Francis Ford Coppola (1974)

Epic in length, breadth and depth, Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to The Godfather is a sequel and a prequel.  The Godfather: Part II[1] takes forward the story of the Corleone family in the late 1950s and the dawn of the 1960s; the film also explores the roots and early development of their gangsterism during the first decades of the century.  In the Sicilian town of Corleone in 1901, the local Mafia boss Don Ciccio (Giuseppe Sillato) kills successively the father, elder brother and mother of nine-year-old Vito Andolini (Oreste Baldini), who avoids the same fate by the skin of his teeth.  With the help of family friends, he gets passage on a ship bound for America.   In the stirring description of its approach to New York Bay, Vito is one among hundreds on board the ship, their eyes drawn to the Statue of Liberty.  These opening sequences ground the dominant events of Vito’s formative years in Mafia violence and situate what’s to follow within American immigrant experience.  An official registering Vito on Ellis Island confuses his surname and his place of origin.  The boy thus becomes Vito Corleone – a simple, trenchant indication of how his background will impinge on his future, how the ‘old ways’ of Sicily will make their mark in the New World.

In quarantine on Ellis Island, Vito sings a little song in a voice somehow both fragile and firm.  His image fades out and that of another boy – Vito’s grandson Anthony (James Gounaris) – fades in.  This is the first of many moments in Godfather 2 that invite comparison between members of the Corleone family across the generations.  The boy Vito witnessed at close quarters, and was old enough to understand, the violent killing of his mother by Don Ciccio’s men in Sicily.  In the closing stages of Godfather 1, the toddler Anthony witnessed, also at close quarters, the death of Vito, from natural causes, in his orange grove.  The child was too young to realise what was going on – he thought his grandfather was playing a game.  Some three years later, Anthony, who already looks a sadder and a wiser boy, is taking part in his First Communion at a church in Lake Tahoe.  The service is followed by a spectacular social occasion held on his family’s lakeside estate.  This allows Coppola to describe the current state of play between particular members of the Corleone family and in the Family’s expansive business interests[2].

Under the leadership of Michael (Al Pacino), the Family has shifted its operating base geographically and in terms of criminal enterprise – from New York to Nevada, from narcotics into gambling and the control of Las Vegas casinos.  The public and private aspects of the First Communion gathering, as in the wedding episode that opens Godfather 1, are in sharp contrast.   Senator Pat Geary (G D Spradlin) takes to the podium to pay tribute to Michael Corleone’s philanthropy – in the form of a ‘magnificent endowment’, in Anthony’s name, to the local university.  Behind closed doors, Senator Geary discusses with Michael the latter’s difficulties with the Nevada state authorities in getting one of his casino licences renewed.  Geary agrees to help, at an exorbitant price.  Michael asks why Geary thinks he’d be willing to pay it.  The Senator’s explanation and Michael’s response are instructive:

Geary:  Because I intend to squeeze you.  I don’t like your kind of people.  I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair – dressed up in those silk suits – and try to pass yourselves off as decent Americans.  I’ll do business with you, but the fact is, I despise your masquerade – the dishonest way you pose yourself.  Yourself and your whole fucking family.

Michael:  Senator, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy.  But never think it applies to my family.

This first Lake Tahoe section of Godfather 2, which climaxes in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Michael, lays the ground for an unusually complicated plot involving numerous characters and extensive dissimulation on the part of several[3].  Suffice to say that the attempt on his life reinforces Michael’s inveterate distrust, giving a pathological twist to his father’s advice, of which Michael is always mindful, to ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’.  His suspicions focus on three people in particular:  the Family caporegime Frank Pentangeli (Michael V Gazzo); Michael’s business partner Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg); and Michael’s brother Fredo (John Cazale).  The murky convolutions of this story, as well as being absorbing in themselves, are also designed by Coppola and Mario Puzo (who again worked with him on the screenplay) to contrast with the relative moral simplicity of  the account of Vito’s early years in New York City’s Little Italy.  At the start of this narrative in 1917, Vito (Robert De Niro), in his mid-twenties, is a law-abiding, working-class family man.  He and his wife Carmela (Francesca De Sapio) already have their first child, Sonny.  Vito loses his job in a grocery store thanks to the nepotism of the local ‘Black Hand’ grandee Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin).   With no means to support his wife and child, Vito takes part in a burglary at the invitation of another young local, Peter Clemenza (Bruno Kirby).

