The Godfather Part III (1990)¶

At a glance¶

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Editing: Barry Malkin, Lisa Fruchtman, Walter Murch
Music: Carmine Coppola (themes by Nino Rota)
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Premiere: December 20, 1990 — Beverly Hills
Wide release: December 25, 1990
Runtime: 162 min (theatrical) · 170 min (1991 cut)
Budget: ~$54 million
Box office: $136.9M worldwide (domestic $66.7M · international $70.1M; components rounded)
Academy Awards: 0 wins from 7 nominations
Intended title: The Death of Michael Corleone

Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in. Michael Corleone

The most argued-about film in the trilogy, and the one whose reputation has moved the most. It was made sixteen years after Part II, by a director who did not want to make it and needed the money, under a title he did not choose, with a lead actress hired eight days before her first scene.

It is not the equal of the first two films. It is also nowhere near as bad as its reputation, and the 2020 recut Coda makes that case far better than the 1990 version does. If you are choosing one, choose Coda.

Plot¶

Story years: 1979–1980, with a coda in 1997. New York, Sicily, Rome, Atlantic City.

New York, 1979. Michael Corleone is sixty, diabetic, and rich. He has divested from gambling, endowed a charitable foundation in his father's name, and is being invested by the Church as a Commander of the Order of St. Sebastian — an honor purchased with a $100 million donation. At the reception, his estranged children appear: Anthony, who refuses law school for opera, and Mary, who runs the foundation. Kay comes to tell him Anthony will not be entering the family business, ever.

Vincent Mancini — Sonny's illegitimate son, raised by Lucy Mancini — arrives with a grievance against his boss Joey Zasa, the flashy, media-friendly gangster who inherited the Corleones' New York operations. Zasa calls him a bastard; Vincent bites his ear. Michael, appalled and secretly delighted, takes him on.

The deal. Michael offers the Vatican $600 million to redeem its debts in exchange for control of Internazionale Immobiliare, an ancient European property conglomerate — a laundering of the family's money into unimpeachable respectability, and the last legitimizing act of his life. Archbishop Gilday, who has run the Vatican Bank into a $769 million hole, accepts. The deal requires ratification by the Pope, who is dying.

The old friend. Don Altobello, an aged New York boss and Connie's godfather, asks to be let in. Michael pays off the Commission from the Immobiliare windfall; Zasa gets nothing and is publicly humiliated. Minutes later a helicopter hovers outside the Atlantic City conference room and machine-guns the Commission. Michael and Vincent escape through a kitchen. Michael, on the tarmac, suffers a diabetic stroke and screams for Fredo.

Vincent, without permission, kills Zasa during a street festa. Connie sanctions it. Michael — recovering, furious — understands that he has been maneuvered: Altobello is behind everything, and behind Altobello are Gilday, Immobiliare chairman Don Licio Lucchesi, and the banker Frederick Keinszig.

Sicily. The family travels for Anthony's debut at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. Michael, guided by the reformist Cardinal Lamberto, makes a confession he has never made aloud: he ordered his brother killed. Lamberto tells him he could be redeemed and that he won't be. Lamberto is elected Pope John Paul I. Thirty-three days later he is dead — poisoned in his bed by Gilday's people.

Michael formally abdicates. He gives the family to Vincent on one condition: Vincent must give up Mary, with whom he has been having an affair that Michael and Kay both find intolerable. Vincent agrees.

The opera. Cavalleria Rusticana plays at the Teatro Massimo while the Corleones settle every account: Keinszig is strangled and hung from a bridge; Altobello is poisoned with cannoli by Connie; Lucchesi is stabbed in the throat with his own glasses; Gilday is shot on the Vatican stairs. Meanwhile the assassin Mosca stalks Michael through the theatre.

On the steps afterward, Mosca fires. The second bullet hits Mary. She says Dad? and falls. Michael screams — and Coppola cuts the sound, so that the widest gesture in the trilogy happens in silence before the audio returns.

1997. An old man in a chair in a Sicilian courtyard. He slumps sideways. A dog wanders over. Nobody comes.

Cast¶

Actor	Role
Al Pacino	Michael Corleone
Diane Keaton	Kay Adams Michelson
Talia Shire	Connie Corleone Rizzi
Andy García	Vincent Mancini-Corleone
Eli Wallach	Don Osvaldo Altobello
Joe Mantegna	Joey Zasa
Sofia Coppola	Mary Corleone
Franc D'Ambrosio	Anthony Corleone
George Hamilton	B. J. Harrison
Bridget Fonda	Grace Hamilton
Raf Vallone	Cardinal Lamberto / Pope John Paul I
Donal Donnelly	Archbishop Gilday
Enzo Robutti	Don Licio Lucchesi
Helmut Berger	Frederick Keinszig
Richard Bright	Al Neri
Don Novello	Dominic Abbandando
John Savage	Fr. Andrew Hagen
Franco Citti	Calò
Vittorio Duse	Don Tommasino
Mario Donatone	Mosca
Al Martino	Johnny Fontane

Production¶

Why it exists¶

Coppola spent the 1980s in financial ruin. One from the Heart (1982) destroyed his studio, American Zoetrope, and left him personally liable for millions; The Cotton Club (1984) was another disaster. He had refused a third Godfather for over a decade. He signed in 1988 for $6 million plus participation because he needed it.

Paramount had been trying to make one without him since 1979. Rejected scripts include a Dean Riesner draft (1979), a Vincent Patrick draft (1982), and a 1985 Nick Marino / Thomas Lee Wright treatment; at various points the studio pursued a CIA-and-the-Mafia plot and a version centered on Anthony Corleone. Directors approached over the years reportedly included Sylvester Stallone and Michael Cimino.

Coppola and Puzo wrote twelve drafts, finishing in May 1989. They wanted it called The Death of Michael Corleone. Paramount refused: a film with "death" in the title, they argued, was unsellable at Christmas.

The Duvall problem¶

Robert Duvall would not return as Tom Hagen without pay comparable to Pacino's. His public account has been consistent for decades: if they paid Pacino twice what they paid me, that's fine, but not three or four times, which is what they did.

Rather than meet it, the production wrote Hagen out — dead before the film begins — and created the lawyer B. J. Harrison for George Hamilton. This is the single most damaging production decision in the film. The trilogy's whole architecture depends on Michael having one person who tells him the truth, and Part III has to invent substitutes for a function Hagen was built to serve. Connie ends up carrying most of it, which changes her character in ways the script never quite argues for.

The Mary problem¶

The role was, in sequence:

Julia Roberts — accepted, then withdrew for Pretty Woman
Rebecca Schaeffer — scheduled to audition; she was murdered by a stalker on July 18, 1989, hours before the meeting
Madonna — tested; Coppola judged her too old opposite García
Winona Ryder — cast, arrived in Rome, and withdrew within days from exhaustion and overcommitment (Mermaids), costing three weeks
Sofia Coppola — the director's 18-year-old daughter, cast in an emergency

Also considered: Annabella Sciorra, Laura San Giacomo.

The result was a catastrophe of reception rather than of performance. Sofia Coppola is a non-actor giving a non-actor's performance in a film full of Actors Studio veterans, and the tonal mismatch is real and unmissable. What followed was not proportionate: two Razzies, a decade of being the punchline for the film's failure, and a level of press hostility that Coppola has described as an attack on him routed through his child. She stopped acting, became a director, and won an Academy Award for writing Lost in Translation thirteen years later. See Part III Reassessed.

Roger Ebert, notably, defended her at the time — arguing that a professional would have brought a polish the part is better off without, and that the girl's awkwardness is the point of the character.

Other casting¶

Andy García beat Alec Baldwin, Val Kilmer, and reportedly Robert De Niro to Vincent. Frank Sinatra agreed to play Altobello and could not clear the schedule; Eli Wallach took it. Michael's sons and daughters and grandchildren are, as always, Coppolas — Carmine wrote and conducted, Italia appears, uncle Anton conducts on screen, granddaughter Gia is in shot.

Shooting¶

Principal photography began November 27, 1989, budgeted at $44 million, running to about $54 million. Six weeks at Cinecittà in Rome; locations in Rome, Caprarola, and Lunghezza; spring 1990 in Palermo, Taormina, and Forza d'Agrò; then New York and Atlantic City.

Coppola rewrote continuously through the shoot and did not settle the ending until roughly two months before the December release. Post-production was six months for a 162-minute film — a schedule that would be tight for a comedy.

The real story underneath¶

Part III's conspiracy is closer to documented history than anything in the first two films. See Real-World Mafia for the full mapping:

Archbishop Gilday ← Paul Marcinkus, the American head of the Vatican Bank during the Banco Ambrosiano collapse
Frederick Keinszig ← Roberto Calvi, "God's Banker," found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982. The film's name comes from Manuela Kleinszig, an associate of a figure later indicted in the Calvi case.
Don Licio Lucchesi ← Giulio Andreotti, seven-time Italian prime minister, right down to the spectacles. The line Calò speaks before killing him — power wears out those who don't have it — is Andreotti's own.
Cardinal Lamberto / John Paul I ← Albino Luciani, who reigned 33 days in 1978 and whose death has generated a permanent cottage industry of poisoning theories, most prominently David Yallop's In God's Name.

Reception¶

1990¶

67% Rotten Tomatoes (6.4/10 average) · 60/100 Metacritic · B+ CinemaScore.

The complaints clustered: Sofia Coppola's performance; a labyrinthine finance plot; Michael's redemption arc read as unearned; and — most damagingly — the sense that it was a film that did not need to exist.

But the reviews were more mixed than memory allows:

Roger Ebert, 3½ / 4, arguing it is not even possible to understand the film without the first two, and defending its ambitions.
Gene Siskel placed it tenth on his 1990 ten-best list while criticizing Sofia and Pacino's makeup.
Leonard Maltin, 3 / 4: masterfully told, with an almost-fatal flaw.
Vincent Canby was, this time, warm.
John Simon (National Review) supplied the most quotable pan: a tedious effort to flog an old hippopotamus into action.

Seven Academy nominations, zero wins — Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (García), Cinematography (Willis, his second and last nomination), Editing, Art Direction, and Original Song. It lost Best Picture to Dances with Wolves. Seven Golden Globe nominations, zero wins. Two Razzies for Sofia Coppola.

Box office¶

It opened to $19.6 million on 1,901 screens, second behind Home Alone, and took $6 million on Christmas Day — then a single-day record, held for seven years until Titanic. Final worldwide: $136.9 million against $54 million. A solid commercial performer that everyone remembers as a flop, because it was measured against The Godfather.

2020 and after¶

The Coda recut scores 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 76 on Metacritic — a jump of nineteen and sixteen points respectively for a film with essentially the same footage in it. That gap is the best available evidence for how much of Part III's failure was structural rather than substantive.

The case against, and for¶

Against. The Immobiliare plot is genuinely hard to follow and emotionally inert; a film about the soul cannot afford a second act about shareholding. Hagen's absence is a structural wound. Sofia Coppola cannot carry the scenes the ending requires. Pacino, playing sixty at fifty, is occasionally acting the makeup. And a trilogy whose first two entries never once explained themselves ends with a film that explains constantly.

For. It is the only one of the three that takes Michael's damnation seriously as a religious proposition rather than a dramatic one. The confession scene with Lamberto is among the best things Pacino has ever done — a man who has not said a true sentence in thirty years attempting one, and finding that saying it changes nothing. The opera finale is a genuine formal achievement, a twenty-minute crosscut that answers the baptism sequence eighteen years later and inverts it: in 1972 Michael's enemies die while he takes a sacrament; in 1990 his enemies die and it costs him his daughter. And the silent scream is the single best shot in the film.

Fuller argument: Part III Reassessed.