Ebert's Godfather Reviews

That last made me curious. Most everyone I know ranks the Godfather trilogy like this: Godfather 2, Godfather, Godfather 3, with Godfather 3 being most people's least favorite of the trilogy. So what does Ebert do? None of those are occupying his own ordering.

Godfather (4 stars)

Godfather 3 (3 1/2 stars)

Godfather 2 (3 stars)

I'm surprised both that he rated Godfather 3 so high, and that he rated Godfather 2 so low (but I'm not surprised to see Godfather with a perfect score). Of Godfather 2, he closes his review like this:

What we're left with, then, are a lot of good scenes and good performances set in the midst of a mass of undisciplined material and handicapped by plot construction that prevents the story from ever really building.

There is, for example, the brilliant audacity of the first communion party for Michael's son, which Coppola directs as counterpoint to the wedding scene that opened "The Godfather." There is Lee Strasberg's two-edged performance as Hyman Roth, the boss of the Florida and Cuban operations; Strasberg gives us a soft-spoken, almost kindly old man, and then reveals his steel-hard interior. There is Coppola's use of sudden, brutal bursts of violence to punctuate the film's brooding progress. There is Pacino, suggesting everything, telling nothing.

But Coppola is unable to draw all this together and make it work on the level of simple, absorbing narrative. The stunning text of "The Godfather" is replaced in "Part II" with prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions.

Interesting take. I can see what he means, I think, as I've always felt like Godfather 2 was a little uneven. Mainly because the flashbacks with De Niro are so much more interesting than the Pacino-played scenes in the present. (BTW, star ratings are listed elsewhere).