Creatively talking, 2024 was Francis Ford Coppola’s largest 12 months in ages. Not solely did it see the discharge of his first film in 13 years, that movie was Megalopolis, a dream venture that had been kicking round in his head for upwards of 4 a long time. It made a very auspicious 12 months for the emergence of Coppola’s doubtlessly career-capping achievement, as a result of it additionally marked the fiftieth anniversary of maybe his best sustained skilled triumph: the 12 months he launched each The Dialog and The Godfather Half II inside months of one another in 1974. (For good measure, that 12 months additionally noticed the discharge of a lavish, misbegotten adaptation of The Nice Gatsby, his screenplay for which had turn out to be legendary, even when the film didn’t stay as much as it.) With the sprawling (and crazy) ambition of Megalopolis nonetheless contemporary in thoughts, the fiftieth anniversary of The Godfather Half II appears significantly notable in Coppola’s evolution as a film-maker.
The very thought of a status sequel was an odd ambition in 1974, when follow-ups had been actually widespread – particularly to hits as smashing as The Godfather – however not significantly revered. Prequels had been even much less modern. After going smaller with the masterful surveillance thriller The Dialog, Coppola went all out for his subsequent film, merging a sequel story following the additional corruption of a brand new mafia household head, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with a flashback prequel following the arrival of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, enjoying the younger model of Marlon Brando’s indelible character from the primary movie) in America and his introduction into a lifetime of crime. In doing so, he introduced collectively Pacino and De Niro, each nonetheless younger actors on the time; the truth that their characters can not meet in these kinds on display, solely co-feature in a handful of dissolves, helped burnish each actors’ legends as they labored their means throughout a surprising array of subsequent 70s movies. (They might, in fact, ultimately share the display correctly in a number of movies, two of them notable: briefly however brilliantly in 1995’s Warmth, and extra considerably in 2019’s The Irishman.)
Although The Godfather Half II has lengthy been held up as one among cinema’s really nice sequels, it’s nonetheless value asking what motivated Coppola to revisit this materials. The film is so well-regarded right this moment, and so tied up with the unique movie in our reminiscences, that it’s simple to overlook how little of it comprises really new revelations about Michael, who we already know was descending into darkness on the finish of the primary film, and even Vito, whose tender aspect was already on show in sure scenes of Brando’s efficiency. On the time, Roger Ebert famously gave the movie a mixed-positive three-star evaluate, feeling that the intercutting between Michael and Vito’s tales damage the movie’s momentum, particularly Michael’s, which he discovered extra shaded and sophisticated. That is thanks partly to a terrifically coiled efficiency from Pacino; a lot of his work within the movie consists of quietly watching and strategizing that when he has a late-movie blow-up reverse Diane Keaton as Michael’s fed-up spouse, Kay, it feels particularly chilling, determined and unhinged. De Niro gained a deserved greatest supporting actor Oscar for his work as Vito, however by design it’s Pacino who should cowl a higher emotional vary.
But these De Niro-led sequences are additionally a significant purpose the movie endures as a top-tier sequel. Although Ebert in the end makes a compelling case for the prevalence of the primary movie, and is fully appropriate that the film turns into convoluted at instances, particularly with Michael’s dealings in Cuba, I don’t agree along with his assertion that the Vito flashbacks quantity to a sentimentalization of the character because the “proper” sort of legal. The wonder and element of those scenes set in early Twentieth-century New York are wealthy, to make certain, which does lend them a sure heat, and there’s old style gangster-picture glory to the centerpiece sequence wherein Vito knocks off Don Fanucci. However the weight of the Vito materials within the film depends upon it enjoying like a mythic household historical past – the sort of humble starting that actually would have been retold in hushed tones inside the household, and may function silent justification for Michael’s actions within the film’s current: take a look at how far we’ve come; we are able to’t let this go now. The Vito sections flip The Godfather Half II right into a extra specific immigrant story, and, as such, an much more American one. It’s no shock that the about-to-open, 215-minute immigrant epic The Brutalist appears to cite and invert the well-known Statue of Liberty shot from Vito’s arrival in New York.
Maybe that innate Americanness accounts for why among the materials set in Cuba appears much less pressing, even with what might be the movie’s best-known second: Michael tightly, furiously embracing his brother Fredo (John Cazale) and saying, “I do know it was you, Fredo. You broke my coronary heart.” Although the the movie is much too wealthy in memorable characters like Fredo, and too lavishly entertaining, to be really overlong, The Godfather Half II does really feel a bit extra indulgent at 200 minutes than its predecessor does at 175 – and this was Coppola’s second image of the 12 months! It appears like a selected gesture of auteur-driven muchness in a 12 months when a number of different main film-makers occurred to place out their very own double-headers. Of the pairs of flicks put out in 1974 by Coppola, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks and Sidney Lumet, The Godfather Half II is well the largest swing, with sufficient ambition (and close to actually, sufficient story) for 2 films by itself.
In a means, then, it feels on reflection as if The Godfather Half II ushered in a special section of Coppola’s profession, being the final time the place his huge-scale dangers paid off kind of as handsomely as attainable. He spent the higher a part of the following 5 years getting Apocalypse Now made, and whereas that film has its personal legendary repute so a few years later, it took a higher monetary, psychological and bodily toll on him than his earlier epic (and, not like the Godfather sequel, didn’t win him a greatest director Oscar for his hassle). There are seeds, even, of Megalopolis in The Godfather Half II, a much more staid and accessible film by comparability, however nonetheless one whose topic and excesses each think of the Roman empire, which is particularly mentioned in each movies.
The Godfather sequel had the correct of extra – a career-building form. Pacino would enlarge after this sequel, in each movie star and performing model, and De Niro grew to become extra of a family identify off of his Oscar-winning efficiency. Some years later, the ambition and scale of peak American 70s film-making would wobble and collapse, after some big-budget epics didn’t repay and blockbuster sequels – slightly like The Godfather Half II, however possibly not so darkish, not so lengthy, not so downbeat – grew to become much more attractive. A film like Megalopolis must be placed on maintain for years, then a long time, earlier than Coppola self-financed it and launched it as, primarily, a novelty act. The Godfather Half II gave the suitable however mistaken impression that for a pugnacious American visionary, issues may simply hold getting greater.
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