Many of Francis Ford Coppola's films, including the recent "Youth Without Youth," have been haunted by the passing of time and an acute awareness of its destructive handiwork – the sense that once a treasured moment has been lost, nothing can be done to recover it.
But now a piece of Coppola's own youth, which also happens to be one of the greatest works in American film, has been recovered, and spectacularly so. Paramount Home Entertainment has issued the three films that make up Coppola's "Godfather" saga, miraculously rejuvenated by a team of digital-restoration experts under the supervision of film preservationist Robert A. Harris.
Offered both in high- definition Blu-ray and standard DVD editions, Coppola's three films seem to have reclaimed the golden glow of their original theatrical screenings – a glow that has been dimmed and all but extinguished over the years through a series of disappointing home video editions.
Most of Harris' work has gone into the first (1972) and second (1974) films in the trilogy. The later and less well-received third installment (1990) did not need as much effort, having been shot on a newer generation of film stock and never subjected to the abuse that nearly destroyed Parts I and II. By all accounts, the original negatives of the first two films were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration.
The final product, which the studio is calling "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration," combines bits and pieces of film recovered from innumerable sources, scanned at high resolution and then retouched frame by frame to remove dirt and scratches. The color was brought back to its original values by comparing it with first-generation release prints and by extensive consultation with Gordon Willis, who shot all three films, and Allen Daviau, a cinematographer ("E.T.") who is also a leading historian of photographic technology.
The tight grain of the image, so important a component of Willis' original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition.
The effect is not unlike that of a pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus – until quite recently, inconceivable in the living room.
The "Godfather" films remain the 20th century answer to Shakespeare's plays of royal succession, with the twist that here Prince Hal grows up, not into Henry V, but Richard III. Al Pacino's performance as Michael Corleone, the introverted youngest son of a wise and ruthless monarch, remains a model of modulation. The shape of his face, the set of his eyes, the weight of his body all seem to evolve imperceptibly (at least until the aggressive intervention of makeup in Part III). A puppyish kid who might have been played by Dustin Hoffman in his "Graduate" period becomes a figure of immense gravity and chilling emotional reserve, a portrait worthy of Walter Huston or Max von Sydow.
Watching the first film, you are struck again by how little screen time Marlon Brando actually occupies. Most of his work is done in the 20-minute opening sequence, as the Godfather sits in his study, receiving supplicants on the day of his daughter's wedding. This is a piece of superbly efficient expository writing, setting out an exotic milieu, describing its rules and moral configuration, and establishing the larger-than-life figure who presides over and protects it.
And Brando plays it like the master he was, balancing just enough exaggeration (the cotton-stuffed cheeks, the asthmatic voice) with pure behavioral naturalism (the eyes that go blank when he is bored or distracted) to create a figure that both belongs to this world and is too big for it. After that sequence his work is effectively done, and the character can recede into the background of the action without surrendering his dominant presence.
Like another venerated American epic, "Gone With the Wind," the first "Godfather" film is essentially a study in vanishing feudalism: The old, aristocratic masters who made their empires out of sweat and blood are fading into the background, to be replaced by the middle-class, mercantile interests represented in "Gone With the Wind" by the blockade runner Rhett Butler and in the first "Godfather" by the drug-dealing upstart Sollozzo (Al Lettieri).
