The Godfather Part II

In the first Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) never believed he could be sucked into his father's way of doing things. And in The Godfather Part II (1974), he can't accept that he has. His corruption happens quickly but subtly. Under the guise of vengeance, of protecting family honor, Michael becomes a tragic fallen hero. Director Francis Ford Coppola and author Mario Puzo have created a sequel that fills in a lot of detail for us, simultaneously depicting Michael's rise as the new Don Corleone and the life of young Vito (played in flashback by Robert De Niro) as he leaves Sicily for America and gradually begins a life of crime.

There are moments of greatness in The Godfather Part II, and moments of great drama. Some of the images stay with you, and considering how much it attempts, much of this movie is a smashing success. The actors are exceedingly good: Pacino shines darkly. You can see the transformation he's undergone in his face, which was once innocent. Now it has a yellow patina of greed and an addiction to power. Diane Keaton gets some stronger material in this sequel as well. She's the good wife who's stuck by Michael for longer than she should have, who's looked the other way too many times now. De Niro is a solid Vito (it's no small feat filling the shoes of Marlon Brando), Talia Shire adds a new level of depth to Connie, Michael's sister, who was always getting roughed up by her sleazy husband Carlo in the first one. In Part II she's given herself over to money and things, at the expense of her family. But then she experiences something of a reversal of character, and she rises up to be the family's new matriarch. It's fascinating to watch all these performances and the depths to which the actors take them.

But it's lacking something. Many critics have proclaimed this an even better film than its predecessor. They praise it for deepening the material, for elevating it to a mythological status. It's just that in the process of demonstrating how far Michael has fallen, the movie too seems to lose its soul. Despite the fact that he had already been corrupted by the end of the first Godfather, that film left you with a sense of ambiguity. That perhaps things were going to be different. After all, Michael's involvement in murder had been about "vengeance" and "justice." But in the sequel, we start to see the consequences of that. It's beautiful and compelling yet bleak and depressing. And the powerful scenes are linked by many scenes that lumber along. (It's three hours and twenty minutes long, where the first was under three, a significant difference.) The tacked-on ending, a flashback of the days before WW2, when all the children were alive, but grown, feels too TV-movie-ish, like Coppola was already showing signs of the bad judgment that would taint his directing ever after. (It is nice to see James Caan reprising his role as Sonny, if ever so briefly. His absence is really felt--Sonny was such a presence, such an iconic character, and Caan turned him into a hot-headed bad boy who you liked because of his brashness and his macho love for his family.)

Part II deserves credit for what it does and what it is: a very good movie, and a compelling study of the soul-destroying power of an America that has built-in methods of abiding criminal activity. It also gets at the things which knit this family together, and the myriad forces which tear it apart. With Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Michael Gazzo, G.D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Bruno Kirby, Morgana King, and Gianni Russo.

The Godfather

Even those who haven't seen The Godfather (1972) are aware of its status as one of the all-time great motion pictures of our time. Some critics refer to it as the Gone With the Wind of the 1970s. A good many people consider it the greatest film of all time, or at the very least, somewhere in the top five. It may be worthwhile to venture back into film history for a few moments, to help those movie-goers who aren't familiar with the movie and its significance, understand why there's still so much hoopla.

First off, movies about organized crime are about as old as the medium itself. Scarface (1932) is one noteworthy example from among the early talkies. Many of these old-school crime flicks concerned themselves with Prohibition, and the licentious pleasures associated with that era of government-mandated morality. These movies are one of the reasons film has always been a sort of prodigal medium: an art form for the common people, the mass audience, concerned with iniquities and people of dubious character. That's the appeal of movies, ultimately. They're not good for us. (The Novel, when it was in vogue, was also considered suspect, denounced as the art of the "common," and what's more, as a medium full of subversive potential. As they say, the movies are the 20th century's answer to the Novel. Both have received similar treatment. But we've become post-literate, and one wonders if the same will happen to movies in the 21st century, ushering in a post-cinematic public.)

The appeal of such entertaining movies was threatened with the production codes starting in the mid-30s, which set strict rules about what films could depict in terms of sex and violence, etc. The major studios mostly churned out sanitized material that was non-threatening and "safe" and "clean." Writers and directors who wanted to address adult subject matter had to be coy about it, or risk being censored by the studio heads. Film adaptations of novels and plays had to tone down racy material. For example, when Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was made into an MGM movie, the main character's homosexuality was removed from the story. Those familiar with the source material of such expurgated movie adaptations could read between the lines, sure, but it would seem that studios exercised a great deal of confidence in the ignorance of the movie-going public at large. Moreover, they perpetuated such ignorance by depicting life in a blissful state. It's like the men in The Stepford Wives (1975) who want to pretend their wives haven't been turned into automatons. Sure, there have always been exceptions to this rule, but mostly Hollywood was about keeping things superficial and fake.

