The Godfather Part II at 50: Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling masterpiece | The Godfather II

CRelatively speaking, 2024 was Francis Ford Coppola’s biggest year in ages. Not only did it see the release of his first film in 13 years, that film was Megalopolis, a dream project that had been kicking around in his head for upwards of four decades. It made a particularly auspicious year for the emergence of Coppola’s potentially career-defining performance because it also marked the 50th anniversary of perhaps his greatest sustained professional triumph: the year he released both The Conversation and The Godfather Part II within months of each other in 1974. (For the record, that year also saw the release of a lavish, misguided adaptation of The Great Gatsby, his script for which had become legendary, even if the film didn’t live up to it.) With Megalopolis’ large (and devious) ambitions still fresh in his mind, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather Part II seems particularly noteworthy in Coppola’s evolution as a filmmaker.

The very idea of ​​a prestige sequel was an odd ambition in 1974, when follow-ups were certainly common – especially to smash hits like The Godfather – but not particularly respected. The prequels were even less fashionable. After downplaying the masterful surveillance thriller The Conversation, Coppola went all out for his next film, merging a follow-up story following the further corruption of a new mob boss, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with a flashback prequel after the arrival of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, playing the young version of Marlon Brando’s indelible character from the first film) in America and his introduction to a life of crime. In doing so, he brought together Pacino and De Niro, both still young actors at the time; the fact that their characters can’t meet in those forms on screen, only co-feature in a handful of dissolves, helped polish both actors’ legends as they worked their way through a stellar string of subsequent ’70s films. (They would, of course, eventually share the screen properly in several films, two of them notable: briefly but brilliantly in 1995’s Heat , and more significantly in 2019’s The Irishman .)

Although The Godfather Part II has long been held up as one of cinema’s truly great sequels, it’s still worth asking what motivated Coppola to revisit this material. The film is so well-regarded today and so attached to the original film in our memories that it’s easy to miss how little of it contains truly new revelations about Michael, who we already know was descending into darkness at the end of the film. first film, or even Vito, whose tender side was already on display in certain scenes of Brando’s performance. At the time, Roger Ebert gave the film a mixed positive three-star review, feeling that the intercutting between Michael and Vito’s stories hurt the film’s momentum, especially Michael’s, which he found more shadowy and complex. This is thanks in part to a terrifically coiled performance from Pacino; so much of his work in the film is quietly watching and strategizing that when he gets a late-film blow-up opposite Diane Keaton as Michael’s jaded wife, Kay, it feels especially chilling, desperate, and uninhibited . De Niro won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work as Vito, but by design it’s Pacino who has to cover a larger emotional territory.

Yet these De Niro-led sequences are also a major reason why the film continues as a top-tier sequel. While Ebert ultimately makes a convincing case for the first film’s superiority, and is absolutely right that the film gets convoluted at times, especially with Michael’s dealings with Cuba, I don’t agree with his claim that the Vito flashbacks equate to a sentimentalization of the character as the “real” kind of criminal. The beauty and detail of these scenes set in early 20th century New York are certainly rich, giving them a certain warmth, and there’s old-school gangster picture glory to the middle sequence where Vito knocks off Don Fanucci. . But the weight of the Vito material in the film hinges on it playing like a mythic family story—the kind of humble beginnings that would surely have been retold in hushed tones within the family, and which might serve as tacit justification for Michael’s actions in the present of film: see how far we’ve come; we can’t let it go now. The Vito episodes turn The Godfather Part II into a more explicit immigrant story, and as such an even more American one. It’s no surprise that the opening 215-minute immigrant epic The Brutalist seems to quote and invert the famous Statue of Liberty from Vito’s arrival in New York.

Perhaps that innate Americanness is why some of the material set in Cuba seems less urgent, even with what is probably the film’s best-known moment: Michael tightly, furiously embracing his brother Fredo (John Cazale), saying, ” I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” While the film is far too rich in memorable characters like Fredo and too lavishly entertaining to really be too long, The Godfather Part II feels a bit more indulgent at 200 minutes than its predecessor does at 175 – and this was Coppola’s second picture of the year! It feels like a special gesture of the auteur-driven lot in a year when several other major filmmakers happened to release their own double-headers. Of the pair of films released in 1974 by Coppola, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks and Sidney Lumet, The Godfather Part II is easily the biggest swing, with enough ambition (and almost literally enough story) for two films alone.

In a way, in retrospect, it feels like The Godfather Part II heralded another phase of Coppola’s career, the last time his huge risks paid off more or less as handsomely as possible. He spent most of the next five years getting Apocalypse Now made, and while that film has its own legendary reputation so many years later, it took a greater financial, mental and physical toll on him than his previous epic (and in contrast for the Godfather sequel, didn’t win him a Best Director Oscar for his troubles). There are even seeds for Megalopolis in The Godfather Part II, a far more stable and accessible film by comparison, but still one whose subject matter and excesses both recall the Roman Empire specifically discussed in both films.

The Godfather sequel had the right kind of excess—a career-building kind. Pacino would expand after this sequel, both in celebrity and acting style, and De Niro became more of a household name due to his Oscar-winning performance. A few years later, the ambitions and scale of top American 70s filmmaking would falter and collapse after some big budget epics failed to pay off and blockbuster sequels – a bit like The Godfather Part II, but maybe not as dark, not as long, not so downcast – became even more enticing. A film like Megalopolis had to be shelved for years, then decades, before Coppola himself financed it and released it as essentially a novelty. The Godfather Part II gave the appropriate but mistaken impression that for a combative American visionary, things could just keep getting bigger.