The Godfather Part II (1974)¶

At a glance¶

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola & Mario Puzo
Produced by: Coppola, Gray Frederickson, Fred Roos
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Editing: Peter Zinner, Barry Malkin, Richard Marks
Music: Nino Rota & Carmine Coppola
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Premiere: December 12, 1974 — Loew's Astor Plaza, New York
Wide release: December 20, 1974
Runtime: 202 min (sources vary: 200–205; Wikipedia cites 205)
Budget: ~$13 million
Box office: ~$47.5M domestic / ~$93M worldwide
Academy Awards: 6 wins from 11 nominations

I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. Michael Corleone

The first sequel in history to win Best Picture, and — for a large constituency of critics and directors — the better of the two films. It is also, structurally, one of the strangest things a major American studio has ever released: two films spliced into each other, one a rags-to-power immigrant saga in Italian, the other a chilly corporate thriller in which almost nothing is resolved and the protagonist ends the picture alone in a chair.

The idea is simple and merciless. Cut between Vito Corleone building the family, 1901–1925, and Michael Corleone destroying it, 1958–1959, and let the audience do the arithmetic.

Plot¶

The film alternates continuously between two timelines. They are described separately here; on screen, they interrupt each other roughly every fifteen minutes, and the cut points are the argument. See Structure & Parallel Editing.

Vito, 1901–1925¶

Corleone, Sicily, 1901. Nine-year-old Vito Andolini attends his father's funeral. His father was murdered for an insult to the local chieftain Don Ciccio; his brother Paolo is killed for swearing revenge; his mother offers her own life for the boy's and is shot for it. Vito is smuggled out and reaches Ellis Island, where an immigration clerk enters the town he came from as his surname. He is quarantined for smallpox and sits alone at a window singing to himself. The film's first ten minutes are almost wordless and almost entirely in Sicilian.

New York, 1917–1920. Vito (Robert De Niro) works in a grocery, married to Carmela, with an infant Sonny. The neighborhood's Black Hand extortionist Don Fanucci — white suit, no visible muscle, a great deal of noise — has Vito's job given to a nephew. Vito falls in with Clemenza and Tessio, stealing dresses off a truck.

Fanucci demands $200 in tribute. Vito's proposal to his partners is the seed of everything: let me handle it — I'll make him an offer he don't refuse. He negotiates Fanucci down to $100, then, during the Feast of San Rocco, follows him across the rooftops, unscrews the lightbulb on the landing, and kills him with a towel-wrapped pistol while a brass band plays below. He walks home, picks up his infant son, and tells him he loves him.

Vito becomes the neighborhood's patron. He resolves a widow's eviction by charming, then not charming, her landlord. He founds Genco Pura Olive Oil with Genco Abbandando and Clemenza. He becomes, without ever having sought it, the Don.

Sicily, 1925. Vito returns with his family, ostensibly on business. He is introduced to the ancient, blind Don Ciccio, gives his real name, and cuts him open. The film's last flashback is Vito on a train, holding infant Michael's hand, waving.

Michael, 1958–1959¶

Lake Tahoe, 1958. The Corleones now live behind gates on the Nevada shore. At the First Communion party for Michael's son Anthony — a party staged as a deliberate, degraded echo of Connie's wedding — the requests come in. Senator Pat Geary takes a bribe with one hand and insults Michael's family to his face with the other. Frank Pentangeli, running Clemenza's old Brooklyn operation, wants permission to move on the Rosato brothers and cannot get it because the Rosatos belong to Hyman Roth. Connie arrives with a fiancé Michael despises. Fredo's wife is drunk and humiliating.

That night, machine-gun fire tears through Michael and Kay's bedroom. The assassins are found dead — killed by someone else. Michael tells Tom: it was someone close.

Havana, New Year's Eve 1958. Michael and Roth are in Cuba to buy into the Batista casino economy. Roth, celebrating his birthday, divides a cake shaped like Cuba among the American investors. Michael, watching a rebel detonate a grenade rather than be taken, tells Roth the rebels can win, because they aren't being paid. Nobody wants to hear it.

Fredo, who has sworn he has never met Roth's man Johnny Ola, lets slip in a nightclub that he has. Michael kisses him and tells him he knows. Batista abdicates at midnight; the party collapses into revolution; Michael finds Fredo in the crowd, embraces him, and Fredo runs.

