The focus of the gangster film in the 1950s and thereafter was not the push to the top and the inevitable fall, as in Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, but the “mundane problems of living legitimately once the top had been reached: the conflict of the old life of crime and the new respectability.” Such is the case in The Godfather: Part II, as Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin put it.1 Paramount Pictures had assumed that the first Godfather film would be a routine gangster picture and a modest success.
When The Godfather (1971) became a runaway hit, the studio brass insisted that Francis Ford Coppola, its director and cowriter, come up with a sequel. The Godfather: Part II would continue to examine organized crime in the 1950s, when the Senate Committee on Organized Crime, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, investigated the Syndicate, which is depicted in The Big Heat. The term syndicate “lacks any ethnic resonance.”2 Nevertheless, in The Big Heat, Mike Lagana is portrayed as a first-generation Italian with Old World origins, foreshadowing the Mafia types in the Godfather films. In Coppola’s Mafia movies, the word family is substituted to signify each of the gangs making up the New York Mafia to mollify the coalition of Italian American groups who protested the use of the word Mafia in the films.
In approaching the screenplay of The Godfather: Part II, Coppola explains, “I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose the ascension of the family under Vito Corleone with the decline of the family under his son Michael, to show in flashback how the young Vito Corleone was building this crime family in America, while his son in the present is presiding over its disintegration.”3 In the documentary that accompanies the Godfather trilogy on DVD, Coppola notes, “I had always wanted to write a screenplay that told the story of a father and a son at the same age: They were both in their thirties, and I would integrate the two stories.”4 Young Vito Corleone’s early life as an immigrant is set during World War I, while the later life of the Corleone family, presided over by son Michael, is updated to the 1950s. The modern story depicts the family as “beset by Byzantine intrigues, marital discord, fraternal rivalry, and internal decay.”5 Consequently, The Godfather: Part II covers nearly sixty years of U.S. history, from the immigrants coming to the United States in the early 1900s until the post–World War II era.
Paramount had commissioned Mario Puzo, author of the novel The Godfather (1969), to prepare a preliminary draft of the screenplay before Coppola came on board, and Coppola incorporated some incidents from it in his version of the screenplay. Most of the events in the modern story were invented by Coppola. Some of them were suggested by contemporary newspaper accounts. There is, for example, the incident in which Michael frames Nevada senator Pat Geary by having a dead prostitute found in his bed in a sleazy bordello run by the Corleones to ensure the senator’s continued patronage of the Corleone enterprises. This episode was inspired by a sensational newspaper exposé of Nevada brothels.
The flashbacks to young Vito’s life in New York’s Little Italy were drawn from material left over from Puzo’s novel—historical background for which there had been no room in the first film. In fact, part III of the novel is a thirty-page description of the rise of the Mafia in Sicily and Vito Corleone’s subsequent rise to power as a Mafia leader when he immigrates to the United States.6 Puzo chronicles how Vito becomes a Mafia godfather who is a sort of Italian-immigrant entrepreneur in Little Italy. Coppola simply plucked historical incidents from part III of the novel and wrote them into the screenplay.
These flashbacks essentially depict the experiences of immigrants like Vito Corleone coming to the United States and endeavoring to realize the American dream of success, but they were reduced to laboring in sweat shops and dwelling in slum tenements, so they found self-esteem and cash by joining street gangs, which they saw as brotherhoods. The immigrants had a tradition of violence born of their resistance to the rural landlords who had exploited them in Sicily. When they came to the United States, they formed street gangs and secret societies, just as they had done in the old country. Crime became a means of survival in the lawless slums, which were therefore a fertile ground for the growth of the Mafia in the United States.
“My heart was really in the Little Italy sequences,” Coppola remembers, “in the old streets of New York, the music, all that turn-of-the-century atmosphere.”7 To that extent, Coppola sees The Godfather: Part II as a personal film in which he addresses his own ancestors and ethnic heritage.
Many of the actors from The Godfather reprised their roles in The Godfather: Part II. Al Pacino, Talia Shire (the director’s sister), Diane Keaton, John Cazale, and Robert Duvall returned. Coppola was at pains to find the right actor to play Vito Corleone as a young man. He tested Robert De Niro (Mean Streets). “I thought De Niro could be the young Brando,” Coppola says in the DVD commentary.8 He had a sort of stately bearing, as if he really was the young Vito who would grow into the older man who was Marlon Brando in The Godfather. By the way, G. D. Spradling, a former politician, was selected to play a politician: Nevada senator Pat Geary.
