Godfather, The: The Coppola Restoration (Blu-ray) (1972)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Mob	Audio Commentary-#1, #2, #3: Francis Ford Coppola Featurette-Francis Coppola's Notebook Featurette-On Location Featurette-The Godfather Family-A Look Inside Featurette-The Godfather Behind The Scenes 1971 Deleted Scenes Featurette-The Cinematography of The Godfather Featurette-The Music Of The Godfather Featurette-Coppola and Puzo on Screenwriting Storyboards Biographies-Cast Biographies-Character Featurette-Academy Award acceptance speeches Gallery-Photo Theatrical Trailer Biographies-Crew Featurette-The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't Featurette-Godfather World Featurette-Emulsional Rescue: Revealing 'The Godfather' Featurette-When the Shooting Stopped
Rating
Year Of Production	1972
Running Time	177:09
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered Multi Disc Set (5)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Francis Ford Coppola
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Marlon Brando Al Pacino James Caan Robert De Niro Robert Duvall Talia Shire John Cazale
Case	?
RPI	Box	Music	Nino Rota

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 French Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	1080p
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The Godfather remains one of cinema’s greatest critical and commercial successes. The film was not only the first chapter in an epic and bloody gangster saga, it was to become widely acclaimed as one of the greatest films ever made. Decades later, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie masterpiece remains as potent as ever - a beautifully rich, layered, and detailed exploration of a family in crisis. The film has been restored, and the entire Godfather Trilogy is making its high definition debut as a four-disc box-set. But is the Godfather on Blu-ray “an offer you can’t refuse”?

    A commercially and critically successful producer, director, and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939. The son of musicians, Coppola grew up in New York City. After graduating with a B.A. in Theater Arts in 1959, Coppola enrolled in UCLA for graduate work in film. While studying, he worked as an assistant to Roger Corman on a variety of low-budget films. Coppola's break came when he scripted an English-language version of a Russian science-fiction movie, which became Battle Beyond the Sun (1963).

    Considered a young writing talent, Coppola was hired to work on a number of scripts before landing the job of scripting Patton. In 1969, Coppola and his UCLA buddy, George Lucas, formed American Zoetrope, an independent film production company (Coppola produced Lucas' THX 1138 and American Graffiti). In 1971 Coppola's film, The Godfather, became the highest-grossing film to date It also brought him an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay with author, Mario Puzo, and a Best Director nomination. The film also received an Oscar for Best Picture. Coppola's next film, The Conversation, was also critically acclaimed, winning the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and also gaining Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

    In 1974, Coppola wrote the screenplay for The Great Gatsby and The Godfather, Part II was released. The Godfather, Part II was also a box office success, and went on to win six Oscars. Indeed, Coppola won Oscars as the film's producer, director, and writer. No sequel before had achieved this feat. Buoyed by his success, Coppola undertook his most ambitious film project, Apocalypse Now. Although it was greeted with mixed reviews when it was released initially in 1979, the film was awarded with the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and two Oscars. The film has since been recognized as both a critical and commercial success.

    However, not every film project of his has been so successful. Coppola's overblown musical One From the Heart (1982) was considered a disaster, and recouped little of its US$25 million budget. In 1983, Coppola was forced to sell his Zoetrope Studio. While many predicted the end of Coppola's career, he immediately began his comeback by purposely choosing to direct popular films, such as The Outsiders(1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986),Gardens of Stone(1987), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), The Godfather, Part III(1990), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and The Rainmaker (1997). Coppola is now semi-retired, only occasionally working as a film producer.

    However, long before his ‘retirement’, in the early 1970s Coppola was credited with providing a renaissance in American film. Coppola’s Godfather set the standard for almost every gangster or crime movie in the last 30 years, and has also well and truly entered popular culture. Just consider lines of dialogue such as “sleeps with the fishes" or “make him an offer he can’t refuse”. Interestingly, the words "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" never appear in the film. Rather, the characters refer to the "family business". Some have claimed this was at the insistence of organised crime bosses who could have used their union connections to prevent the film from being made.

    The Godfather is is beautifully paced and delivered with strict attention to detail. The story unfolds meticulously during conversations that take place in darken rooms, corridors, kitchens, and around tables. Family celebrations and meals feature throughout. On one hand, this is a time-honored writing technique. There are a lot of characters, and these scenes allow the writers to bring them all together naturally. But more importantly, these scenes serve to underline how important family is to the story. Family, and issues surrounding honour, duty, respect, loyalty, responsibility, and blood-ties pervade the story. There are no outstanding or memorable action set-pieces. It’s the story, characters, and dialogue that one remembers. The Godfather focuses on story and characters first and action and effects second – an approach many modern filmmakers could learn from.

