The Godfather Part II Movie

Francis Ford Coppola's legendary continuation and sequel to his landmark 1972 film, The Godfather, parallels the young Vito Corleone's rise with his son Michael's spiritual fall, deepening The Godfather's depiction of the dark side of the American dream. In the early 1900s, the child Vito flees his Sicilian village for America after the local Mafia kills his family. Vito (Robert De Niro) struggles to make a living, legally or illegally, for his wife and growing brood in Little Italy, killing the local Black Hand Fanucci (Gastone Moschin) after he demands his customary cut of the tyro's business. With Fanucci gone, Vito's communal stature grows, but it is his family (past and present) who matters most to him -- a familial legacy then upended by Michael's (Al Pacino) business expansion in the 1950s. Now based in Lake Tahoe, Michael conspires to make inroads in Las Vegas and Havana pleasure industries by any means necessary. As he realizes that allies like Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) are trying to kill him, the increasingly paranoid Michael also discovers that his ambition has crippled his marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton) and turned his brother, Fredo (John Cazale), against him. Barely escaping a federal indictment, Michael turns his attention to dealing with his enemies, completing his own corruption.

Both sequel and prequel to The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) delves further into the dark side of the capitalist American dream by paralleling the young Vito Corleone's 1910s rise with his son Michael's 1950s spiritual fall. To create a more contemplative view of the Corleones' American success story, Coppola cross-cut between Vito's story (in subtitled Italian) and Michael's, revealing how the honorable aim of protecting the family degenerates into an excuse for wielding lethal power, for the sake only of business. Images of Vito's parental concern and immigrant neighborhood dealings dissolve to Michael's familial disintegration and U.S. Senate subterfuge. Cinematographer Gordon Willis' warm sepia tones for the Vito sequences recall period photographs, contrasting sharply with the crass brightness and cold shadows of 1950s Lake Tahoe and Havana. With the memory of The Godfather present in Robert De Niro's uncanny evocation of Marlon Brando and in flashbacks to 1942, Coppola underlines how much The Godfather's potentially alluring myth of family unity begat horrific violence; the film becomes both a critique of responses to the first film that may have glorified its family-oriented violence and a more explicit and mournful allegory of American corporate violence and corruption across the 20th century. These aspects, together with the unique cross-cut narrative, give the movie a richer dimension and a wider scope than the first one's family drama, and it was hailed by most observers as the rare sequel that equaled, or even surpassed, the original. A box-office hit, it was nominated for ten Oscars and won six, including Best Picture, the Director prize denied Coppola in 1972, Supporting Actor for De Niro, Art Direction, and Score. Years of sequel plans finally produced The Godfather Part III in 1990; and parts I and II were later cut together in chronological order for TV as The Godfather Saga, eliminating this film's cross-cut structure. Often equated with Citizen Kane (1941), The Godfather Part II remains one of the most artistically challenging popular films ever made.