Film critics and historians all agree that “The Godfather”, released in 1972, is one of the greatest films ever made. It plays somewhat like a Shakespearean tragedy as the youngest son, who’s been shielded from the family business of organized crime, must assume power as the Godfather to protect and keep his family together.
The movie would go on to become the highest grossing film of the year, and won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Film critics have also hailed the movie as a masterpiece in cinematic storytelling.
The Godfather 2 shuttles back and forth constantly from past and present, contrasting the life of Vito Corleone in the early twentieth century, from his humble beginnings through his ascent into power, with that of his son Michael Corleone in the second half of the twentieth century, whose influence is declining. The film begins with a flashback to 1901, where the grisly massacre of the.
It’s surprising that Francis Ford Coppola was able to deliver such a powerful film with all the pressure he was under at the time; the studio behind the film wanted to fire Coppola, and a replacement director was present on set during a good duration of the production waiting to take over if Coppola was axed. The studio also disapproved of his choices of actors, especially Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, and Coppola had to fight hard to get both men cast in their now iconic roles.
The studio also didn’t want to make “The Godfather” a period piece and instead of taking place in New York, the executives wanted the story to take place in Kansas City. Coppola’s sister Talia Shire, who plays the character Connie in the film, had this say about the uncertainty and chaos in the first film’s production: “No one knew when you were going to be fired on the first movie, so the thing is get enough footage in the can, keep going, keep shooting.”
The up and coming director at the time overcame huge obstacles and created a piece of art that has entertained cinephiles for decades, but Coppola’s greatest accomplishment was creating a sequel that, on many levels, surpassed the original masterpiece. “The Godfather” romanticized the life of organized crime by telling the story as a family drama while “The Godfather: Part II”, released in 1974, gives an unflinching look at the dark side of power and vice, giving the sequel a more realistic portrayal of the Mafia, and making the second movie the superior film in the “Godfather” trilogy.
1. The Origins of Don Corleone
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Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Don Corleone is one for the ages. The performance transcends the craft of acting, because Brando disappears and the viewer actually believes Don Vito Corleone is a living breathing person instead of an actor playing a role.
The sequel tells the story of how a young Vito Andolini escapes certain death in his birthplace of Corleone, Sicily after his mother and father are murdered by a local Mafia Don. The young boy travels to America, living the immigrant experience all by himself, and Vito’s last name is changed from Andolini to Corleone during a clerical error when he arrives at Ellis Island.
Robert De Niro takes the mantle from Brando and accomplishes the same acting feat by becoming a younger Vito Corleone; his performance is just as powerful as Brando’s, and being a method actor, De Niro lived in Sicily prior to filming to learn the local dialect. Just like Brando, De Niro would go on and win an Oscar, this time for Best Supporting Actor and is the only American actor to win an Oscar by reciting his dialogue in a foreign language.
We watch as De Niro delivers a restrained and subtle performance of a hard-working immigrant who struggles to raise his small family after losing his job. Vito is reluctantly introduced to a life of crime by his neighbor Peter Clemenza, but takes the leadership role once Vito assassinates a local neighborhood gangster Don Fanucci.
De Niro’s performance is brilliant because throughout the transformation, he remains humble and devoid of ego, and this storyline retains the same romanticism from the first film as opposed to the darker storyline belonging to Michael Corleone.
2. Father and Son
The movie juxtaposes the lives of Vito Corleone and his son Michael Corleone at similar ages, and is a prime example of “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” Vito slowly rises to power and would go on to achieve wealth and power, control over politicians and judges, the ability to form alliances with other powerful gangsters, and to have many loyal capos to do his bidding.
However, Don Corleone’s sins have been passed on to Michael. As his father had influence in the world of politics, his son is being dragged before a congressional hearing to testify about his connections to organized crime, and a local senator in his new hometown of Las Vegas shows nothing but content for Michael. A former business associate of Don Corleone, Hyman Roth, is trying kill his son in secret and utilizes one of his loyal capos to undermine Michael’s power.
The foundation that Don Corleone built is coming back to haunt his son, bringing him nothing but grief and tragedy. The parallel storylines prove that no one can escape karma, and even if Don Corleone didn’t suffer or pay for all of his sins, his son Michael must surely answer for them.
