Mario Puzo's The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television (Season 1)

Mario Puzo's The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television (1977) is a TV recut of Francis Ford Coppola's saga that you can watch online on iFILM. It isn't a separate film but a seven-hour chronicle: the first two Godfather films, reassembled in strict order of events and padded out with more than an hour of footage cut from the theatrical releases.

The story now runs along a single timeline — from Vito Corleone's boyhood in a poor Sicilian village to his rise in turn-of-the-century New York, and on to his son Michael's cold reign over the family in 1950s America. Robert De Niro plays the young Vito, Marlon Brando the aging don, and Al Pacino the heir who joins the business to protect his family and quietly loses himself in it. Robert Duvall, James Caan, Diane Keaton and John Cazale fill out the ranks. The restored scenes add texture the cinema versions never carried.

Coppola oversaw this television assembly himself, building the two films into one continuous novel about family, power and the price of loyalty. For anyone who knows both parts by heart, the chronological cut reopens the saga — slower, fuller, closer to Mario Puzo's book. Stream Mario Puzo's The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television (1977) online on iFILM.