The transformation of The Godfather …

… Corleone Family Values. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Fascinated though I was by Seal’s well-told tales of the vast amount of collective effort that it took to bring The Godfather to the screen, the best things about Take the Gun are for me the sections in which we learn how Coppola, who cowrote the screenplay with Puzo, performed the feat of alchemy so neatly described by Pauline Kael in her New Yorker review of the film: "Francis Ford Coppola … has stayed very close to the book’s greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the strength that popular novels such as Dickens’ used to have."