[COLUMN] The Godfather, Part II Was the Original 'Screw You' Sequel | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Godfather, Part II. But, if you haven’t seen The Godfather, Part II, you should probably pause and watch The Godfather, Part II. Not because this piece contains spoilers, but because it’s one of the best movies ever made.

The Godfather, Part II was released 50 years ago this weekend. It remains one of the best sequels ever made, in large part because Francis Ford Coppola used the film to interrogate the legacy and the reception of its universally beloved predecessor. It’s a study of the decline and decay of the family that Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has tasked himself with overseeing. To a certain extent, The Godfather, Part II was one of the early “screw you” sequels.

The Godfather was a genuine cultural phenomenon. It earned rave reviews, went on to be the highest-grossing movie of all-time until the release of Jaws and won three Oscars including Best Picture. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby lauded it as “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.” It is still widely regarded as one of the best movies ever made. It was also embraced by the mobsters it depicted.

“Many wiseguys rejoiced in viewing the original film multiple times,” wrote Selwyn Raab. “Federal and local investigators on surveillance duty saw and heard made men and wannabes imitating the mannerisms and language of the screen gangsters,” he recorded. “They endlessly played the movie’s captivating musical score, as if it were their private national anthem, at parties and weddings. The film validated their lifestyles and decisions to join the mob and accept its credo.”

This is one of the challenges of making populist mainstream art, the fear that a work will be misinterpreted and misunderstood. When Coppola agreed to produce a sequel, he was candid that he wasn’t doing it to appease fans or to cash in. “I really had made so much money on The Godfather, it was irrelevant for me to do a film for any other reason than because I wanted to do it,” Coppola told Film Comment in the lead-up to the film’s release.

Instead, Coppola seems to have been motivated by a desire to wrest control of his story back from those who misinterpreted it. In his review of the sequel, Canby noted that he had “been told that one of Coppola's intentions in Part II was to de‐romanticize The Godfather.” This was a very interesting reason to make a follow-up to a beloved classic, particularly at a point in time when studio sequels with numbers in their titles were still relatively rare.

Coppola was not subtle. “This time I really set out to destroy the family,” he told The New York Times in the lead-up to the film’s release. “Yet I wanted to destroy it in the way that I think is most profound - from the inside. And I wanted to punish Michael, but not in the obvious ways. At the end he's prematurely old, almost syphilitic, like Dorian Gray. I don't think anyone in the theater can envy him.” It does feel like Coppola is setting out to punish the audience who misread The Godfather.

Although set in the world of organized crime, The Godfather is not really about the mob. Instead, it is an allegory for contemporary America, capturing the soul of a nation eroding from the inside out. The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II are foundational texts of the Nixon era. Indeed, while the congressional hearings depicted in The Godfather, Part II really happened, any contemporary audience would understand those sequences in the context of the Watergate scandal.

In The Godfather, Part II, veteran soldier Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) likens the Corleone family to the Roman Empire, and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) suggests that Pentangeli should end his life like a disgraced servant of the emperor. It’s a reflection of the American imperial anxieties bubbling through the culture at that moment – Caligula would be released just a few years later – which Coppola would carry over into his next film: Apocalypse Now.

The Godfather, Part II is in many ways about the end of the American Dream. The story of the Corleone family is the story of America. Patriarch Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro, Marlon Brando) travelled from Sicily to New York. In The Godfather, Michael expanded the family’s operations to Las Vegas. Vito started an olive oil business, but – by The Godfather, Part II – Michael has invested in IBM and IT&T. Mobster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) boasts, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”

In The Godfather, Vito made it clear that his dream was always that Michael would assimilate. This is obvious even by the name, which is much more Anglophonic than Vito’s other children: Santino (James Caan), Frederico (John Cazale) or Constanzia (Talia Shire). In their final conversation, Vito admits to his son, “I thought that, when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings: Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, or something.”

By the start of The Godfather, Part II, it is clear that Michael has reached the limits of what America can offer him. This is rendered literally. The film opens and closes with Michael on the family’s estate on the shore of Lake Tahoe, which separates Nevada from California. There is a very literal limit to how far west Michael can take the Corleones, how American this immigrant family can ever be. Michael does not even get to see the Pacific Ocean, the logical boundary on Manifest Destiny, but instead remains in some strange purgatorial space.

Michael is too American to be accepted by old-school gangster Pentangeli, who complains that the band playing at Michael’s son’s (James Gounaris) communion don’t know any Italian songs. However, he’s too Italian to be accepted by Senator Pat Geary (G. D. Spradlin), who complains, “I don't like your kind of people. I don't like to see you come out to this clean country in your oily hair -- dressed up in those silk suits - and try to pass yourselves off as decent Americans.” Michael is neither Italian nor American. He belongs nowhere.

Both The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II were shot by cinematographer Gordon Willis. While both films reflect Willis’ shadowy style, there is a marked tonal difference between the two films. The Godfather is an autumnal film, often tinted in shades of rich golds and deep browns, like some memory of a bygone age. In contrast, The Godfather, Part II is much more of a winter film. It’s colder, starker, greyer and bluer. Fittingly, the movie climaxes with snow falling on Lake Tahoe.

