This Day in Film History (‘Godfather Part II,’ Oscar-Winning Sequel, Opens)

Dec. 20, 1974—Two years after The Godfather broke box-office records, the sequel went into general release in the U.S., in a production that was more generously budgeted, longer, more ambitious—and with a far more tragic vision of the American Dream.

The Godfather Part II duplicated its predecessor’s success, garnering six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Many critics regard it as even superior to the first. 

Though it mirrored the original in many respects, it departed from it in relying less on memorable killings (e.g., the toll-booth murder of Sonny) and one-liners (“leave the gun, take the cannoli”) and more on narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism.

While Francis Ford Coppola was initially reluctant to direct Part II (even suggesting Martin Scorsese for the job), he came around to the idea because of two factors.

First, he insisted on—and won—greater creative control, largely sidelining his nemesis on the first film, Paramount studio exec Robert Evans, in the process.

Second, he was so disturbed by the audience’s delight at a sneak preview for the first film—the final scene, where the door is closed on Kay Corleone as her husband Michael conducts “business” as the new don—that he wanted to leave no doubt whatsoever that a fissure had appeared in their marriage and that the crime boss had endangered his soul.

In other words, he wanted to definitively disprove critics who thought the first film had romanticized the Mafia by depicting them as devoted family men rather than as killers. By the end of Part II, Michael Corleone sits utterly alone, as his focus on “business” has left him paranoid and questioning how it could have all gone so utterly wrong.

What went wrong for the Corleones, the film suggests, is also what went wrong with the American empire.

The movie, while covering roughly the years from 1957 to 1960, actually reflects America’s dark post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood, in which cynicism about government lies and corruption became the order of the day. 

Coppola settled on the architecture of this epic with parallel stories of two fathers of roughly the same age, Vito and Michael Corleone, tracing the rise and decline of their family—their personal one as well as the criminal one they head.

I discussed Part II briefly 10 years ago in this post. I had seen bits and pieces over the years, both in The Godfather Saga (a chronological TV presentation beginning with nine-year-old Vito Corleone in Italy through the death of his son Michael roughly three-quarters of a century later) and on AMC (where, over the last few years, Parts I, II and III have been run as holiday mini-marathons).

But a couple of days ago, for the first time, I saw Part II as a complete entity in its own right, reel to reel. The richness I (re)discovered convinced me it was worthwhile exploring in greater depth.

Its nearly half-hour more of running time compared with Godfather I gave co-screenwriters Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo more time not only to convey atmosphere, but also to offer hints about character motivations and relationships.

This time, knowing the major plot points of the movie, small, seemingly minor moments loom larger, as with the pills that Michael takes on the way to meet partner Hyman Roth—perhaps a means of alleviating the tension and anxiety of running a far-flung criminal enterprise and of surviving an assassination in his own home.

Coppola has likened the film to a saga about a king and his three sons. The imperial theme resonates most loudly and mournfully when Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen and “soldier” Frankie Pentangeli muse on the Roman Empire:

Hagen: “You were around the old timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman Legions, and called them 'Regimes'... with the 'Capos' and 'Soldiers,' and it worked.”

Pentangeli: “Yeah, it worked. Those were great old days. We was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.”

Hagen (sadly): “Yeah, it was once.”

While thoroughly of its own time, Part II anticipated much of the disillusionment in America over the last few decades by detailing the costs of the intersection of entertainment, politics, business, and crime.

Perhaps the most vivid example is when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista meets with United Fruit Company, United Telephone and Telegraph Company, Pan American Mining Corp., South American Sugar—and Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth.

Visually, it echoes the scene from Part I when a grief-stricken Vito Corleone calls a summit meeting of the Mafia families to call a halt to their bloody vendetta—as the inclusion of Corleone and Roth with the more conventional companies implies that little difference exists between ostensibly non-criminal and criminal enterprises.

That sense is reinforced when Batista thanks a group member for the Christmas “gift” of a solid gold telephone, and later when Roth confides to colleagues: 

“There’s no limit to where we can go from here. This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it…We can thank our Friends in the Cuban government, which has put up half of the cash with the Teamsters on a dollar-for-dollar basis and has relaxed restrictions on imports. What I'm saying is that we have now what we have always needed: real partnership with the government.”

