The Godfather

On the data. Three films, one re-edit of the third, and one chronological recut of the first two. The order above is release order, and that is not a default: it is the director's own conclusion. Coppola had the material cut chronologically at his own instruction and afterwards said that the story of the young Vito and the story of Michael were not as compelling alone as when they were intercut. He kept the parallel structure. What the intercutting does is worth spelling out, because it is what a chronological viewing costs you. Every juxtaposition in the second film is a moral comparison. Vito's crimes bind a neighbourhood together and buy him love; Michael's identical crimes isolate him and cost him everything he was trying to protect. Nobody says this in dialogue. It exists only in the seam between the two threads. The closing flashback to December 1941, with the family around the table and Michael alone at the end of it, only lands because the film has spent three hours holding the past just out of reach. Moved to its chronological slot it is simply a scene. On-screen dates are rarer here than people remember. The first two films display no location or date captions at all; plot summaries and transcripts carry headings like New York 1917 and Lake Tahoe 1958, and those are the summarisers' words, not frames of the film. The only written date in the first two films is the card that opens the second, placing the murder of Vito's father in Corleone in 1901. Everything else is spoken or inferred: the war being over places the wedding in 1945, and Sonny's line about the Japanese bombing on his father's birthday dates the final flashback exactly to 7 December 1941, which is the most precise moment in the trilogy and is said aloud rather than printed. The third film is the one that captions itself, opening on New York City, 1979 and running to Easter 1980. Its final scene, Michael dying alone in Sicily, carries no stated year, so none is given here. The chronological recut has appeared under at least seven names since 1977: The Godfather Saga, Mario Puzo's The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television, The Godfather 1902-1959: The Complete Epic, The Godfather: The Epic 1901-1959, The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980, and The Godfather Epic. These are editions of one project, not separate works, and only one entry is listed. One warning about the earliest: the 1977 NBC broadcast is both longer and tamer than the films, because nine sequences including the horse's head and Sonny's death at the tollbooth were censored or replaced with alternate takes. The restored versions from 1981 onwards put the violence back. None of them has ever had a proper modern home release, so finding one is a project. The Offer, the 2022 series about the making of the first film, is regularly filed into Godfather watch orders. It is a drama about producing a film rather than part of the story, so nothing is listed for it here. The video games are not listed either.

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