Coppola revisits familiar beats from The Godfather, but with a much more cynical take on the material. Business is bloodier. In The Godfather, Vito manipulates a studio head (John Marley) by leaving a horse’s head in the man’s bed. In The Godfather, Part II, Michael manipulates Geary by having him wake up in a brothel next to a dead sex worker, so Hagen can blackmail him. A botched hit on Pentangeli recalls the murder of Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana), although this time, it goes awry. Things get messy.

There is an uncanny and unsettling vibe to The Godfather, Part II. Things happen that don’t have simple explanations. Why did one of the assassins (Danny Aiello) attacking Pentangeli say, “Michael Corleone says hello?” It wasn’t to turn Pentangeli against Michael, as they planned to kill Pentangeli. Similarly, when two would-be assassins turn up dead on the Corleone family compound, it’s never revealed who killed them. Fredo is revealed to be the inside man, but he’s not a cold-blooded killer.

There are ways of making sense of these smaller details. Aiello improvised the line on the day, and Coppola liked it. Fans theorize that there was a second traitor within the Corleone household alongside Fredo, Michael’s right-hand man Rocco Lampone (Tom Risqui). This would explain why Michael instructs Lampone to sacrifice his life at the end of The Godfather, Part II to assassinate Hymen Roth. In this fan interpretation of the movie, this mission is a gesture of atonement, similar to Pentangeli’s suicide.

However, the details don’t matter. Instead, The Godfather, Part II taps into the paranoia and uncertainty of the era. It is a companion piece to Coppola’s The Conversation, another epoch-defining classic. The point is the uncertainty and the ambiguity, the lack of clarity or explanation. Nobody can be trusted. The truth can never be fully known. There is only doubt. In this line of work, there is no loyalty or brotherhood. Just as Michael exists in some strange ambiguous state, neither Italian nor American, no human being can truly know another.

The Godfather, Part II makes this subtext quite apparent. When Michael begins plotting to assassinate Roth, his inner circle objects. “It’d be like trying to kill the President,” Hagan protests. “There's no way we can get to him.” Michael replies, “Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anybody.” It’s a very loaded line in a film released just over a decade after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Indeed, the Kennedys cast a long shadow over the Godfather films.

This ambiguity creeps into the film’s relationship with reality. If The Godfather was a fairytale, The Godfather, Part II is something much more postmodern. While The Godfather fictionalized Frank Sinatra as Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino), The Godfather, Part II more explicitly blends history with fiction. Characters namedrop Eisenhower and Kefauver. Michael is present at “the Triumph of the Revolution” in Cuba and testifies at “the Valachi Hearings.”

There’s an emptiness and a hollowness to The Godfather, Part II. Michael is haunted by the ghost of Vito Corleone. Brando opted not to return for the sequel, meaning he’s absent for the film’s closing flashback sequence. Michael’s management of the Corleone is juxtaposed with his father’s early years building the empire. At each point, Vito’s warmth and humanity are contrasted with Michael’s ruthlessness.

Indeed, Hyman Roth is transparently a stand-in for Vito, an old business partner confronting his mortality. Even the casting is something of a wry joke. Strasberg was one of the leading proponents of “the method”, and so was linked with Brando in the public eye, even though Brando himself would later insist that “Strasberg never taught [him] acting.” As such, the conflict between Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth is in some way Michael wrestling with the ghost of his absent father.

This bleakness is most obvious at the film’s climax. The Godfather famously builds to a montage in which Michael synchronizes a series of hits that wipe out the enemies surrounding his family. Through his skill and his organization, Michael protects the people that he loves. However, when The Godfather, Part II builds to a similar sequence, there is no sense that Michael is acting in self-preservation or self-defense. He isn’t striking against some existential threat.

“I mean you've won,” Hagan demands. “Do you have to wipe everyone out?” Michael proceeds to assassinate Roth, who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and so only has a few months to live anyway, order the execution of his sweet idiot brother Fredo, who is no longer a threat to anybody, and arrange the suicide of Pentangeli, who is already locked away in federal custody. It is hard to feel any sense of triumph. It’s just empty, meaningless violence.

Michael becomes a truly pathetic, empty creature. At one moment, he asks his mother (Morgana King), “What did papa think, deep in his heart? He was being strong, strong for his family. But by being strong for his family, could he lose it?” Michael’s attempts to hold his family together through violence only drive it apart. He murders his brother Fredo. He blackmails his surrogate brother Hagan into compliance. He drives his wife Kay (Diane Keaton) to have a secret abortion.

It is possible to read the original Godfather as an inherently reactionary text. Released at a moment when feminism and the civil rights movements threatened to change the social order, the film presented a fantasy of an era when white men sat unchallenged at the top of the social hierarchy. Vito Corleone was a romantic depiction of a wise patriarch, the strong and stern authority who could hold the world together as it threatened to slip into chaos. In contrast, Michael’s attempts to hold on to patriarchal authority as the world shifts around him ultimately suffocate the family and kill the very thing that he claims to be trying to protect.

Half a century after its release, The Godfather, Part II remains among the very best sequels ever made, in large part because it’s a sequel willing to grapple with the weight and the context of the original film. The Godfather, Part II engages with the audience who loved the first film, pushing the themes of that original work in challenging and confrontational directions. There is no nobility here. Maybe there never was.