Then came the 1960s. Films like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) in France and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in America began to introduce a new kind of realism to the movie-going public, a violent realism that re-examined the values of movies and ignited a new passion for something different, something urgently real.

Along the heals of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch (1969) and other such movies came The Godfather. What people tend to see in The Godfather is a sort of tragic humanization of these old-time gangsters, once cartoonish, expendable, forgotten the moment the picture was finished. In this new vision of the American organized crime world, these characters are no longer divorced from their human context. They are fathers and sons and brothers and husbands, and they bleed real blood. They are corrupt, but also redeemable. They have scruples, as antithetical as that may sound, and their own moral code, which too seems incredulous, and yet they are cold-blooded killers. Ambiguity is always more interesting than morality depicted in black-and-white.

But enough about film context. You can read all that elsewhere, and it doesn't mean you have to like The Godfather a bit. The movie speaks for itself. (The context may deepen one's understanding, but it does not define it.) Marlon Brando plays the head of the Corleone family, based in New York (it starts in 1945, just after the war has ended), who's competing with several other crime families. A chain of events, beginning with Don Corleone's rejection of a narcotics operation in conjunction with the other families, sets up his youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino) to take over the family business, neither a vocation nor a lifestyle he wanted. He's the war hero, the "pure" son, untainted by the blood of organized crime. (They were going to try and land him a political career so he could be "untainted" there too.) It's inevitable of course that Michael is sucked into the world he thought he was too principled to embrace.

Director Francis Ford Coppola turns this gangster picture into a tragic masterpiece. He is helped by Mario Puzo, on whose novel this was based, and with whom he wrote the screenplay. The iconic music is by Nino Rota. The supporting cast includes James Caan as Sonny, Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, Richard Castellano as Clemenza, Diane Keaton as Kay, Michael's wife, Talia Shire as Connie, John Cazale as Fredo. Also starring Abe Vigoda, Al Littieri, Gianni Russo, Sterling Hayden, Lenny Montana, Richard Conte, Al Martino, John Marley, Alex Rocco, and Morgana King. Followed by two sequels. (The only criticism I can give of The Godfather is that it spawned a lot of inferior imitations that we have had to sit through for the last 40 years.)

Dog Day Afternoon

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is a bank robbery movie that's so intense you start to feel stressed out for the hostages, as though you were a hostage too. Al Pacino, post-Godfather I and II, gives a smashing performance as Sonny, the Brooklyn bank robber who's trying to get enough money so his lover, Leon (Chris Sarandon), can get a sex-change operation. The question that hangs over the proceedings, as Sonny's robbery is stalled by the arrival of seemingly every cop and FBI officer in New York, is just how crazy is Sonny? And, how crazy is his partner, Sal (John Cazale), who seems like a grenade, waiting to explode.

What's so funny about this movie is how badly Sonny and Sal bungle their robbery, which, as the movie poster reads, should have lasted for a few minutes, but turned into a 12-hour ordeal, full of bullshit negotiations. Sonny's gullible though, and under too much pressure to think clearly (he has a considerably complicated home life, between his wife and kids, his demanding mother, and his obsession for Leon, who's trying to get away from him, to the point of several failed suicide attempts and subsequent hospitalization). And probably Leon is unknowingly hungry for the attention he receives throughout the day and into the night. And no bank robber ever had friendlier, more accommodating hostages. They like him, strange as that sounds, and they're not really that scared of him. They even criticize his lack of organization skills in carrying off the robbery. But the humor is mixed with a real sense of tense fear, and the looming dread of the inevitable showdown between the robbers and the police. 

Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson have fun exploring what kind of a circus a drawn-out bank robbery turns into when the media shows up, spectators flock to the scene, and the criminal becomes a sort of revolutionary, a hero standing up against the establishment. No one really even cares what, if anything, Sonny represents, other than rebellion. Even the hostages, for the most part, seem keen to like him, even if it's because they're under such extraordinary pressure. They seem to be having a good time, as though Sonny had involved them in a TV drama, not an actual robbery.

With Charles Durning as a detective, James Broderick as an FBI agent, Lance Henriksen as the agent driving the getaway car, and Penelope Allen, Sully Boyar, and Carol Kane among the bank employees being held hostage. It's loosely based on real events which occurred on August 22, 1972, from an article in Life Magazine written by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, called, "The Boys in the Bank."