    As mentioned above, The Godfather was to become one of cinema’s greatest critical and commercial successes. Not only did it become the highest grossing film to date, but also won a swag of awards, including the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Screenplay Adaptation. Both the American Film Institute and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) rank it as one of the greatest films ever made. By any measure - box office or reviews, The Godfather is a phenomenal success.

    Of course Marlon Brando also won the Oscar for Best Actor, and he provides one of his most famous performances as the family patriarch. But Brando's is just one performance in an outstanding ensemble cast. Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall all create characters for which they will be forever remembered. Interestingly, Brando and Pacino both provide brilliant performances as ‘the Godfather’, but they do so with very different approaches. While Brando’s oft-imitated physical characterization is perfect for the role, Pacino provides a powerfully restrained performance as Michael Corleone. His character’s internal struggle can be seen with the slightest gesture or just a look in his eyes.

    The talent behind the camera is also as impressive. Apart from Coppola, who could forget the atmospheric sepia-tinted cinematography by Gordon Willis, the editing by William Reynolds and Peter Zinner, the set design by Dean Tavoularis, or the haunting score by Nino Rota.

    Coppola, Mario Puzo, and Robert Towne (uncredited) wrote The Godfather’s script based on Puzo's classic 1969 novel. In some ways, The Godfather can be seen as a juxtaposition of the famous Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. The story begins in 1945 with the end of WWII. Michael is the youngest son of the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). Michael had left his gangster family, and when he returns home in the opening scene we can see that he has chosen a different path to them. He has a tertiary education and is a patriot; he has even served in the US Marines and is a war hero. Indeed, when we first see his character at his sister Connie’s (Talia Shire) wedding, everyone else is sporting their slick, Italian suits, but he is in full military uniform, adorned with medals. Everyone assumes Michael is the ‘back sheep’ (or perhaps ‘white sheep’) of the Corleone family – the one who has gone straight. He even arrives at this very Italian-American wedding with another outsider, his WASP girlfriend Kay Adams (Diane Keaton). She is horrified, entertained, and intrigued by the Corleones. But Michael is quick to assure Kay that he is nothing like his family. As an outsider, her introduction to this sub-culture is also ours. At the wedding she meets Michael’s three brothers, the family heir, the hot-headed and impulsive Sonny (James Caan), the weak Fredo (John Cazale), and ‘half-brother’, raised by Don Vito, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall).

    Following an attempt on his father’s life, Michael is slowly drawn by family ties into the underworld, and his corruption only bonds him closer to his family. Even if those bonds result in a forced exile, as opposed to his former self-imposed one. Michael’s point of no return arrives when he carries out a hit at a restaurant, which forces him into hiding in Sicily. Once he returns to America, Michael assumes control of his family with a masterful command and callousness that is both shocking and thrilling. In one of the outstanding segments of the film, a series of bloody and brutal assassinations are carried out which are poetically intercut with scenes of Michael attending his nephew’s baptism. Michael has become the Godfather.

Video

    The first two Godfather films have been restored under Coppola and Willis' supervision. The restoration was carried out by famed film historian, Robert A. Harris of the Film Preserve, using 4K (4000 pixel-per-inch scanning technology) at Motion Picture Imaging - the Warner Brothers digital facility. Harris gained fame in the film and DVD community by restoring the classic films Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Spartacus (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and My Fair Lady (1964).

    Having just watched and reviewed the Blu-rays of the Lowry-restored Dr. No (1962) and Live and Let Die (1973) , my expectations might have been a little too high, for I was horribly disappointed with the high definition transfer of the restored Godfather films. Indeed my heart sank as soon as the first film began.

    Having been restored from "a patchwork of sources", The Godfather has been mastered in 1920 x 1080p, using AVC MPEG-4 compression. The High Definition transfer is presented in a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.78:1, in a native 16x9 frame.

    Both Parts I and II appear much brighter with this restoration, and this is particularly noticeable with the almost 'over-exposed' look of the outdoor scenes. But fortunately, the mood evoked by the shadowy indoor scenes and the at times, sepia-tinted cinematography by "Prince of Darkness" Gordon Willis, remain unaffected. There are no problems with the transfer in regards to MPEG or film-to-video artefacts. The vast majority of film artefacts are tiny and not distracting, but their existence is surprising considering the time and cost of the restoration.

    16 sets of subtitles are provided, but note both Parts I and II have lengthy scenes of dialogue in Italian, with no English subtitles.

    This is a BD-50 (50 GB Blu-ray disc), with the feature divided into 23 chapters.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    I found the audio on Parts I and II also disappointing. The feature for all three films is presented with English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround audio (48kHz/24-bit) with the option of French or German dubs presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps). There is also an English Audio Commentary by Coppola presented in English Dolby 2.0 (192 kbps).