Roth is voicing the code of businessmen that has prevailed so often from Adolf Hitler to the wanna-be dictators of today: the transgressions of government heads matter little so long as they can forge a “real partnership” that allows them carte blanche to operate.

It has been a devolutionary process even near the start of the movie, when nine-year-old Vito and other passengers gaze longingly at the Statue of Liberty, coming just a few scenes after we see what has happened over 50 years later: Vito’s now-grown son Michael tangling with a zenophobic U.S. senator over a bribe to secure a Las Vegas casino gambling license.

Quote of the Day (Ron Rosenbaum, on Al Pacino’s Godfather)

“Pacino’s Michael Corleone embodies perhaps better than any other character the bitter unraveling of the American dream in the postwar 20th century—heroism and idealism succumbing to the corrupt and murderous undercurrent of bad blood and bad money. Watching it again, the first two parts anyway, it feels almost biblical: each scene virtually carved in stone, a celluloid Sistine Chapel painted with a brush dipped in blood.”—Ron Rosenbaum, “Passion Play: Al Pacino Gets Ready for the Next Act in His High-Wire Career—Bringing Live Theater to the Movie Screen,” Smithsonian, September 2013

I had this quote, waiting to be used for the last year—then forgot to include it for my post yesterday about The Godfather: Part II. But this brief but perfect commentary, by one of my favorite nonfiction writers on one of the essential postwar American films, is way too good to waste.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Godfather: Part II,’ With the Kiss of Death)

Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino): “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!”— The Godfather: Part II (1974), screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, based on characters created for Puzo’s novel The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The Godfather: Part II, which premiered 40 years ago today in New York, didn’t have the propulsive drive and shock of its predecessor, but it surpassed it in demands on the audience, ambition, and assessment of the soul-deadening costs of a life of crime. In the process, it became the first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar.

One of the most common criticisms of the first Godfather film was that it romanticized mobsters as family men. Part II, in many respects, seemed to be a direct answer to that complaint, as Michael—whose progress from idealistic war veteran to head of a crime family was detailed in Part I—now finds himself progressively isolated from all members of his clan.

Michael adheres all too well to the advice of his father: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” To expand the “family business,” from Las Vegas to pre-revolutionary Havana, he embodies the cold, coiled lethality of a snake.

In fact, perhaps he displays more passion here, in his confrontation with weak, unwary sibling Fredo (played by John Cazale), than throughout the rest of the film. A slip of the tongue by Fredo confirms his younger brother’s suspicion that Fredo not only connived with Hyman Roth, but that he helped the older gangster set up a hit on Michael.

And so, in a scene more shocking and devastating than the violent scenes (16 deaths) throughout, Michael plants a “kiss of death” on Fredo at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Havana. The act functions as an inversion, turning an affirmation into a negation, a vow of good faith into a naked avowal of betrayal, and a year’s beginning into an unmistakable mark of a life’s ending.

It is hard not to see how bleak his entry in The Godfather Saga has become. The first film, opening the year of the Watergate break-in, was cynical about both government and law enforcement, yet continued to hold the banner of family aloft. No such solace is offered this time.

Cold, manipulative, deceptive Michael has so often broken his promise to go legitimate that wife Kay decides to punish him by aborting his son. That is not the only promise he will break to a family member, however: he also reneges on his agreement with his sister Connie that he forgive Fredo. That radical act of love could have broken the endless cycle of violence, perhaps, but it is impossible given the life Michael chose more than a decade ago.

The last extended flashback in the film—Pearl Harbor Day, when a birthday party for Vito Corleone is being planned by Michael and three family members who will die from violence, future brother-in-law Carlo and brothers Sonny and Fredo—is followed with the muted, desolate scene of Michael, sitting alone and lost in the family garden at Lake Tahoe. He may have turned his family-owned business into an enterprise "bigger than U.S. Steel," but at what cost?