Creatively speaking, 2024 was Francis Ford Coppola’s biggest year in ages. Not only did it see the release of his first movie in 13 years, that film was Megalopolis, a dream project that had been kicking around in his head for upwards of four decades. It made a particularly auspicious year for the emergence of Coppola’s potentially career-capping achievement, because it also marked the 50th anniversary of perhaps his greatest sustained professional triumph: the year he released both The Conversation and The Godfather Part II within months of each other in 1974. (For good measure, that year also saw the release of a lavish, misbegotten adaptation of The Great Gatsby, his screenplay for which had become legendary, even if the movie didn’t live up to it.) With the sprawling (and loopy) ambition of Megalopolis still fresh in mind, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather Part II seems particularly notable in Coppola’s evolution as a film-maker.
The very idea of a prestige sequel was a strange ambition in 1974, when follow-ups were certainly common – especially to hits as smashing as The Godfather – but not particularly respected. Prequels were even less fashionable. After going smaller with the masterful surveillance thriller The Conversation, Coppola went all out for his next movie, merging a sequel story following the further corruption of a new mafia family head, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with a flashback prequel following the arrival of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, playing the young version of Marlon Brando’s indelible character from the first film) in America and his introduction into a life of crime. In doing so, he brought together Pacino and De Niro, both still young actors at the time; the fact that their characters cannot meet in these forms on screen, only co-feature in a handful of dissolves, helped burnish both actors’ legends as they worked their way across a stunning array of subsequent 70s films. (They would, of course, eventually share the screen properly in several films, two of them notable: briefly but brilliantly in 1995’s Heat, and more substantially in 2019’s The Irishman.)
Though The Godfather Part II has long been held up as one of cinema’s truly great sequels, it’s still worth asking what motivated Coppola to revisit this material. The movie is so well-regarded today, and so tied up with the original film in our memories, that it’s easy to miss how little of it contains truly new revelations about Michael, who we already know was descending into darkness at the end of the first movie, or even Vito, whose tender side was already on display in certain scenes of Brando’s performance. At the time, Roger Ebert famously gave the film a mixed-positive three-star review, feeling that the intercutting between Michael and Vito’s stories hurt the film’s momentum, especially Michael’s, which he found more shaded and complex. This is thanks in part to a terrifically coiled performance from Pacino; so much of his work in the film consists of quietly watching and strategizing that when he has a late-movie blow-up opposite Diane Keaton as Michael’s fed-up wife, Kay, it feels especially chilling, desperate and unhinged. De Niro won a deserved best supporting actor Oscar for his work as Vito, but by design it’s Pacino who must cover a greater emotional range.
Yet those De Niro-led sequences are also a major reason the film endures as a top-tier sequel. Though Ebert ultimately makes a compelling case for the superiority of the first film, and is entirely correct that the movie becomes convoluted at times, especially with Michael’s dealings in Cuba, I don’t agree with his assertion that the Vito flashbacks amount to a sentimentalization of the character as the “right” kind of criminal. The beauty and detail of these scenes set in early 20th-century New York are rich, to be sure, which does lend them a certain warmth, and there’s old-fashioned gangster-picture glory to the centerpiece sequence in which Vito knocks off Don Fanucci. But the weight of the Vito material in the movie depends on it playing like a mythic family history – the kind of humble beginning that certainly would have been retold in hushed tones within the family, and might serve as silent justification for Michael’s actions in the movie’s present: look at how far we’ve come; we can’t let this go now. The Vito sections turn The Godfather Part II into a more explicit immigrant story, and, as such, an even more American one. It’s no surprise that the about-to-open, 215-minute immigrant epic The Brutalist seems to quote and invert the famous Statue of Liberty shot from Vito’s arrival in New York.
Perhaps that innate Americanness accounts for why some of the material set in Cuba seems less urgent, even with what is probably the film’s best-known moment: Michael tightly, furiously embracing his brother Fredo (John Cazale) and saying, “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” Though the the film is far too rich in memorable characters like Fredo, and too lavishly entertaining, to be truly overlong, The Godfather Part II does feel a bit more indulgent at 200 minutes than its predecessor does at 175 – and this was Coppola’s second picture of the year! It feels like a particular gesture of auteur-driven muchness in a year when multiple other major film-makers happened to put out their own double-headers. Of the pairs of movies put out in 1974 by Coppola, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks and Sidney Lumet, The Godfather Part II is easily the biggest swing, with enough ambition (and near literally, enough story) for two movies on its own.
In a way, then, it feels in retrospect as if The Godfather Part II ushered in a different phase of Coppola’s career, being the last time where his huge-scale risks paid off more or less as handsomely as possible. He spent the better part of the next five years getting Apocalypse Now made, and while that movie has its own legendary reputation so many years later, it took a greater financial, mental and physical toll on him than his previous epic (and, unlike the Godfather sequel, did not win him a best director Oscar for his trouble). There are seeds, even, of Megalopolis in The Godfather Part II, a far more staid and accessible movie by comparison, but still one whose subject and excesses both call to mind the Roman empire, which is specifically discussed in both films.
The Godfather sequel had the right kind of excess – a career-building kind. Pacino would enlarge after this sequel, in both celebrity and acting style, and De Niro became more of a household name off of his Oscar-winning performance. Some years later, the ambition and scale of peak American 70s film-making would wobble and collapse, after some big-budget epics failed to pay off and blockbuster sequels – a little like The Godfather Part II, but maybe not so dark, not so long, not so downbeat – became even more enticing. A movie like Megalopolis would have to be put on hold for years, then decades, before Coppola self-financed it and released it as, essentially, a novelty act. The Godfather Part II gave the appropriate but mistaken impression that for a pugnacious American visionary, things could just keep getting bigger.
