An offer I could refuse

Globe film critic Wesley Morris makes it his business to come clean about a small matter of 'The Godfather'

Marlon Brando (front, with Robert Duvall) as Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's ''The Godfather.'' (Paramount pictures)

I am about to tell you that until a few days ago I had never seen all of the second "Godfather" movie. And I saw the first one in its entirety only a year ago. The occasion for both the confession and the deflowering was another edition of Francis Ford Coppola's trilogy - "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration," a breathlessly advertised restored and re-mastered five-disc set that came out Tuesday at the relative dawn of our high-definition, Blu-ray era.

In the weeks leading up to my date with "II," I tried to gauge how worried a professional moviegoer should be that someone (you, perhaps) might find this appalling or incriminating: "Sir, it's 'The Godfather.' You're a critic. How couldn't you?" It's not an unfair thing to ask. I didn't miss two of the most popular movies ever made out of snobbery. Somehow, mostly, I just missed them.

And in a sense I haven't. "The Godfather" legend hardly obviates the need to see the films, but if you were born after their release, as I was, their reputation dwarfs the urgency of watching them. You know them almost through cultural osmosis: the mournful cry of the oboe in Nino Rota's theme, the hand-delivered fish, the borderline mellifluous wheeze Marlon Brando invented for Don Vito Corleone, the darkly ro mantic saga of an organized crime family unraveling.

"The Godfather" has shown up in ads and cartoons. The films spawned other tributes, copies, and parodies, on television and at the movies. I didn't need to see "II" to understand why Pacino's pursuit of Robert De Niro in Michael Mann's "Heat" constituted a sort of event in 1995: Pacino, De Niro in the same scene for the first time! And why their current grumpy-old-man reunion in "Righteous Kill" feels a little like pandering to fans who had wished the Beatles had gotten back together.

Like "Gone With the Wind," "Psycho," "Star Wars," and "Jaws," Coppola's saga of the Corleone family has a reputation that exists independent of the movies themselves. I knew this was true of "The Godfather" when I saw Brando spoof Vito Corleone with love in Andrew Bergman's 1990 comedy "The Freshman."

I've caught the films in-progress on television at various times of day, in various places (I once watched Sonny's tollbooth slaying on a treadmill, and young Vito's murder of Fanucci with the sound down at a deli). But usually, I resisted keeping the channel on out of respect both for the movies' myth and my own chastity. I wanted the time to be right. And it never really was.

I was raised by a woman whose love affair with Al Pacino began when she paid $1.65 in 1972 to see "The Godfather." Like a lot of Americans, the scale of Coppola's film blew my mother's mind. She had never seen a Hollywood movie done on such a serious, violent, intensely grand scale. But as my first unofficial film professor, she didn't put that movie or its sequel on her required reading list. Our household was lax and our neighborhood was not America's safest, so it wasn't an issue of all the murder, the cursing, or the severed horse's head having a corruptive effect. Seeing Billy Dee Williams pour hot candle wax all over Diana Ross in "Mahogany" probably did more to ruin me than anything Coppola could have.

In college, the guys who were obsessed with "The Godfather" seemed privately besotted. They put up their posters, but that was it. I was never dragged to a "Godfather" party. Only the "Star Wars" kids partied and proselytized. I studied film but never Coppola - or never those Coppolas. We thoroughly dismantled "The Conversation" and compared the simultaneous slaughter of Kurtz and that cow in "Apocalypse Now" to a sequence out of "Battleship Potemkin." "The Godfather" films remained these looming populist events that in my college years never underwent academic scrutiny.

If I'm being honest, I was also overwhelmed by the responsibility of watching them. Had I waited too long? Would I be watching with some kind of purely academic interest? What if I felt nothing? Or maybe the movies would wilt in the shadows of their myth.

But as many millions have known for decades, "The Godfather" doesn't wilt. The films are monuments to Coppola's ambition to give us a story of America in the first half of the 20th century refracted through an Italian immigrant, his children, and his business associates. The business, of course, is organized crime, and better than any movie I know this trilogy manages to dramatize the simultaneous ascent and collapse of one man (Pacino's Michael Corleone). It is, as they say, lonely at the top. And by the end of the first two movies, Coppola manages to encase Michael in a prison of his own hubris while demonstrating what an uncanny way the director has with atmosphere, period, and, mood.

I was afraid that "II" would play like a greatest hits collection of the moments I'd read about and the ones I'd already seen - De Niro's young Vito stalking along the edge of rooftops or the violence in Michael's kissing his back-stabbing brother Fredo ("You broke my heart!"). But the storytelling is ingenious, even when it's confusing (which as long as it's in revolutionary Cuba, it is). A fourth of the film is devoted to Vito's arrival in New York at the start of the 20th century and his rise to neighborhood dominance and respect. Coppola, who adapted Mario Puzo's bestseller with Puzo himself, juxtaposes Vito's ascent with Michael's growing evil, which Pacino puts across as both pathological and inevitable.

Watching the movie now is saddening on some level simply because Pacino doesn't do this kind of withholding anymore: hot blood and cold running in the same veins. Neither does De Niro, who is lean and mean in the truest senses of those words. All the acting has its moments, particularly toward the end as Coppola slowly begins to twist his vise: a beleaguered yet beatific Lee Strasberg, as Hyman Roth, speaking to the press at an airport after being kicked out of Israel; John Cazale, as Fredo, slumped in misery over a chair like a tossed shirt while Michael disowns him; and Diane Keaton's viciousness, as Michael's wife, Kay, during her giant fight with Pacino, is unlike anything she's done in a movie since. Thinking about the way she says "Sicilian thing" before he socks her just gave me goose bumps.

It's easy to think in clichés about movies like these. But power here really does corrupt. Everybody is turned nasty, and Michael, who promises to take the family business legit, is tragically incapable of steering himself away from venality, so, internally, he revels in it, honoring his father and disgracing him at the same time. His triumph, of course, is his tragedy. And tragedy is his triumph. You could say something similar about Coppola's career, which famously wouldn't be the same after at the end of 1970s. (It's his daughter, Sofia, who continues the family business in this century.)

Coppola did manage a third "Godfather," which is not nearly the disaster people seemed to think it was at the time. The movie has its misfortunes - namely, all the Vatican-level intrigue and Sofia's notoriously limp performance ("Cuz . . ."), which almost drains the film's climax of its devastation. But Coppola managed to sustain his good form for the whole film. Even the cross-cutting he used in the first two movies managed to chill bones in the third.

Courtesy of "The Coppola Restoration," I watched all three films in a single day, and I climbed off my couch astounded, exhausted, and relieved. They're a great pop approximation of oil-painting and opera. You can smell leather and cologne, death and cigar smoke. Days later, after my marathon, both life and other movies were something of an unreasonable let down. (Why can't "Nights in Rodanthe" be more like "The Godfather"?)

I survived "The Godfather," and the momentousness of "The Godfather" survived my neglect.