Al Pacino suggested Lee Strasberg to play crime syndicate treasurer Hyman Roth, an aging Jewish racketeer. Strasberg was head of the renowned Actor’s Studio in New York, where he had been Pacino’s mentor. Strasberg made Roth a wily financial wizard who was a worthy opponent for Michael. Roth ostensibly treats Michael as an ally but covertly plots to overthrow him. He was modeled on the notorious Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. Like Lansky, Roth lives in a modest bungalow in Florida, which belies his status as a wealthy, powerful kingpin of organized crime. One gangster warns Michael, “Your father did business with Hyman Roth, but your father never trusted Hyman Roth.” At one point, Roth tells Michael that one of his idols is Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series, a crime that comes up in The Great Gatsby.
Coppola brought back some creative personnel who had worked on The Godfather. They included cinematographer Gordon Willis, known in Hollywood as the “Prince of Darkness” for his shadowy lighting and penchant for darkened rooms with actors shown in silhouette, and production designer Dean Tavoularis, who won an Academy Award for creating Old New York, Sicily, and Cuba in the film.
Principal photography began on October 28, 1973, and included location work done in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Santa Domingo was the site chosen for the scenes set in Cuba, where Michael attends a high-level conference with other leaders of organized crime. During the Batista regime in Cuba, the Mafia was involved in the casinos and other rackets there, but their holdings there would soon be lost in the wake of the overthrow of Batista’s dictatorship by Fidel Castro, which is portrayed in this sequence.
By May 1974, Coppola had finished principal photography—in 104 days. By November, the rough cut had been pared down to three hours and twenty minutes. Coppola firmly believed that in moving back and forth in time at significant moments in the lives of father and son, he had linked their lives together and showed how each had dealt with problems that faced the family.9 In switching back and forth from a scene in Michael’s time to Vito’s young manhood, Coppola took pains to provide smooth transitions between present and past that would suggest the affinities between Michael and his father. Thus, Michael gazes down at his sleeping son in his Tahoe mansion, and the scene slowly dissolves to Vito gazing down at his firstborn son in the same fashion in a New York tenement.
Francis Ford Coppola.
Coppola managed to pull together a final cut of the movie just days before the premiere in December. He had succeeded in creating a vast epic reflecting the development of organized crime in the United States, in terms of the Italian-immigrant past. As Pauline Kael says, “We only saw the middle of the story in the first film; now we have the beginning and the end.” The second Godfather film not only chronicles Michael’s later career as head of the “family business,” but it also presents in flashback Don Vito’s early life in Sicily, as well as his rise to power in New York City’s Little Italy after his immigration to the United States. Kael continues, “The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the script and deepens the meaning of the first film.”10
The parallel structure of the film brings into relief the symbiotic relationship between Vito and Michael. The child Vito Corleone, who arrives at Ellis Island, will grow up to forge a crime family that will “subvert the American dream to attain criminal wealth,” and his son Michael will follow in his footsteps.11 To that extent, The Godfather: Part II can be called Coppola’s requiem for the American dream.
The Godfather: Part II begins where the previous picture left off, with the scene in which Don Michael’s lieutenants pay him homage as his deceased father’s rightful successor. Then the movie switches swiftly to a scene from the childhood of Michael’s father, when young Vito’s own father is murdered for defying Don Ciccio, the local Mafia don in the Sicilian village where Vito was born. Vito’s mother and older brother are also murdered shortly thereafter for attempting to take vengeance on the Mafia chieftain, and Vito, now an orphan, escapes to the United States.
In 1901, the child Vito goes through the immigration process at Ellis Island. The wide-eyed Vito Andolini cannot communicate with the American immigration official, so he stands by mutely as the officer mistakenly records his name as Vito Corleone, thereby naming him for his hometown of Corleone. The sallow, frail boy is diagnosed as having contracted small pox and is therefore quarantined for three months on Ellis Island. The lad comes to the United States carrying another sickness as well, that of the vendetta. “The child will carry his vendetta-disease to the point of emerging as a Mafia don and liquidating those who have harmed his family.”12
Back in the present, the film focuses on another youngster, Michael’s son Anthony, who is enjoying a big celebration in honor of his First Communion. The party is being held at his father’s estate at Lake Tahoe, now the center of Michael’s business operations. Michael, like his father before him, conducts his business affairs while the festivities are in full swing. While Michael is engaged in making Machiavellian deals in his shadowy study, he is swallowed up in darkness; “his face is often half-lit, his presence tends to recede into the darker parts of the frame,” depicting him as an enigma to those he is dealing with.13 Michael bribes Senator Pat Geary with a large “donation,” ostensibly for the state university, but actually to buy Geary’s support in securing a gambling license for one of the Corleone Las Vegas casinos. Geary sneers at Michael and his entourage, calling them wops, dagos, and other derogatory names, but he takes the money.
