Why anyone needs to reconsider/reevaluate this movie, just because it happens to be turning 30 years old, is beyond me. I'm sure it's some lame attempt to elevate the film's reputation through putting lipstick on a pig, as the unfortunate saying goes. A new cut of the film? Changing the title to Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone? None of it will change the essentially rancid flavor emitted from that film.
But I'm not writing about it today to complain about the decision to re-release it. Re-release whatever you want, I really don't care.
It's that it made me realize that possibly the most famous line of dialogue from the entire Godfather series actually comes from this movie.
You could choose a couple other lines from the series that have a lot of pop culture prominence, like "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," or "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes," or "I know it was you, Fredo."
But the first line I ever knew from a Godfather movie was "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
I believe it was my college roommate, Al, who first used it in my presence. I can see him doing the Michael Corleone impression, with the clawed hands gesture imitating a person being pulled back in. And this was years before I had seen any Godfather movie. This would have been about 1994, and I didn't see the original Godfather until the early 2000s.
However, Al was just the first. This was a meme before memes existed, a quotation people liked to apply to any situaton where they had hoped to extract themselves, only to find themselves still mired in whatever quagmire it was they wanted to get out of. In fact, a friend of mine used it just last week in my presence. (Over Zoom, but still, "in my presence.")
Knowing that this was Michael Corleone, I assumed the line came from either The Godfather or The Godfather Part II -- you know, the only two Godfather movies anyone actually likes. In fact, I think I went so far as to look for them when I first watched those movies. I didn't have to wait long to find the line after not seeing it in The Godfather Part II, as we watched The Godfather Part III the next night as the end to a three-night Godfather weekend.
I must have acknowledged that the line came from the third movie at the time, but that was almost 15 years ago, so I've blocked out a lot of that movie. Who knows, maybe it's not even as bad as I remember it.
In a way it makes sense. I mean, Michael is not actually trying to "get out" in the first two movies. It's only in the third movie that he tries to go legit. So that line wouldn't have made any sense before 1990.
But I guess the timing of it is funny. Some lines of dialogue feel like they have been around for years, when they are actually comparatively new. That would have been the case with this one. When Al quoted that line to me -- if it was, indeed, the first time -- it would have been only four years after the movie originally came out. Yet it was referenced in the way you'd reference one of the classic lines of cinema, that had been around for decades.
I'd accuse Al of bad movie taste, but not by a long shot is he the only one who has tried to get out and been pulled back in over the years. Others have repeatedly endorsed this line and elevated to, I don't know, maybe even one of the hundred most recognizable cinematic quotations of all time? Is it possible it is that well known?
Because this whole phenomenon felt somewhat familiar from my own writings, I researched it the best I could (using my tag "quotations") and found that I wrote about a similar phenomenon back in 2015. That was about a line in Poltergeist II ("They're baaaAAAAaaack") that had inexplicably found greater pop culture endurance than the line it was playing off from the original ("They're heeeEEEEeere").
Maybe we should just follow the logic of my former co-worker Jason, who waved off the Back to the Future movies as "all the same," as though the first were not orders of magnitude better than the second and third. Although that was a ridiculous viewpoint, maybe there was a hidden logic to it. Maybe when we make references like Al Pacino's "pull me back in" line, we are really referencing a whole franchise, and the beloved characters in it, rather than re-litigating the strengths and weaknesses of any one film.
Hey, I'm sure Pacino didn't want to be in a sub-par third Godfather movie. If he managed to wring from the experience an epic line of dialogue, more power to him.
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