We live in the age of the legacy sequel. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, The First Omen, Alien: Romulus, Twisters, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Apartment 7A: these are all from this year alone, all dependent on the audience's memory of specific plots, imagery, and often even characters of films released before the turn of this century. Nostalgia is in! Some say it's because audiences miss the films of old, we're chasing the high of our youth - certainly making a semi-sequel/remake to 1996's Twister suggests this.
Now, obviously, when I looked at the Oscar nominees of 1990, I knew I would get to revisit the legacy of The Godfather thanks to The Godfather: Part III, which revisits characters introduced to audiences in 1972's The Godfather and last seen in 1974's The Godfather Part II. What I did not expect was to run into three more films following up with icons of early-70s cinema.
It began in August with The Two Jakes, a follow-up to 1974's Chinatown. The original's Oscar-nominated star Jack Nicholson, Oscar-nominated producer Robert Evans, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne all reunited for the sequel, with Nicholson pulling double duty as director. Joe Mantell, Perry Lopez, James Hong, and Faye Dunaway (via voiceover) all reprise their roles from the original; joining the ensemble are Harvey Keitel, Meg Tilly, Madeleine Stowe, and Eli Wallach, who also has a significant role in The Godfather Part III. It's an interesting movie, especially if one is familiar with Chinatown's production, particularly how director Roman Polanski helped shape it into the coherent, suspenseful narrative we all know and love. The Two Jakes is awfully vague by comparison. To many, that's a sign of weakness: the plot's confusing, the threads go nowhere, the pace is ponderous, there's lousy voiceover, my God, how could this be Chinatown! Well, it's not Chinatown, it's The Two Jakes, and it's about an older, wearier Gittes seeing echoes of the past even as its signposts are developed into oblivion. Its constant callbacks to Chinatown can be frustrating...or they can, like Agatha Christie's final Poirot novel Curtain, serve as a reminder that we are doomed (fated?) to return to the places and people most significant to us, that, as Paul Thomas Anderson would say in 1999's Magnolia, "We may be through with the past but, the past ain't through with us." It's an untidy film, but, it's haunting enough to justify any supposed cash grab.
One week after The Two Jakes debuted, The Exorcist III hit theaters. The second sequel to 1973's The Exorcist also saw a change of directors: instead of William Friedkin, William Peter Blatty helmed, his first time since 1980's The Ninth Configuration. Blatty, author of the original 1971 novel, producer/writer of the original film, and winner of the 1973 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, adapted his own sequel novel, Legion. This one has Lt. Kinderman, a cop who played a supporting role in the original's events, taking center stage as he investigates a series of murders that don't just mimic the M.O. of an executed serial killer - they may be the work of his demonic spirit possessing another. George C. Scott takes over for Lee J. Cobb in the Kinderman role. As the number indicates, there was already a sequel to The Exorcist - 1977's The Heretic - but Blatty makes sure that we forget that film ever existed, never references it, pretends it didn't even happen. Hell, even the III and the climactic exorcism were both forced on him by an insistent studio: he wanted to maintain the Legion title, more fitting for the nature of the forces of evil Kinderman is up against (indeed, that's the title of the Director's Cut released by Scream Factory in 2016), while the exorcism feels as tacked-on as it is. When it's about a policeman trying to reconcile faith with his job - not just the existence of demons in a grounded world, but even the possibility of a caring God in a world so full of suffering - it's downright moving and scary.
(Where was Friedkin in all this? Making The Guardian, about a nanny who is actually a kind of part-tree Druid nymph who sacrifices her charges to an ancient arboreal deity. It sounds mad but, sadly, is actually quite dull. Just as an exorcism was shore-horned into Legion, supernatural forces were shoe-horned by the studio into Friedkin's film. It's not great. It's not even good.)
Jake Gittes without Roman Polanski, Kinderman without Friedkin: at least Peter Bogdanovich got to return to the director's chair for Texasville, his followup to 1971's The Last Picture Show, both based on books by Larry McMurtry. While the first film is an ensemble piece (albeit with Timothy Bottoms and Ben Johnson at the center), the second is very much through the eyes of Jeff Bridges' Duane. All of these legacy sequels deal, in some way, with weariness, regret, and generally looking around at the world twenty years later and going, "Is this all there is?", with each one giving a different answer - or taking a different tack in how they answer. Texasville, because it is focused on a small town full of the same people who'll never leave, is more poignant, more effective in this regard than the others because...well, because the stakes are so small. No demons, no criminal conspiracies, just people living, getting older, reevaluating their choices. Like the movies above, this was a box office failure, a fact that, according to IMDb, sabotaged early Oscar buzz for Annie Pott's performance as Bridges' wife who, somewhat too understandingly, befriends his old flame Jacy Farrow (yes, Cybill Shepherd, absolutely glorious). Its reception is so unfair, but so is Bogdanovich's reaction: he believed his vision was compromised, and there are cuts that run thirty minutes longer, with Criterion's recent release including a black-and-white version (The Last Picture Show was black-and-white as well, but Texasville was released in color); I haven't seen these versions, but the latter feels like even Bogdanovich may have missed how The Last Picture Show works as bilious nostalgia while Texasville is reality hitting you in full color, finding beauty without silver and shadows to lean on. I love this movie, I love it more than I do The Last Picture Show, and I think that flick's a bloody masterpiece.
Texasville and The Exorcist III began as novels, their original creators driven not by the easy buck but by the need to express their own conflicts within their lives. The Two Jakes, as documented in The Big Goodbye, The Kid Stays in the Picture, and Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, was a reunion among friends (Towne, Nicholson, Evans), seeking to recapture that moment when they were all on top of the world, together. All three flopped, and The Two Jakes has not benefited from any critical reappraisal. So, it's funny that the one legacy sequel to make money, get nominated for everything, and even get a re-release just last year, is the one whose entire creative team (to go by reports) was either cornered into it or just did it for the check.
That would be The Godfather: Part III, in which Al Pacino returns as Michael Corleone, trying to go legit but unable to escape the consequences of his actions or the ghosts of his past. Writer-producer-director Francis Ford Coppola refused to do it until the studio told him it was happening whether he participated or not, so he might as well preserve his legacy...albeit at a discount price. Robert Duvall, nominated for his performance as consigliere Tom Hagen in the original The Godfather, did not return for Part III because the studio also tried to shortchange him. Pacino did the movie but thought it betrayed the character of Michael Corleone by making him too sympathetic. We'll discuss it much more when we get into the year's Oscar nominees.
It's funny that legacy sequels then were not the guaranteed moneymaker they are now. Maybe it was because this was an era where they didn't have to bank on nostalgia to market films to adults. After all, this was the year with a particularly infamous innovation for cinema: the NC-17 rating. But we'll get into that tomorrow.