The subsequent instalments of the Little Italy story – which Coppola alternates with those of the late 1950s one – describe Vito’s ascendancy as an entrepreneur and a criminal, working in both capacities with Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio (John Aprea), the two contemporaries who will become capos in the Family.  The front for the trio’s operations is the ‘Genco’ olive oil company, their product imported from Sicily.  When Fanucci attempts to extort money, Clemenza and Tessio are inclined to pay up but Vito has other ideas.  He murders Fanucci, thereby strengthening his own authority within the community.   In 1923, Vito returns to Corleone, for the first time since his escape more than twenty years earlier.  He mixes pleasure with business.  The visit is a family holiday – Carmela and their now three sons accompany him – with the ulterior motive of settling scores.  Vito pays a call on the senile Don Ciccio, ostensibly to seek his blessing on the Genco olive oil business, in fact to kill him.  Mission accomplished, Vito takes a more leisured leave of his home town than he did twenty years ago.  As his family’s train pulls out of the station, Vito stands at the open window with his youngest son in his arms and waves the child’s hand:  ‘Michael, say goodbye …’

The two hundred minutes of Godfather 2 include just two sequences from the years in which Godfather 1 was set.  The first of these, which opens the second film, is brief and premonitory:  Coppola goes to the other side of the door that closed on Michael’s wife Kay at the very end of the first film.  As he receives another kiss of hands in acknowledgement of his newly confirmed status as Don Corleone, Michael’s face expresses nothing and everything.  His look is impassive; it also conveys his realisation of what he’s become.  The second, longer sequence predates the start of the action (late 1945) in Godfather 1.  It’s 7 December 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  In the kitchen of the Corleones’ Long Island home, Sonny (James Caan) introduces Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo) to his kid sister Connie (Talia Shire) for the first time.  Also sitting round the kitchen table are Michael, whose memory this is, Fredo and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall).  Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda) brings in a birthday cake – for Vito, who’s expected home shortly.   The conversation turns to Pearl Harbor.  Tessio mentions that 30,000 men are reported as having enlisted for service, Sonny dismisses them as ‘saps’ and Michael asks why so:

Sonny               They’re saps because they risk their lives for strangers.

Michael             Oh, that’s Pop talking.

Sonny               You’re goddamn right that’s Pop talking.

Michael             They risk – they risk their lives for their country.

Sonny               Your country’s not your blood – you remember that.

Michael             I don’t feel that way.

Sonny               Well, if you don’t feel that way why don’t you just quit college and go to join the Army?

Michael             I did – I enlisted in the Marines.

A shocked silence follows, before Sonny goes for Michael, physically and verbally.   Their argument ends abruptly with the sound of the front door.  Everyone but Michael gets up and leaves the room to greet Vito.  A pensive Michael remains sitting at the kitchen table; a chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, in honour of his father, is heard from the hall.  Coppola cuts – via a reprise of the shot of Vito and the infant Michael in the departing railway train pulling – to Michael in the present day at the Lake Tahoe compound.  Out in a fishing boat on the lake, Fredo has just been shot dead by the Corleones’ longs-serving henchman Al Neri (Richard Bright), on his brother’s orders.  Michael is once more sitting alone and deep in thought.  The camera closes in on his stony face, as it did in the sequence that opened the film.

Coppola uses the two 1940s/1950s pieces, in other words, to create dramatically powerful juxtapositions of crucial points in Michael’s life, pointing up the surface similarities and deeper differences between them – his consolidations of power, his isolation at moments of alleged and actual betrayals of his ‘blood’.  It’s masterly – an example of the qualities that make Godfather 2 more complex and fully satisfying than Godfather 1.  It also has to be said that the first film is a continuous presence in, and enriching influence, on the second film.  We compare the two halves of Godfather 2 – the mixture of practical necessity and quasi-honourable intentions impelling Vito’s early career with the thoroughgoing corruption of Michael’s rule.  We also relate Godfather 2 to Godfather 1.  This naturally gives an added dimension to the ‘young Vito’ scenes especially.  When we see the robust toddler Sonny, we think of who he grew up into and how he died.  When baby Fredo is seriously ill with pneumonia, the neonatal infirmity seems to predict the weak man he will one day be.  Coppola knows there’s no need to force these connections, that an audience which has seen and remembered Godfather 1 will make them unassisted.