Washington and Tahoe, 1959. A Senate committee investigating organized crime — modeled on the Valachi hearings — subpoenas Michael. Pentangeli, believing Michael tried to have him strangled, has turned state's evidence. Michael flies Pentangeli's brother Vincenzo in from Sicily and seats him in the hearing room; Pentangeli looks at him, recants everything, and the case dies.

Kay tells Michael she is leaving and taking the children. He forbids it. She tells him the miscarriage was an abortion — a son, deliberately ended, because this must all end. He hits her.

Carmela dies. At the funeral, Connie brokers a reconciliation with Fredo, and Michael embraces him over her shoulder while looking at nothing. Al Neri takes Fredo out on the lake to fish. Roth, denied asylum everywhere, is shot in an airport lobby by Rocco Lampone, who is immediately killed. Tom visits Pentangeli in protective custody and talks about how Roman conspirators were permitted to take their own lives and keep their families' estates; Pentangeli opens his wrists in the bath.

Michael sits at the window. Neri's boat is on the lake. A shot.

Flashback: December 7, 1941. The family assembles for Vito's birthday. Michael announces he has enlisted in the Marines. Sonny is enraged; Tom is appalled; only Fredo shakes his hand. Vito arrives in the next room; everyone rushes out. Michael is left alone at the table.

1959. Michael sits alone in a garden chair by the lake. The film ends.

Cast¶

1958–1959¶

Actor	Role
Al Pacino	Michael Corleone
Robert Duvall	Tom Hagen
Diane Keaton	Kay Corleone
John Cazale	Fredo Corleone
Talia Shire	Connie Corleone
Lee Strasberg	Hyman Roth
Michael V. Gazzo	Frank Pentangeli
G. D. Spradlin	Senator Pat Geary
Richard Bright	Al Neri
Dominic Chianese	Johnny Ola
Tom Rosqui	Rocco Lampone
Morgana King	Carmela Corleone
Marianna Hill	Deanna Dunn Corleone
Troy Donahue	Merle Johnson
Joe Spinell	Willi Cicci
Danny Aiello	Tony Rosato
Carmine Caridi	Carmine Rosato
Harry Dean Stanton	FBI agent
Roger Corman	Senator #2

1901–1925¶

Actor	Role
Robert De Niro	Vito Corleone
Oreste Baldini	Vito Andolini, age 9
Gastone Moschin	Don Fanucci
Bruno Kirby	Young Peter Clemenza
Frank Sivero	Genco Abbandando
John Aprea	Young Salvatore Tessio
Francesca De Sapio	Young Carmela Corleone
Giuseppe Sillato	Don Francesco Ciccio
Leopoldo Trieste	Signor Roberto
Maria Carta	Signora Andolini

The 1941 flashback¶

James Caan returns as Sonny for a single scene; Gianni Russo as Carlo; Abe Vigoda as Tessio. Marlon Brando was written into the scene's ending and did not appear — accounts differ as to whether this was a fee dispute with Paramount or Brando's unwillingness, but the scene was rewritten so that Vito arrives off-camera. It is arguably better for it: the film's last image of the family is everyone leaving Michael to greet a father we never see.

Production¶

Coppola didn't want to¶

He had said everything he had to say and turned it down. Paramount, sitting on the most profitable film ever made, pursued him hard. Coppola offered the job to Martin Scorsese; Paramount refused.

What changed his mind was the structural idea — the double narrative — which he has described as being the only reason to make the film at all, and which the studio found alarming. Puzo had begun sketching a sequel in December 1971, before the first film opened, under the title The Death of Michael Corleone. That title would follow the series around for another fifty years.

This time Coppola had leverage and took it: near-total creative control, a producer credit, a director credit, and the freedom to shoot a three-and-a-half-hour film in two languages. Al Pacino's lawyers objected to an early draft; Coppola reportedly rewrote it overnight to keep him.

Budget grew from about $6 million to over $13 million.

The Havana problem¶

Cuba was obviously unavailable. The Havana sequences were shot in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic — convenient because Paramount's parent conglomerate Gulf+Western, run by Charles Bluhdorn, was at that moment aggressively developing the Dominican Republic as a production base and had considerable local infrastructure.

