It’s probably unfair of me to be put off The Offer (Paramount+), about the making of The Godfather, by the memories of all those lads you meet in your late teens to mid-20s who use their knowledge of the film and its lore as a proxy for personality. Or at least it would be if The Offer didn’t play like it had been made entirely by and for them.
Everything anyone has ever known about The Godfather is here, lovingly recreated in whatever detail The Lore has deemed accurate. Here’s Mario Puzo (Patrick Gallo) gazing at the lines round the bookstore as people queue up to buy the groundbreaking gangster thriller he banged out to save himself from bankruptcy and a beating from the guys he owed money to. Here is a nervously unprepared Al Ruddy (Miles Teller) – he just skimmed the bestseller on the plane in! – pulling what would become his one-line pitch to the owner of Paramount out of the bag at the last second and convincing him to greenlight the film. “I’m going to make an ice-blue, terrifying film about people you love.” “That’s brilliant!” Here’s Sinatra (Frank John Hughes) berating Puzo in Chasen’s restaurant for basing the character of Johnny Fontane on him (though in this version, presumably for aesthetic reasons, he does look up from his plate while doing so. It spoils the sense of perfect contempt the oft-recounted tale conveys, but this way you get to see the actor’s face). Here’s Brando’s legendary not-a-screen-test screen test. And so on.
