The Favorites - The Godfather Part II (#9)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Godfather Part II (1974/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola) appeared at #9 on my original list.

What it is • Several years have passed since the events of The Godfather (depending on your source, as few as three or as many as seven). Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has moved the family business out west, and the effect is slightly chilling. In the original film, the Mafia already operated on a grandiose political level detached from its reputation for sleazy street crime. Now Michael is fully enmeshed with the political and corporate world of postwar America, and his geographical relocation exacerbates his distance from the old world (as does his visit to Cuba, sitting side by side with the heads of "legitimate" financial powerhouses, further blurring the lines between the Mafia and Big Business). Yet even as we watch the mobsters advance into modernity, we leap back in time to explore their roots: the film actually begins in Sicily, with a young Vito Corleone (Oreste Baldini). As in late fifties America, turn-of-the-century Sicily makes no real distinction between the wealth and power of criminals and politicians: when local kingpin Don Francesco (Giuseppe Sillato) condemns Vito to death for his father's betrayal, there is no greater authority to condemn him, and Vito must flee for his life. In New York of a hundred years ago (where the boy grows up to be portrayed by Robert De Niro), crime is the only available path for the underdog immigrant, the only way he knows he can protect his family. The irony, of course, is that in the present day Michael follows the path his father set forth and it leads not to the preservation, but to the destruction, of his family. Michael's wife Kay (Diane Keaton) is estranged, his son Anthony (James Gounaris) is threatened, and his brother Fredo (John Cazale)...well, poor Fredo. The Godfather Part II portrays the chilling logic of power, its ability to destroy even that which it has been unleashed to protect. If The Godfather suggests a graceful acceptance of this reasoning, Part II bravely follows it through to its bitter end. There aren't many sequels among my Favorites - even when obvious opportunities present themselves (like one of the later Star Wars films) I have a tendency to favor the original over the works following in its footsteps. Unsurprisingly, The Godfather Part II is the film to buck this trend. It's the only sequel to win Best Picture or to place on many Greatest-of-All-Time lists, and amazingly it does so not as an improvement on a first chapter that didn't really have its act together but rather as the extension of one of the most popular, beloved, and acclaimed classics of all time. On my own list, The Godfather appeared in the top twenty, yet here Part II is even higher. And I'm certainly not alone in that preference, no matter how slight, over its iconic predecessor.

Why I like it •

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

There is a case to be made that the first two Godfather films form the Great American Movie of the second half of the twentieth century. Just as Citizen Kane sums up a half-century of cinema in its flurry of techniques and time-spanning story, so The Godfather and The Godfather Part II have one foot in the world of classical cinema, with their mixture of formal restraint and epic grandeur, and one foot in the cinema of New Hollywood, with their gritty textures, dark themes, and graphic content. Certainly there are few cinematic masterpieces that retain such an immediate foothold in contemporary public consciousness (at least among men): ask someone whose other favorite films are recent blockbusters or lowbrow comedies what they think of The Godfather, and you're likely to get a positive response. The movie resonates across generations and interest levels in cinema history, acclaimed among those who revere classic Hollywood or foreign films, and popular with the crowd that likes the latest action and horror films. Those looking for entertainment made the first film the biggest box office hit of all time, those seeking middlebrow acceptance and respectability voted it Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and those celebrating cinema purely as art routinely place it atop polls and lists of the greatest movies of all time.

In some ways, mixing the two films in one piece is deceptive. While they are often taken together - the Sight & Sound poll combines them and Francis Ford Coppola once re-edited a chronological version stretching from 1901 to 1960 for television - these movies are actually quite different in their approach and style. The Godfather is the movie of a nervous young filmmaker, supremely talented yet under pressure from a studio and crew that didn't quite trust him. It is an adaptation of an entertaining but lurid pulp bestseller, and the public anticipated it the way they had anticipated Gone with the Wind and Love Story, or (later on) The Exorcist and Jaws. The Godfather Part II, on the other hand, feels the film of a self-assured master, even though Coppola is just two years older - a hitmaker, he now commands big-budget resources with confidence and the beginnings of a hubris which would raise him up and eventually bring him down. Part II sheds all associations with its pulp roots, aspiring more towards the complexity and grandeur of a European art film, bleak American drama, or even Greek tragedy than the effectiveness of a tightly-wound thriller (although, of course, it achieves both, as so many great movies do). Yet it makes sense to consider the two films together, different yet inextricably bound. Above all, they tell one story - the slow, desperate, barely poker-faced moral fall of a young American, son of Sicily yet a long way from home.

Pray For Us Sinners 1974 - 1976 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 22

Twenty-second chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films

(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 22: Pray For Us Sinners"

Pray For Us Sinners

The social spillover from the sixties continued into the mid-seventies. Whereas initially the frustration and alienation had been countered by a sense of excitement and community, by this time it just felt like rot. Watergate exemplified the United States' disillusionment with itself and its institutions, yet perhaps the country's misfortune was the cinema's good fortune. After focusing on Europe and Asia for several entries, today we return to America; for the first time in ten chapters, Hollywood films dominate the selections. But what a difference! If in 1959 the clips seemed to be quietly escalating their style and tiptoeing toward a more adult content, fifteen years later the American cinema has passed completely into a dark, radical maturity (fair warning: much of today's chapter is not safe for work).

(continued below, along with NSFW & spoiler warnings)

The Corruption of Michael Corleone

The story of Michael Corleone, from childhood to his ascension as "Godfather"
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