From God-Awful to Practically Perfect

Way back in Christmas of 2001, my daughter bought me the DVD box-set of the Godfather trilogy, and at the time, I was thrilled with their quality.  I had a 32-inch, standard definition (SD) set, I didn’t know scan rate from a hole in the ground, and I thought I was on my way to true cinephilic nirvana.  State of the art format, state of the art equipment.

Only, of course, it wasn’t, and five years later I got an enormous, 50-inch HD Sony.  One of the first things I slapped into the player was The Godfather, and WTF? It looked terrible.  The image was soft and lacking in detail.  It was muddy and dim — even dimmer than I remembered — and there were numerous nicks and scratches and jumps.  In short, I found out what many a film buff has in recent years: if you blow up crap, it doesn’t make it any better.  It just looks like bigger crap.

I was seeing a combination of crappy Paramount encoding and really bad prints; I raged against the machine (and the studio).  Two of the most significant American films of the last half-century — with Part III thrown in as a bonus — shamelessly mistreated at the hands of a system concerned only with profit.  I had visions of cigar-chomping Paramount executives, counting their pennies, asked to produce a quality product, and saying “Naw, it’s the Godfather, for Christ’s sake: they’ll take what we give ‘em and like it!”

Enter Francis Ford Coppola and pal Steven Spielberg, who had recently signed a deal between Dreamworks and Paramount.  Coppola asked Spielberg to put up the money for a restoration, and it was assigned to the redoubtable Robert A. Harris of Film Preserve Ltd in New York, and I must say it looks fabulous.

That’s a minor miracle, considering the condition of the camera negatives of the first two films, and especially the 1972 original.   “Emulsional Rescue,” the most fascinating special feature on the  new discs, details the grueling process and — perhaps more interestingly– the reasons the original elements were in such bad shape.  First of all, cinematographer Gordon Willis (AKA the Prince of Darkness) shot it with no room for error, i.e., with none of the usual compensations for film exposure latitude.  He did this so that the labs would have to print the films the way he shot them.

This resulted in a negative with a minimum amount of information — the featurette points out that in those inky blacks there was “nothing there,” no hidden detail that could be brought out by increasing the exposure of the print.  The same goes for the well-lit scenes, and the overall effect was to create a negative with minimum emulsion, and thus one that was exceedingly thin and fragile.

A second factor was that the 1972 feature was intended to be a low-budget gangster quickie, and was shot on stock not of the highest quality.  Due to its wholly unexpected success, over the years, the camera negative was used many more times than anticipated.  This, coupled with the negative’s original fragility, rendered it unusable by the early 2000s, resulting in scouring the globe for bits and pieces of usable prints.

Willis says he wanted to shoot the bright scenes with the look of  old ansochrome, in order to give it an antique, old-timey look.  In addition, he shot the film unfiltered, without in-camera color correction, expecting it to be done by the lab.  According to the D.P.,  he expected the lab to add four points of yellow and one of red to achieve the golden color he wanted.  And in the first prints, this was done, but as the years wore on, and especially in the transfer to various video media, more and more yellow was added relative to red.

This resulted in videos — tape, laser disc, and DVD — that looked like there was more information in those over-exposed brights than there actually is, as well as a more overall golden tone than was apparently the intent of the filmmakers.  For the restoration, the original intentions of the cinematographer have been honored as much as possible, and this can result in a shock to those of us who remember the films primarily from video and TV.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first half-hour of the The Godfather, which cuts from the darkness of Don Corleone’s (Marlon Brando) study to the full sunlight of Connie’s (Talia Shire) wedding.  The indoor shots are gorgeous on the Blu-ray, with inky blacks and silken browns and grays. The wedding shots, however, look almost amateurishly over-exposed, with whites that are nearly blown.  In additon, because Harrison was more true to Willis’ intentions regarding color than the myriad video transfers, the restoration seems more reddish than many remember it, although they still have that golden hue.

All of this conspires to make viewing the restorations an interesting, at times even revelatory, experience.  There is detail — for example, in Al Pacino’s subtle performance — that hasn’t been seen since almost the beginning.  Instead of the muddy dupes and transfers we had grown accustomed to, it looks pristine and clear.  And it harkens back to a wonderful time when — yes children, it’s true! — Al Pacino was capable of a subtle performance.

The resulting product is gorgeous and indispensable, I would think, to anybody who loves the originals like I do, or anybody with a sense of their place in cinema history.  I can’t believe it took me over a year to get them, and at only fifty dollars a set (their current price on Amazon), they are an incredible deal.

Only twenty-five bucks a film, with The Godfather III thrown in for good measure.