The sacred First Communion ceremony demonstrates the participation by Mafia families in empty displays of religious belief, but they steadfastly ignore the spiritual import of these time-honored religious rituals.14 The sacrament of Holy Communion does not touch their lives. Like Don Vito before him, Michael deploys Catholic ceremonies to legitimize his lifestyle. The Holy Communion ceremony is followed by a noisy, vulgar outdoor party that demonstrates just how far the Corleone family has drifted from its ethnic origins. “The Italian customs associated with the old country are no longer evident in the scenes set in the modern era,” says Coppola.15 The hearty Italian folk songs have been replaced by suave dance numbers of the big band era.
The drunken Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), who is from Vito’s old neighborhood, disdains the music at the reception, as well as the champagne that has replaced Italian wine. He upbraids Michael for abandoning his roots. Frankie likewise excoriates him for doing business with the “despicable old Jew” Hyman Roth. Michael answers Frankie by saying that his policy is to keep his friends close, but his enemies closer. Frankie, however, does not buy his explanation.
Throughout the party scene, it becomes apparent that the in-laws who have been coming into the Corleone family lately are not of Italian origin and have no sense of the family traditions. Mama Corleone (Morgana King) expresses her displeasure at the diminishing of the family’s ethnic identity. Fredo’s wife Deanna (Marianna Hill), who is not Italian, is a floozy and a drunk, and she flirts with younger men at the reception. When Fredo (John Cazale) futilely tries to make her behave, she shouts at him about how these “dagos” attempt to dominate their wives. “Never marry a wop!” she bellows, as two of Michael’s gang hustle her away from the party.
Since Michael is head of the family, Connie (Talia Shire) goes through the motions of asking his permission to marry a WASP named Merle Johnson (Troy Donahue), whom Michael rightly infers is a fortune hunter. Connie has become a hardened, dissipated creature. Coppola comments on the DVD, “She has these fancy boyfriends; that’s the only way she can rebel against her all-powerful brother.” The wretched marriages of Fredo and Connie reflect how the “family unity is really starting to break down in this period,” concludes Coppola.16
After the First Communion reception, the story shifts in due course to a flashback, in which we learn how the Old World criminal traditions imported to the New World add to the misery of struggling immigrants like Vito Corleone. The secret crime cartel called the Black Hand, an early version of the Mafia in the United States, terrorized Italian immigrants living in ethnic neighborhoods by extorting “protection” money from them. The term Black Hand referred to crude drawings of a shadowy hand that accompanied threats from these racketeers.
During the performance of an Italian operetta, Genco, Vito’s friend points out Fanucci, a Black Hand extortionist, to Vito and warns him that Fanucci extorts protection money from Italian immigrants. Fannuci’s florid cape and curled moustache make him look like a villain from a nineteenth-century gaslight melodrama. Vito replies cryptically that Genco should not worry about Fanucci. He says, “I will make him an offer he can’t refuse” (a remark that the older Vito makes in The Godfather about someone else). When Fanucci periodically attempts to terrorize Vito, his comrades, and their families, Vito finally assassinates him, thereby committing his first murder and committing himself irrevocably to a life of crime. With that, the first part of the picture draws to a close.
Throughout the film, Coppola makes it clear that the higher Michael rises in the hierarchy of Mafia chiefs, the lower he sinks into the depths of moral degradation. As the second part of the film gets under way, Kay (Diane Keaton), Michael’s wife, is appalled by what he has become; she finally comes to the bitter conclusion that Michael will never change his ways and phase out his unlawful business interests, as he had promised her so often that he would. Indeed, it is far too late in the day for Michael to become a legitimate businessman, even if he wanted to. “He can never go back to the time before . . . he shot his father’s enemies,” Kael writes. “Michael’s act, which preserved his family’s power,” ruined his own life by setting him on the road to a life of crime.17
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part II (1974).
