It’s been a long time—easily 50 years, in fact—since I saw
the second Godfather film. I know that, snob that I was, I didn’t see
the first Godfather when it debuted, because I was too arty back then to
be interested in crime dramas. It wasn’t until a friend with impeccable
intellectual credentials told me that The Godfather was essential
Americana that I discovered for myself the brilliant picture that Francis Ford
Coppola had given us of the underside of the American dream. As it turned out, Godfather
II would be a feather in the cap of my former boss, Roger Corman. It won
six Oscars, including several for Corman alumni. Francis Ford Coppola , who got
his start fresh out of film school as Roger’s assistant, took home statuettes
for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Robert De
Niro (who’d been featured in Corman’s Bloody Mama) was honored with the
Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the youthful Vito Corleone. Moreover,
Corman graduate Talia Shire became a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her
role as the godfather’s sister.
I returned to The Godfather Part II in part to savor
the work of the late Robert Duvall, who plays it close to the vest as Tom
Hagen, the godfather’s indefatigable fixer and adopted son. But I was also
curious to see how a film could be both sequel and prequel to what had gone
before. Honestly, I don’t think Godfather II (the first sequel ever to
win a Best Picture Oscar) is quite as strong as its predecessor; by cutting
between two stories set in two very different eras Coppola sometimes weakens
the film’s throughline, and the ultimate conclusion doesn’t pack the wallop of
the earlier film. Still, there’s much to admire. I was strongly impressed by De
Niro’s work in the Sicily scenes, and the Lower East Side sections of the film
allowed us to see his evolution from eager immigrant to
godfather-in-the-making. And Coppola clearly had a marvelous time filming
massive period crowd scenes, letting us in on the local color of New York’s
Little Italy in all its tawdry splendor.
By contrast, there’s the rustic but tony compound of Michael
Corleone and family at Nevada’s Lake Tahoe, where they hole up while he’s busy
deal-making with Las Vegas honchos. And we also get glimpses of both Miami and
pre-Castro Havana. It is striking watching Al Pacino’s Michael becoming, in
this film, more and more his father’s imperious son, the master of all he
surveys. Pacino never won an Oscar for playing Michael in three Godfather films
Though he earned Oscar nominations for the first two, it took him until 1993
(and the semi-interesting Scent of a Woman) to take home the golden
statuette. But when I checked out the dates, I was struck by the fact that less
than a year after Godfather II hit the screen, Pacino gave another
masterful Oscar-worthy performance in a favorite film of mine, Dog Day
Afternoon. That heist film, based on a true story, had Pacino as Sonny, a
hapless young man determined to knock over a Brooklyn bank to finance his
lover’s sex-change operation. If you see Dog Day Afternoon not long
after Godfather II, I suspect you’ll be surprised that Pacino suddenly
seems much younger, much shorter, and much more inept than in the previous
film. That, of course, is what acting is all about.
I should also mention that both Godfather II and Dog
Day Afternoon also feature the gifted John Cazale, an ominous-lookng
character actor who died much too young.
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