Sicily was Forza d'Agrò again. The 1901–1920 New York streets were built on a stretch of East 6^th Street in Manhattan and dressed at enormous expense; Dean Tavoularis's Little Italy is the film's most expensive single asset and one of the best pieces of period design in American cinema. Lake Tahoe provided the compound. Principal photography ran October 1, 1973 – June 19, 1974.

"Part II"¶

Paramount fought the title. The received wisdom was that audiences read a numeral as a sign of a cheap follow-up, and that a sequel needed a new name. Coppola insisted.

The Godfather Part II was the first major American film to use this convention. Every numbered sequel since exists downstream of that argument.

The near-disaster¶

Three weeks before release, the film previewed badly. The crosscutting — the entire point — was reported as confusing and exhausting; there were serious discussions about restructuring. Coppola and his three editors attempted revisions and ran out of time. He has said the final reels are less finely timed than he wanted.

Technicolor's last stand¶

Part II was the last major American production to use Technicolor's dye-transfer (imbibition) process for release prints until the process was revived in the late 1990s. Original IB Tech prints of the film are prized and effectively unobtainable.

Reception¶

The reviews split, hard¶

This is the fact most often forgotten about Part II: on release, it was seriously contested.

Vincent Canby (NYT) panned it, calling it assembled from leftovers and saying the plot defied rational synopsis.
Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four and argued the flashbacks broke the tension — that the film never recovers structurally from its own device. He later reversed himself and added it to his Great Movies canon.
Gene Siskel gave 3½ and reached for a funeral metaphor: the tears don't flow as easily the second time.
Pauline Kael understood it immediately, writing that it was more complexly beautiful and thematically richer than the first, and comparing the experience of needing to see it to needing the terrible climaxes of a Tolstoy novel.

The reassessment was rapid. By the early 1980s the "Part II is better" position was mainstream; by the 2002 Sight & Sound directors' poll it stood at #2 among all films ever made.

Modern aggregates: 96% Rotten Tomatoes (avg 9.7/10); 90/100 Metacritic.

Awards — 6 of 11¶


Best Picture	Won — Coppola, Gray Frederickson, Fred Roos
Best Director	Won — Francis Ford Coppola
Best Supporting Actor	Won — Robert De Niro
Best Adapted Screenplay	Won — Coppola & Puzo
Best Original Dramatic Score	Won — Nino Rota & Carmine Coppola
Best Art Direction	Won — Dean Tavoularis, Angelo Graham, George R. Nelson
Best Actor	Nominated — Al Pacino
Best Supporting Actor	Nominated — Michael V. Gazzo
Best Supporting Actor	Nominated — Lee Strasberg
Best Supporting Actress	Nominated — Talia Shire
Best Costume Design	Nominated — Theadora Van Runkle

Notable consequences:

First sequel ever to win Best Picture. Only The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has repeated it.
The only original/sequel pair to both win.
De Niro and Brando are the only two actors to win Academy Awards for playing the same character. De Niro's performance is almost entirely in Sicilian; he learned the dialect in Sicily for the part. He did not attend the ceremony.
Pacino lost Best Actor to Art Carney in Harry and Tonto, in what is routinely listed among the Academy's worst decisions.
Gazzo and Strasberg split the supporting vote against their own castmate De Niro — the second time in three years a Godfather film cannibalized its own category.

Standing¶

AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies: #32 (1998 and 2007)
AFI's 10 Top 10: #3 gangster film
AFI's 100 Movie Quotes: #58 — "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer"
National Film Registry: inducted 1993
Sight & Sound directors' poll: #9 (1992), #2 (2002), #30 (2012)
Writers Guild of America: #10 greatest screenplay ever written (2006)

Why it works¶

The short version, expanded in Structure & Parallel Editing:

Every cut is an accusation. Vito acquires a friend; Michael loses one. Vito is handed a neighborhood's love; Michael buys a senator's contempt. Vito holds his infant son and says I love you; Michael watches his brother shot on a lake. The film never states the comparison. It just puts the two shots next to each other and trusts you.

The one thing it will not do is let Michael be sympathetic. In the first film he is a man being pulled under. Here he is the undertow. Pacino plays the whole picture with the affect turned almost entirely off, and the film's greatest formal risk is that its protagonist stops wanting anything the audience can share.

The last shot is a man in a chair. Everything he built to protect is gone, and he built the machine that removed it.