Michael is subpoenaed to testify before a Senate committee investigating organized crime, and Coppola portrays how adroitly Michael handles himself before the committee. The congressional hearing in the film is modeled on the televised hearings conducted by Senator Kefauver and Senator McClellan in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively. Coppola hired real reporters to play the press corps in this sequence to make it seem more real. Frankie Pentangeli, who has become completely alienated from the Corleone crime family, is the star witness against Michael. When Frankie takes the stand, he sees that Michael has imported Frankie’s revered older brother Vincenzo from Sicily to witness his testimony. Acknowledging these old family ties, Frankie fakes an attack of amnesia and withdraws his charges against Michael.
Because Kay is now fully aware that Michael is a hardened criminal, she finally informs him that she is leaving him, and taking their little boy and girl with her. At the climax of their dreadful quarrel, Kay reveals that the miscarriage she had told Michael she had suffered earlier was actually an abortion. She killed their unborn son, she explains, because she refused to bring another child into the vicious Corleone world. Michael is shocked to learn of the death of a second son, who would have helped to keep the Corleone name alive. He angrily slaps his wife, knocking her down. But it is Kay who has inflicted the severest blow. Michael orders Kay to get out but leave their two children behind. Coppola comments in his commentary, “Kay is appalled that Michael had gone scot-free after the Senate investigation.” She shouts, “I had an abortion, like our marriage is an abortion, something unholy.” She explains that what she has done is her way of “resisting the terrible evil that is spreading out from the man she had loved.” She knew he would never forgive her, and she wanted out of a Mafia marriage. She is no longer married to the mob.
The second half of the movie continues to develop two separate story lines by showing both young Vito and Michael exacting revenge for earlier treachery. We watch Vito return briefly to the Sicily of his boyhood to stab to death Don Ciccio, the local Mafia chieftain responsible for the deaths of his parents and brother decades before. Don Ciccio is an aging, decrepit man at this point, so Vito’s gruesome vendetta-killing of the pathetic don, a crime committed with ruthless premeditation, illustrates the savage side of Vito’s nature that lurks beneath the charming and civilized façade that he cultivates.
In a parallel act of vengeance, Michael arranges for the assassination of rival mobster Hyman Roth, who had plotted to have Michael slain. Michael has no sympathy for Roth: “He’s been dying of the same heart attack for twenty years.” Michael also orders that his weak and ineffectual older brother Fredo should be shot when he learns that Fredo, who all along had been jealous of his kid brother Michael for superseding him as head of the Corleone family, had cooperated with Roth’s scheme to murder Michael. Coppola notes that Puzo states in the novel that, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”
In the film, Michael decides to spare Fredo while Mama Corleone is still matriarch of the family. At her mother’s wake, Connie, who is no longer the brazen hussy she was at the beginning of the movie, entreats Michael to forgive Fredo’s treachery. While Michael embraces Fredo in a spurious gesture of fraternal affection, he glares at Al Neri, Michael’s enforcer, thereby signaling to him that the time to take vengeance on Fredo is at hand. The murder occurs when Fredo goes fishing just off the pier from Michael’s Tahoe estate. Fredo says a “Hail Mary” to ensure that he will catch a fish. It is the last prayer he will ever utter.
Coppola had Willis film the scene in which Neri liquidates Fredo in long shot to show how it looked from Michael’s point of view as he witnessed the killing through the Venetian blinds in his office. When Fredo is killed, the stony figure of Michael stands gazing out of a window in the family compound. His transformation to moral monster is now complete; he has lost his moral compass and may never find it again.
Once Michael has become permanently alienated from his wife, he is left a lonely, disconsolate man, living in virtual isolation in his heavily guarded compound at Lake Tahoe. Michael may have built the Corleone family into one of the strongest Mafia clans in the United States, but he has, at the same time, lost most of his immediate family: he murdered his only remaining brother, and he has banished his wife. Michael has always maintained that the harsh measures he has taken were motivated by his determination to protect his family, and the fortified compound where they live is a grim physical emblem of that commitment.18 Yet, by film’s end, the vile family business has invaded his home and all but destroyed it. As Talia Shire puts it, “Francis felt that he had to knock this family off to show how their criminal activities destroyed the family.”19
Even though Frankie Pentangeli had recanted his intention to testify against him, Michael is convinced that he should pay for his original willingness to do so. He sends Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), Mafia consigliore (family lawyer) and adopted son of Vito Corleone, to visit Frankie, who is still in the FBI’s witness protection program and living at an army base. How a Mafia consigliore gained access to Frankie while he is sequestered in an army compound is never explained. In any case, Tom has a discussion with Frankie about how traitors were dealt with during the days of the Roman Empire—which is, after all, the structural model for the Mafia. Tom says, “If they committed suicide, their families were taken care of by the Roman regime.”20 Coppola affirms that Puzo wrote this scene based on the old Roman idea that a man’s family would be spared if he did the right thing and opened his veins and bled to death in the bathtub. Frankie obliges, and his demise is a “Roman death.”
