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Your DVD Player Sleeps With the FishesThe restored Godfather trilogy: the best reason yet to go Blu-ray.

By Fred KaplanPosted Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2008, at 11:11 AM ET

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They then set about restoring the image to what it looked like more than 30 years ago. Frame by frame, they erased every scratch, speck, pop, and bit of dust. Often, the damage was beyond fixing, so they had to search for other film elements—dupes, IPs, prints, whatever—to find an image in good enough condition to work with.

Then they had to do the color correction. This was a harder job than usual. The colors on the negative hadn't faded much, but in this case, that wasn't the issue. The colors on the negative bore little resemblance to those on the theatrical print. Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, had manipulated the colors in the film lab, aiming for a lush effect—a "brassy yellow," as he called it—reminiscent of old photographs. Willis created this effect through photochemical "color timing." Harris and his team had to replicate digitally what he had done.

Luckily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a print of The Godfather that was in perfect condition. (This was the approved master print that Technicolor stored with the academy when the film was complete. It had never been shown in a theater.) So, when Harris & Co. did the digital color correction, they could use this print as a reference. They also worked side by side with Allen Daviau, a brilliant cinematographer who, in turn, consulted by phone with Willis himself. (Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock's Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars—the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film—so that he could match the shade of green exactly.)

This sort of fastidiousness—and the seven-figure budget that Paramount allotted to the project—paid off. These discs are gorgeous. Take that opening scene of The Godfather Part II, the close-up of Pacino. The mosquitoes are gone; Pacino's flesh tones are burnished. His facial expressions are complex, ambivalent; on the old DVD, his face looked stiff, expressionless. And now you can see dark wooden shelves behind him; in the old DVD, there was just an amorphous blackness.

Or take the scene in the original film in which Pacino shoots the Mafia rival and the crooked cop in the restaurant in the Bronx. The restoration lets you see the anguish that Pacino is going through just before he pulls the trigger; you couldn't see this in the old DVD. (Harris spent four months finding the film elements that make this scene look right.) I could make similar comparisons throughout both films.

The restoration is available on Blu-ray and regular DVD discs. Do you need the Blu-ray? The restored DVD is extremely good, too, and if you don't have a high-def TV with the highest resolution, there's no point in owning a Blu-ray player at all. (For specifics on this and other technical points, click here.) But if you have the right TV and have been thinking about investing in a Blu-ray player, you now have the perfect excuse. Think of digital images as a dot-to-dot drawing, with pixels as dots. The more dots there are—the closer the dots are to one another—the more detailed the picture will be. Blu-ray has five times as many pixels—five times as many dots—as DVD.

As a result, facial expressions have that much more detail; fast-moving objects are smoother, less jagged; colors are more saturated. In short, assuming the digital mastering is done well (and it's done superbly here), a movie on Blu-ray looks more the way a 35 mm film looks when it's projected in a really good theater. That's what home theater is about—to make you feel, as much as possible, like you're in a theater while you're sitting at home.

If upgrading your TV isn't in the cards just now, there is another option. After Robert Harris and his team finished the restoration, they produced several new 35 mm negatives and masters from the 4K digital files. Then Paramount made a small number of prints from these new negatives. Theoretically, they should look very similar to the prints shown back in the 1970s. Over the next few weeks, the new prints of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are showing at theaters in New York, Hollywood, Cambridge, Palm Desert, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Seattle, Baltimore, and Toronto. Go see them.