasons linked to the Immobiliare deal, but that is less important than his inner crisis. He makes a confession to a cardinal, breaking down in tears as he says, "I'm beyond redemption." When his protector, Don Tommasino, becomes another victim of Michael's power struggle, he sits by the coffin and says to God, "I swear on the lives of my children, give me a chance to redeem myself and I will sin no more." In this version, Coppola eliminates lines in which Michael asks why he is feared and not loved, removing that plea for the audience's sympathy. Michael gives Vincent control of the family, but does he really have a clear conscience when he knows too well the vengeance Vincent will plan?

The Trump era has been full of Godfather references; Trump himself regularly attacks CNN's Chris Cuomo by calling him Fredo.

That revenge plays out in the elaborate, gripping final sequence at the opera, a counterpart to one of the most famous episodes from The Godfather, when a baptism is intercut with a series of murders. That first sequence was about Michael's rise to power; now he suffers the consequences. While the family watches Tony on stage, Coppola weaves in scenes of Vincent's crew settling scores. One shoots an enemy who plummets off a beautiful spiral staircase. Another murders a rival by stabbing the man's own eyeglasses into his neck. At the opera, hitmen are after Michael, which leads to the shooting on the steps, and a bullet meant for him that kills Mary. For him there is no coming back from that, no possible way to forgive himself.

As the film ends, Coppola makes a brilliant editing choice. The original ending flashed ahead years to the elderly Michael, sitting alone in a gravelly yard as the camera closes in on a face still full of desolation and sadness. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. With a tiny cut, Coppola transforms the meaning of the scene. It now ends with the close-up of Michael's face, still alive. Living with his guilt is his true death, a death of the soul and of hope. Coppola adds text at the end, which says: “When the Sicilians wish you ‘Cent'anni’... it means ‘for long life’... and a Sicilian never forgets.” Michael is doomed to a long life of remembering.

Godfather, Coda restores Coppola's original darker vision, but one element creates a jolt even he couldn't have seen coming. The locations listed in the end credits include Trump Castle Casino Resort in Atlantic City, where the exterior of the helicopter attack was shot. The Trump era has been full of Godfather references. Some are from mainsteam media, including a 2018 Atlantic Magazine article with the headline Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo, comparing a Trump tweet saying that he is “like, really smart” to Fredo famously insisting in Godfather II, “I'm smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb, I'm smart!” Similarly, Twitter trolls routinely mock the president's circle and his grown children as Fredos, portraying them as weak and bumbling like the character, including pasting Donald Trump Jr’s head on a photo of Fredo's body. Donald Trump himself regularly attacks CNN's Chris Cuomo by calling him Fredo. Godfather II even turned up in court documents charging Trump's advisor Roger Stone with obstructing justice, citing an email in which Stone asked someone to protect him the way Frankie Pentangeli covered up for the Corleones. Today the location credit lands like a coda to the end of the Trump presidency, and offers a reminder of how influential the Godfather films have been, even when they were embraced for all the wrong reasons.