3. Francis Ford Coppola
The young director burst onto the scene as part of the new Hollywood wave of filmmakers; after co-writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Patton” starring George C. Scott, Hollywood took notice. After several well-known directors turned down the opportunity to direct “The Godfather”, including Sergio Leone, Peter Bogdanovich, and Costa-Gavras, producer Robert Evans wanted an Italian-American to direct the film, and Francis Ford Coppola was hired for the job.
However, soon after signing on as director, the nightmare began for the young filmmaker when Mario Puzo’s novel became a huge bestseller, and suddenly, studio executives had second thoughts about hiring Coppola.
The legendary filmmaker summed up his experience during that time: “’The Godfather’ was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn’t like the cast. They didn’t like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn’t like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn’t at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I’d ever get another job.”
When “The Godfather” was released, it became a commercial and critical success, and Paramount wanted to produce a sequel. However, Coppola didn’t want to direct the next installment after the horrible treatment he received from the studio; Coppola agreed to produce the next film, but wanted Martin Scorsese to direct the sequel. The studio made nice with Coppola by buying him a Mercedes, and he eventually agreed to direct Part Two.
The director had this to say about the approach to the second film: “I worked very hard on ‘The Godfather: Part II’ to try to have you feel what these people were feeling.” One of the strengths of the sequel is the way it pulls in the viewer emotionally from watching Vito Corleone’s mother being blown away with a shotgun in his home in Sicily, or years later in New York when an adult Vito refuses a handout by his former boss after losing his job, or when Michael Corleone discovers his brother is the traitor within his family while in Cuba and gives him a kiss before reciting the line: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart.”
While the first “Godfather” was more of a nostalgic experience, the sequel has more heart, even though the second film is darker than the first. Coppola’s skill at bringing out incredible performances from his actors, as well as his storytelling abilities, would earn him an Oscar for Best Director, and Coppola is the reason why “The Godfather: Part II” is hailed as one of the greatest films of all time.
4. Gordon Willis
The late cinematographer Gordon Willis is one of the most influential directors of photography of all time. His style of underexposing his films and his use of shadows prompted his best friend and fellow cinematographer Conrad Hall to give him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness”. His style of photography has influenced films up to this very day; the technique of lighting he pioneered is known as “crushing the blacks”.
For the “Godfather” movies, Willis created a yellow tone for the films that has been copied in just about every movie that’s a period piece. Willis had this to say about the visual contrast in “The Godfather”: “You can decide this movie has a dark palette. But you can’t spend two hours on a dark palette. So you’ve got this high-key, Kodachrome wedding going on. Now you go back inside and it’s dark again. You can’t, in my mind, put both feet into a bucket of cement and leave them there for the whole movie. It doesn’t work. You must have this relativity.”
For The Godfather: Part II”, Willis made the film darker as Michael Corleone becomes a darker person himself, and even this prince of darkness would later admit that for the second film, he went too far with underexposing, especially the scene between Michael and his mother when he asked her if it’s possible to lose your family. Coppola described Willis’ style: “He has a natural sense of structure and beauty, not unlike a Renaissance artist.”
5. Lee Strasburg
Strasburg was a legend in the acting community and is considered the father of method acting. As the director of the Actors Studio in New York, he trained countless actors, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Jane Fonda.
Playing the role of Hyman Roth, Strasburg proved that not only was he a great teacher of the craft, but he was also an incredible actor himself. The character of Hyman Roth is based off of the real-life gangster Meyer Lansky, and Roth seems more dangerous than the entire five families which Michael eliminated in the first “Godfather” film.
Roth attacks Michael on two fronts: he tries to have him killed, and he has former associates of the Corleone family testify against Michael at a congressional hearing, which can lead to incarceration. Michael and Roth play a cat-and-mouse game of who can eliminate who first, and Strasburg gives a powerful performance of a old man pretending he has one foot in the grave, all while plotting to bring down Michael Corleone.
6. Losing one’s soul
In “The Godfather”, we rooted for Michael Corleone when he avenged his father’s assassination attempt by gunning down Sollozzo and a crooked police captain inside a restaurant. When he took out the heads of the five families, Moe Green, and his brother-in-law once his father passed away, the audiences supported the bloodshed because we all knew Michael did it reluctantly as he tried to protect his family.
But in “The Godfather: Part II”, Michael is a very different man; he’s embraced his role as the Don and has become a darker individual, one who’s intoxicated with the power he wields. Michael gives the orders to murder an innocent prostitute so they can frame and control a senator, and at this point, the audience can no longer support his bloodshed.