As dictated by the fundamental importance of family in the set-up, Godfather 2 reflects the degeneration of motives, from the start of Vito’s criminal life to the nadir of Michael’s, in the effect this has on their personal lives.  Perhaps the film’s most brilliant section (though competition for that label is strong) is the Feast of Saint Rocco section that builds to the death of Don Fanucci.  Vito makes preparations for the killing while the neighbourhood is absorbed in the feast day celebrations.  Carmela and their children sit watching the street entertainment as Vito leaves them to do the deed.  This involves an extraordinary journey, there and back, over the rooftops.  On the return leg, Vito disposes of the gun down a chimney.  The journey is accompanied by Nino Rota’s beautifully august festal march – arguably the greatest highlight of his and Carmine Coppola’s[4] score (another keen competition).  The rhythm of these scenes is as exhilarating as their content is alarming.  The very last moments of the feast day deliver a powerful sucker punch, as Vito calmly returns to Carmela and the children.  They all carry on enjoying the spectacle – a completely happy family group.

That ambiguous goodbye wave from the train in Sicily is a bridge between the Feast of Saint Rocco scenes and Coppola’s unambiguous description of Michael’s destruction of his own family.  His marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton) in effect ends when she tells him her recent miscarriage was actually an abortion.  Michael retains custody of their two children by banishing Kay from their lives.  Once Carmela (Morgana King) has died, he moves to kill his one surviving brother – an act of revenge for Fredo’s earlier treachery, even though he now represents no danger to Michael.  As in Godfather 1, the female roles are relatively very minor but it’s worth noting the important influence of women in this part of the story.  Michael’s furious reaction to Kay’s revelation of the abortion is magnified by the shock it causes him:  he can’t believe his wife has made, let alone acted upon, an independent decision.  On the other hand, Fredo is safe from Michael for as long, and only for as long, as their mother is alive.

The very different physical qualities of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are a crucial means of illustrating the process of the decay in the Corleones’ values.  De Niro (in what I think is his greatest performance) creates a depth of character and conveys a variety of moods with extraordinary economy and lack of visible effort.  The reading of his lines, mostly in Sicilian dialect, is deft.  His movement is wonderfully expressive.   De Niro’s Vito is intensely observant; in complete stillness, he can be calmly resigned or powerfully threatening, as the occasion demands.  Pacino too is sometimes menacing when Michael is saying little or nothing.  In social situations, this Don Corleone is almost magnetically charmless.  In more private settings, he operates at emotional extremes, alternating between a brooding, almost withdrawn manner and convulsions of anger.  In 1941, Michael chose to enlist and Vito eventually took pride in his youngest’s son distinguished war service.  Before 1945 was out, Michael made another choice – out of loyalty to his father, he committed himself to the Family business.  A decade or so later, Michael is businesslike all right, in appearance and manner.  Well aware of what the business involves, he’s also uncomfortably brittle.  Pacino’s Michael exudes mauvaise foi.

The character of Hyman Roth is based on Meyer Lansky, a prominent figure in Jewish-American organised crime, who had strong ties to the Mafia.    Lansky was a major player in the casino business in Havana, the setting for one of Godfather 2’s major episodes – a visit to the city by Michael that coincides with the Cuban Revolution of New Year 1959.  Coppola achieved a remarkable casting coup in persuading the legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg, with the encouragement of his former student Al Pacino, to play Roth.  Strasberg had appeared in only two films previously (uncredited in Parnell (1937) and in a featured role in Don Siegel’s China Venture (1953)).  It’s fitting that the ‘father of Method acting’ in America takes his place in a work that’s a supreme vindication of the approaches that he pioneered.  Strasberg memorably practises what he preached.  The ailing but still sharp-minded Hyman Roth, whose vicious determination shines through his bland appearance and folksy humbug, is a formidable creation.   ‘There must be more brilliant strokes of casting … and more first-rate acting in smaller parts,’ wrote Pauline Kael of Godfather 2, ‘than in any other American movie’.   It’s ironic, for someone as preoccupied with screen performances as me, that I’m going to leave it at that, as far as the cast is concerned.   I agree with Kael – and the fine contributions really are too numerous to mention.

There’s grim comedy in a shared characteristic of all but one of the crime bosses in the film.  Don Ciccio in Sicily at the start of the century, Don Fanucci in Little Italy two decades later, Hyman Roth and even, in his occasional more voluble moments, Michael Corleone – each man likes the sound of his own voice, has an aptitude for cant and expects his audience to be impressed by his insights and amused by his jokes.   It evidently goes with the job.  The words through which Coppola expresses this pattern of behaviour, however, are always convincingly the individual’s own.  The exception to the rule is Vito:  while it’s true that we see his career is in its early stages, his more rationed use of words seemed to persist in the older Vito of Godfather 1.

Another motif is the harking back of characters to the good old days, when Mafia work, according to them, was a more straightforward and principled profession.  (Frank Pentangeli is a leading exponent of this particular brand of self-deception.)  Whenever we hear the refrain, it’s a reminder of the persistent criticism of the Godfather films that they glamorise the Corleone family.  The reminder makes us reflect on whether we’ve been seduced into complicity with the alleged euphemisation.  The crucial distinction here is surely between glamorising and humanising.  The latter is a virtually necessary consequence of the exploration of meanings of family.  The films would be diminished, as well as less challenging, if Coppola, because of the Corleones’ line of work, were coldly antipathetic towards them as husbands and brothers, fathers and sons.

Although bloodshed is often prominent in Godfather 2, there are next to no instances of scenes of mayhem troubling in the way that some are in Godfather 1:  the violent sequences in the second film, however startling, don’t depersonalise either the perpetrator or the victim.  Vito’s murders of Don Fanucci and Don Ciccio are outstanding examples of this.  We see that the murderer considers these acts morally justified.  The vain, dandified Fanucci is thoroughly hateful – until the last few seconds of his life, as he reacts to Vito’s first gunshot.  The apparently cordial conversation between Vito and Don Ciccio allows time to take in, before he’s knifed to death, how frail the victim is – compared both with his killer and with the man who once slew Vito’s parents and brother.   The lesser violence – lesser in terms of the physical damage it causes – is similarly telling, as, for example, when Michael loses his temper and strikes Kay.

Michael Sragow wrote in 2002 that ‘Although “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” depict an American family’s moral defeat, as a mammoth, pioneering work of art, it [sic] remains a national creative triumph’.  This sums up Coppola’s achievement well but I think it needs stressing how much the second film surpasses its predecessor – even allowing that Godfather 1 fortifies Godfather 2.   The cinematography by Gordon Willis is a sophisticated advance on the impressive visual scheme of Godfather 1:  the lighting and framing are always aligned, never obviously so, with a sequence’s emotional temperature.  The production design by Dean Tavoularis, especially the vivid recreation of the young Vito’s Little Italy, is superb and Coppola brings it to astounding life.  He manages the huge cast and the intricate plot admirably.  There are very occasional dips in momentum and a couple of points where it’s not clear how much time has passed between events (the setting-up of Senator Geary as payback for his demands over the casino licence, the interval between Michael’s disowning of Fredo and the death of their mother).  But Godfather 2, as a whole, is a quite exceptional piece of storytelling.  It was heartening to see NFT1 packed out for BFI’s screening of this masterpiece – the finest American film that I know.

29 September 2018

[1] This note usually refers to the two films as Godfather 1 and Godfather 2.

[2] The two levels of ‘family’ are distinguished by a capital initial letter for ‘Family’ in the Mafia sense of the word.

[3] The Wikipedia plot synopsis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather_Part_II  is adequate.

[4] Carmine Coppola, the director’s father, shared the music credit; both he and Rota received Academy Awards for Best Original Score.  (The film also won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (De Niro), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Art Direction.)