SOURCE: "The Godfather Saga," in Film Comment, Vol. 14, No. 1, January-February, 1978, pp. 21-3.

In the following review, Clarens asserts that Coppola's The Godfather epic does not translate well to television, and complains that the film's restructuring does not add much to the film, except in its early sequences.

Long before the success of Roots in January, 1977, Francis Ford Coppola had envisioned combining the two parts of The Godfather into one seven-hour film for theatrical release. Few directors have been that ambitious, and none from Hollywood. Their work is mainly to be seen in art houses and colleges all over the nation: Mark Donskoi, and the Gorky trilogy; the three films based on the Marcel Pagnol plays, Fanny, Marius, and Cesar, and Satyajit Ray's three-part Story of Apu. But the sudden popularity of the novelistic form on television, as attested by Rich Man Poor Man, Captain and the Kings, and...