He exiles his wife once Michael learns she had an abortion, snatching her children away from her. After finding out his brother betrayed him in unwittingly helping Hyman Roth, he exiles his brother and puts a death sentence over his head.
And once Michael’s mother passes away, he pretends to forgive his older brother Fredo as he gives the signal to his enforcer Rocco to proceed with the hit. Toward the end of the movie, Michael has outwitted Hyman Roth, but is so hellbent on killing his nemesis that he sends one of his best enforcers on a suicide mission to kill the elderly gangster.
When Michael finally kills Fredo, we realize he’s lost his soul and become a monster. This is the brilliance of “The Godfather: Part II”; it strips away the romanticism that pop culture has with the gangster lifestyle, letting the viewer know that the price is too high to pay for the wealth and power that comes with organized crime. And the last scene is almost poetic as Michael sits all alone in his backyard contemplating, realizing he can never get his soul back.
Author Bio: R. Prince is a filmmaker from Harlem, New York and the author of the book How to Roll a Blunt for Dummies.
The Godfather 2 shuttles back and forth constantly from past and present, contrasting the life of Vito Corleone in the early twentieth century, from his humble beginnings through his ascent into power, with that of his son Michael Corleone in the second half of the twentieth century, whose influence is declining. The film begins with a flashback to 1901, where the grisly massacre of the Andolini family in Corleone, Sicily is well underway. A nine-year-old Vito Andolini is spared from the bloody vendetta against his family enacted by local Mafia head Don Ciccio by the quick actions of loyal Andolini clan retainers. Vito makes his way to Ellis Island in New York where a migration officer registers him as “Vito Corleone” after finding the name “Andolini” too difficult to pronounce and spell.
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Fast forward to 1958: current Corleone Clan Don Michael Corleone is celebrating his son’s First Communion party at Lake Tahoe. Amidst this joyous occasion, he is holding a series of meetings as the head of his organized crime family. There is dissidence within his organization; his caporegime, Frank Pentangeli, is disappointed. He feels that Michael has abandoned him, failing to defend his territory from incursions of the Rosato brothers, who work for Hyman Roth, who in turn works for Michael. In the evening an assassination attempt is carried out in the Corleone compound with Michael as the intended target. Michael is able to escape the attempt on his life, and to get to the bottom of the assassination he flies off to Nevada to gather his forces and to do some intelligence work.
The scene changes quickly and a flashback is shown once again, this time to a grown Vito Corleone, living in New York in 1917 with his wife Carmela and a very young Santino. A stoic Vito Corleone has just lost his job due to patronage politics of local extortionist Don Fabrizio Fanucci; and in a strange twist of fate, he happens to witness a burglary being perpetrated by his would-be enforcer, Peter Clemenza, who asks that he remain quiet about the crime. Vito obliges, and when Celemenza sees that Vito is a man who can keep his mouth shut regarding criminal ventures, he invites him to take part in a burglary.
Again, the scene jumps forward once more to the “present,” where Michael guesses that Roth is the mastermind of the murder attempt. Rather than confront him, Michael continues with his ventures with Roth, pretending that he doesn’t suspect a thing. He does this in order to root out all co-conspirators in the treachery against the Corleone clan. As part of his plan he sends Pentangeli to make peace with the Rosato clan in order to preserve the semblance of ignorance. This doesn’t go as planned, though, as they try to kill him. Michael continues to feign ignorance and goes on with business as usual; the Corleone group and their partners, including Hyman Roth and Michael, fly to Havana, Cuba to discuss the direction of their business forecasts under the accommodating administration of Fulgencio Batista. Michael, however, expresses his hesitation after contemplating the effects of ongoing Cuban Revolution.
Come New Year’s Eve, Michael moves to have Roth and Johnny Ola, Roth’s second in command, eliminated. Roth survives because the Cuban police shot the would-be assassin, thinking that he was a rebel. Michael soon discovers that the traitor who leaked critical information to his enemies was none other than Fredo—his older brother. The Corleone group ends their business dealings in Cuba because of Batista’s resignation due to pressure exerted by the rebels and the increasing instability of the political scene. Michael, Roth, and Fredo all capitalize on the confusion to make their escape, individually, to the US. Upon Michael’s return, he greeted with more bad news: his wife Kay has suffered a miscarriage.
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Once more the scene shifts to a flashback, again focusing on Vito Corleone, this time a little older with two more children in tow, Fredo and Michael. Vito’s illegal activities have caught the attention of Don Fanucci, the local small-time Mafiosi who runs protections rackets in the neighborhood. He proposes to take a portion of Vito’s earnings from his criminal ventures in exchange for his safety. Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio, Vito’s partners in crime, suggest that they pay in full to avoid earning Fanucci’s ire. Vito refuses, insisting that he can persuade Fanucci to take a smaller tribute by making him “an offer he can’t refuse.” He pays a visit to Fanucci showing equal parts deference and bravado, successfully fooling him into thinking that he is a docile man who fears him, lulling Fanucci into a false sense of security. Later on, during the neighborhood festival, Vito follows him to his apartment where he shoots him using the sound of fireworks to conceal the crime.
The film jumps forward again to a courtroom scene where a Senate committee is investigating the Corleone family for alleged involvements in organized crime. Pentangeli believes that Michael has betrayed him, because of the unsuccessful assassination attempt on his life. He agrees to testify against Michael in exchange for being placed under the witness protection program. Meanwhile, Fredo returns to Nevada, seeking a private audience with Michael in an attempt to clear his name and spare his life. He explains that he was indignant at being bypassed by Michael for leadership of the clan, and thus agreed to assist Roth in organizing a coup—unaware that this involved a plot to kill his brother. After Fredo confesses, Michael promptly disowns him.
Trying to protect himself from the investigation, Michael resorts to another method to shake Pentangeli, who is now virtually untouchable because of the federal witness protection program. He has his men bring Pentangeli’s brother to the court proceedings, and it is clear that although Pentangeli himself is safe, Michael would ensure that his entire clan would be wiped out if he doesn’t recant. Pentangeli denies all his previous statements and a riot breaks out in the courtroom. Just when it seems that matters are turning out favorably for Michael, Kay decides to reveal the truth regarding the supposed miscarriage. It was actually an abortion, and to add fuel to the fire she intended to run off with their children in tow, reasoning that she didn’t want them to take part in the clan’s criminal empire. A now-livid Michael Corleone then banishes Kay and takes sole custody of their children.
The scene then cuts back to another flashback: here we see Vito Corleone visiting Sicily, the first time since his harried departure many, many years ago. He visits the compound of Don Ciccio with his business partner Tommasino under the pretense of paying their respects to him to seek his blessing to set up their olive oil import-export business. Vito is there however to exact vengeance on the old Don for wiping out his clan. He approaches the aged Don Ciccio to personally give him a gift—a liter of his finest olive oil. When the old Don asks him who he is he introduces himself as “Vito Andolini.” He then proceeds to stab Don Ciccio with a concealed knife, dragging the blade through his midsection slowly ensuring that the Don dies slowly and painfully. They manage to escape, but Tommasino is wounded in the leg causing him to limp for the rest of his life.
Jump forward in time to the Corleone Family at a funeral. Carmela Corleone, the clan matriarch, has died. Out of respect for his mother, Michael had refused to carry out any reprisals against Fredo. Now that Mamma Corleone has passed away, Fredo must finally pay for his betrayal, and Al Neri, the Corleone caporegime, is tasked with killing Fredo out on the lake. Word gets out that Fredo has been eliminated, and the Corleone coup plotters scramble to escape: Roth is denied entry to Israel and must return to the US; he is eventually shot by Corleone enforcer, Rocco Lampone, who is in turn shot by federal agents shortly afterwards. Pentangeli is visited by Tom Hagen, the Corleone clan consigliere, in the witness protection safehouse. He obliquely threatens Pentangeli’s family by reminding him that the Roman conspirators of old who failed in their coup attempts committed suicide. Pentangeli agrees in exchange for the promise of his family’s safety and care in his absence. Hagen agrees, and Pentangeli slits his wrists in the bathtub later on.
The film ends with a final juxtaposition of scenes. Flashback to 1941: it is Don Vito’s birthday, and his family members have gathered to surprise the clan patriarch, but his youngest son, Michael, has an even bigger surprise in store for the family: he is enlisting in the US Marine Corps to fight in the Pacific War efforts, and he decides to make that announcement today. Santino responds with his usual fire and brimstone, Tom is completely doubtful of what he hears, and Fredo is the lone supportive voice in the cacophony. While they argue over the announcement, they hear Don Vito arrive. Everyone leaves to greet the Don, save for Michael, who sits alone, contemplating how to break the news to his father. The film ends with the last jump forward to a much older Michael Corleone, this time sitting alone by the artificial lake at the Corleone Compound.