The climactic sequence at the end of The Godfather: Part II, in which Michael’s principal enemies die in a series of vignettes, recalls a similar montage at the conclusion of The Godfather. In quick succession, Frankie Pentangeli slashes his wrists in the bathtub at the army base. Hyman Roth is assassinated at an airport as he is interviewed by reporters. And Fredo is shot in a rowboat while fishing on the Tahoe estate. Comments Coppola, “There’s no doubt that by the end of this picture, Michael Corleone, having beaten everyone, is sitting alone, a living corpse.”
The final image of Michael sitting in a thronelike chair on the lawn of his estate on a bleak autumn afternoon, brooding over the loss of many members of his family, recalls the shot in the film’s first flashback, in which the sickly young Vito Corleone sits in an enormous chair in a lonely hospital room at Ellis Island right after his arrival in the New World. The lad, we know, came to the United States because of a vendetta against his family in his own country, and he will grow up to wreak vengeance on the man who slaughtered his loved ones back home.21
Years later, his son Michael will, in turn, take it upon himself to avenge a murderous attack on his father’s life. By so doing, he will inevitably become an integral part of the ongoing pattern of vengeance that began with the massacre of his ancestors long before he was born. Hence, there is a direct connection between the frail little boy sitting alone in the oversized chair at the beginning of the movie and his grown son sitting alone in a majestic chair late in the movie. Coppola articulates that connection in his remark that in The Godfather: Part II, his purpose was to “show how two men, father and son, were . . . corrupted by this Sicilian waltz of vengeance.”22 Revenge, as noted earlier, is a dish best served cold.
The last major flashback takes place at the outbreak of World War II, December 7, 1941, just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Corleone family, including Sonny (James Caan), Fredo, Connie, and Tom, are waiting for Don Vito to come home for a surprise birthday party in his honor. Michael takes the occasion to announce that he has enlisted in the U.S. Marines. The volatile Sonny (who is killed in The Godfather) chides Michael for risking his life for strangers, while Tom says on Vito’s behalf, “Your father has plans for you.” The final flashback concludes as the family runs out of the room to greet Vito—except for Michael, who is left sitting alone at the dining room table. He is already a loner who will live his life his own way.
In the movie’s last shot of Michael, he is ironically still wearing his wedding ring. It is an empty symbol of his pose as a family man, for he is as alone at this moment as was the boy Vito in the quarantine cell on Ellis Island. In contemplating Michael at film’s end, one recalls what Robert Warshow says in his seminal essay on the gangster film: “The typical gangster film represents a steady upward progress, followed by a very precipitous fall.”23 Coppola adds, Michael “is prematurely old, like the hero of The Picture of Dorian Gray.”24
When The Godfather: Part II came out, some critics wrote it off as a mere rehash of The Godfather. Still, other critics were enthusiastic, according to Rodney Hill in The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia: A. D. Murphy says in Variety, “Godfather II, far from being a spin-off follow-up to its 1972 progenitor, is an excellent epochal drama in its own right.”25 Kael cheers, “The sensibility at work here is that of a major artist. . . . The film is a modern American epic.”26
On Oscar night, Coppola became one of the few filmmakers in cinema history to win the triple crown: he received Academy Awards for directing the picture, coauthoring the screenplay, and producing the best picture of the year. Indeed, The Godfather: Part II is the first sequel to win Best Picture. Robert De Niro won an Oscar for his supporting role as young Vito. He delivered most of his lines in Sicilian—a language he did not understand. In addition, Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola (the director’s father) won Oscars for the musical score. Ironically, Pacino was nominated but did not win an Oscar. Yet, Michael Corleone is still considered Pacino’s greatest role, “because Michael is one of the few movie characters to achieve an authentically tragic dimension.”27 In sum, The Godfather: Part II remains one of the greatest gangster pictures ever made.