I really scored at Christmas, receiving many things I very much do not deserve. One of these was a Blu-Ray player, (Thanks K&M!) and it didn’t take me long to jump into The Godfather, Coppola Restoration, which I’d purchased on Blu-Ray even before I had a player.

By all accounts, the original negatives of the first two films were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration.

The final product, which the studio is calling “The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration,” combines bits and pieces of film recovered from innumerable sources, scanned at high resolution and then retouched frame by frame to remove dirt and scratches. The color was brought back to its original values by comparing it with first-generation release prints and by extensive consultation with Gordon Willis, who shot all three films, and Allen Daviau, a cinematographer (“E.T.”) who is also a leading historian of photographic technology. [New York Times]

The restoration is a thrill to watch, and I’ve never seen a better presentation, even compared to viewings in the theater. Particularly captivating was the amount of detail preserved (rescued even?) while keeping the character (grain, color) perfectly intact.

Blink

“What?” I yelled in my darkened apartment, fumbling for the rewind button immediately following Michael Corleone’s pivotal showdown with Sollozzo and the corrupt police chief McCluskey. I’d just seen something I’ve never noticed before: a body on the floor blinked as the scene ended. A blinking corpse. It jolted me out of the moment, out of the fantasy, out of the 40s. Blu-Ray did that, it gave me too much detail?

I’ve since learned that McCluskey’s blink is a known quantity—a minor bug in continuity that’s charming in today’s world of computer aided post process. Apparently that blink is visible in other formats, but I’d never seen it until I had the restoration and the resolution to appreciate it. I would never have noticed it without this version. Therein lies the rub.

For me, details matter, technology matters, and I’m just anal enough to obsess about shadow detail and grain when I think it’s important, like in the case of The Godfather. McCluskey’s blink floored me because it reminded me that I’m watching something made 37 years ago and it looks as good or better than things produced today. I never lost anything by not seeing that blink before, and maybe it was actually detrimental to the experience seeing it now.

The blink could be the only thing I’m not crazy about in the Coppola Restoration, an otherwise perfect thing, but that’s not a fair critique. If anything it goes to show how caring, faithful and complete the restoration process was. It does make me wonder however, how frequently we’ll see Blu-Ray editions of classics that aren’t cared for so well. Perhaps those unfortunate reels are best left as they are…perfect with their flaws.