    Dolby TrueHD Lossless audio is capable of carrying up to eight discrete audio channels, at a sample depth and rate of 24-bit/96 kHz. The maximum bitrate that can be encoded is 18 Mbps. That noted, the format seems largely wasted here as the audio still sounds fairly mono, flat, and tinny. The audio has a similar sounding fidelity as a DVD and the surround channels are barely used.

    As a dialogue-based drama, perhaps the most annoying aspect of the audio is the variable volume. Often I struggled to hear what was being said and I was forever increasing or decreasing the volume, as at other times the looped dialogue was booming. The use of looped dialogue is frequent and obvious. For example, in an interview Brando later admitted that he had tried to imitate gangster Frank Costello's whispery voice in the film, but he had to later redub most of his dialogue because almost all of it was impossible to understand. There is extensive use of ADR and the audio sync is by far the worst I have ever seen on any Blu-ray.

    The original orchestral musical score was provided by Italian composer, Nino Rota, and his memorable and haunting Italian melodies suit the films perfectly.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    The Box Set comes with a bonus disc packed with genuine extras. The extras are comprised of those ported from the 2001 DVD release (presented in standard definition), and a collection of new extras as well (presented in high definition).

Menu

    As with other BDs, a floating menu is available.

Audio Commentary

    Coppola provides a screen-specific commentary for each of the three films, which collectively adds up to over eight hours! I found all of them interesting, and he shares many memories and anecdotes, along with trivia and detailed information about the actors, locations, and film production. I was pleased that he's fairly opinionated (with a well-considered opinion gained from intellect, education, and experience) and seems to share his views freely, which makes listening to these commentaries all the more interesting. These commentaries are the only extra included on each feature disc, as all the other extras are all found on the Bonus Disc.

Bonus Disc: The Godfather Supplements

The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't (29:46)

    Featuring interviews and plenty of archive footage, this fascinating featurette looks at how Hollywood and the film industry changed dramatically at the end of the 1960s, and how facing an industry that was "collapsing", a group of young film students sought to revive it with their own vision, inspired by the films from the past.

Godfather World (11:19)

    Comprised of interviews and clips from television shows such as The Sopranos, The Simpsons, South Park, and The Family Guy, this is a fun featurette looking at the incredible influence these films have had on popular culture.

Emulsional Rescue: Revealing 'The Godfather' (19:05)

    A short but detailed featurette looking at the original work of Prince of Darkness, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and how the films have degraded over time. This featurette covers how the restoration of Parts I and II came about, with Steven Spielberg's help, and the long road to the finished version with the wonder of technology and serious computing power.

When the Shooting Stopped (14:18)

    Focusing on the post-production work carried out, here we see how Coppola struggled to realise his lengthy artistic vision on the big-screen, with Paramount insisting on a much shorter cut of the film.

'The Godfather' on the Red Carpet (4:03)

    A strange addition, this is a collection of short interview snippets recorded at the red carpet premiere for the film Cloverfield.

Four Short Films on 'The Godfather' (7:20)

    These are not short films but a collection of interviews discussing various aspects of the films.

• GF vs. GF II
• Riffing on the Riffing
• Cannoli
• Clemenza

The Family Tree and Crime Organization Chart

    A diagrammatic presentation of both the Corleone Family tree and a FBI-style Crime Organisation Chart. Viewers can also drill down using their remotes for more information, such as character bios.

Connie and Carlo's Wedding Album

    A collection of photographic stills from the opening wedding scene of Part I.

2001 DVD Archive

    An extensive collection of extras ported from the previous DVD release:

• Galleries: A large collection of stills and text-based information, video footage, as well as trailers for all three films.
• Behind the Scenes: A collection of detailed featurettes looking at various aspects of production, ranging from locations, the script adaptation, the music, and cinematography. This collection includes the 73 minute, 1990 featurette, The Godfather Family: A Look Inside.
• Filmmakers: Text-based information about Coppola, Puzo, Willis, Rota, Dean Tavoularis, and Carmine Coppola.
• Additional Scenes/Godfather Chronology: The Godfather Chronology provides a brief history of the plot in point form, while the Additional Scenes contain a collection of alternate and deleted scenes from all three films, grouped in the story's chronological order.

    In terms of content, the Blu-ray discs released in the USA and here seem to be much the same, with only minor differences such as subtitles.

    The Godfather is a truly wonderful film, and while the high definition transfer is disappointing due to the poor source material, these Blu-rays are now the best way to enjoy these films. Indeed, as Robert A. Harris observed in a recent interview: "hopefully this will be one of those films that will spur people to buy Blu-Ray players".

The video quality is hampered by the dated and damaged, (albeit restored), source material.

The audio quality is also limited by the age, condition, and monaural source.

The extras are genuine and enjoyable.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall