The Corleone saga continues, after a hiatus of sixteen years of real time, twenty years of screen time. This third installment traverses less ground than its forerunners, only a few months in "1979" [sic], anchored historically to the ascension and theoretical assassination of Pope John Paul I, who, it will be recalled, died actually in 1978! Coppola never has shown much faith in the gangster genre per se, although his forays into it have always been at their best when most generic (e.g., the two intruders in Andy Garcia's apartment in Part III). To the contrary, he always felt he had to didacticize the connections between gangsterism and capitalism, which astute observers such as Robert Warshow saw long before Coppola came along to clarify. And his repetition of previous material — the big bash at the start, the internecine cross-cutting at the finish, not to forget the Citrus Fruit of Death — demonstrates a fat-headed belief in the sacrosanctity of his own creation. (He has preferred to call this practice "quotation" rather than "repetition," to set himself apart, at least in vocabulary, from garden-variety sequel-makers.) His soulful, spiritually anguished, Method-immersed gangsters were always a little silly, but never more so than in the dime-novel vignette where Michael confesses thirty years' worth of sins to the future Pope ("a true priest," gushes the Mafia don, touched to the heart). And the artlessness of Coppola's daughter Sofia — a last-minute replacement for Winona Ryder – makes everyone look even a little more silly: the professionals show up the awkwardness of the amateur; the amateur shows up the affectedness of the pros. Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Eli Wallach, Joe Mantegna. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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