The Final Act of a Family Epic

THE GODFATHER, PART II

Directed by FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA Screenplay by FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA and MARIO PUZO

It is possible to pinpoint precisely when a sense of well-being begins to take over in The Godfather, Part II--a sense that this is "a film of respect" rather than a cynical attempt to cash in on The Godfather. This moment occurs at the end of the establishing sequence that deliberately challenges comparison to the great wedding scene that opened the earlier film. The occasion for a party this time is the First Communion of Michael Corleone's son. The setting is Lake Tahoe, where Michael, as the new head of the "family," has moved his home office in order to run his casino operations in Nevada. An emptily handsome U.S. Senator commands attention in order to acknowledge receipt of Michael's handsomely empty contribution to the state university's scholarship fund. Inevitably, the lawmaker finds it impossible to throw his Western accent around a proper pronunciation of the new philanthropist's name. Equally inevitably, a boy choir has been recruited to sing a song dedicated to Michael Corleone.

Their choice? What else but Mister Wonderful?

What happens at this point is that delicious sensation of letting-go familiar to readers of huge 19th century novels, but much less readily available to a moviegoer today. A skilled popular artist --the kind of man who can blend subtly observed details with a gift for socko showmanship--takes over to lead a guided tour of an exotic yet humanly recognizable and completely realized world. That's really entertainment.

Austere Aspirations. It should be understood that the mood of Godfather II is quite different from that of its predecessor. This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations--not fully realized--to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. The modern sections show what Michael (Al Pacino), as heir to his father's empire, must surrender in order to maintain his power and his ideal of a Mafia-style "family." The first film made clear that part of Michael knows better, but he cannot really change the stern conditioning of his upbringing.

The basic, pitiless irony is that what he must do is sacrifice the happiness, often the lives, of his family (his wife, his elder brother, old associates). The end finds him stripped of everything he once valued except the one thing he found essential--unquestioned, unquestionable authority. It seems a far more terrible punishment than the bloody retributions the old movie code used to insist on applying to Scarface, Little Caesar and their ilk.

The new movie also has a stronger moral dimension than Godfather I, which ended with the Corleones' wiping out their rivals from less nice families.

Here there is no doubt that they are as vicious, as driven as their enemies.

There are no lovably honorable hoods wielding their gats for Michael, no warm family reunions or mutual aid meetings. His major enemy is a Meyer Lansky-modeled criminal mastermind, shrewdly played by Actors Studio Director Lee Strasberg (see box). As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him. Those eyes somehow manage to dominate a film that is also rich in action. Not once does Pacino overtly ask for the audience's sympathy, but through a disciplined, suggestive performance he dominates the film.

Criminal Life. This is particularly remarkable because he does not even appear in long stretches. As a way of offering historical perspective on the Mafia (and of warming up his movie), Coppola contrasts Michael's fight for continued control over his inheritance by crosscutting to the story of his father's arrival in this country from Sicily and his first successes in the criminal life. Robert De Niro is excellent as the young Don; Coppola's reconstruction of life in Little Italy around the year 1918 is obviously a work of love as well as research. Somehow, however, it is not as effective as the later story. From the beginning of the gangster genre in movies, we have been offered the same explanation for what makes a man go wrong: immigrants were kept out of the mainstream of American life and had to find success outside the law. No one has handled this theme more expertly than Coppola, but still it is very familiar.

The validity of the historical flashbacks derives largely from what they say, by inference, about Michael. The old man, encountering in New York's Little Italy the very same pattern of extortion and vendetta that he escaped in Sicily, began by doing his own killing and taking his own risks. He did so not on the basis of cold calculation but hot-blooded need. One does not exactly admire him, but one at least finds him explicable, entirely human. Michael is not.

The notion that he is tragically flawed --which the warmly colored historical sections are designed in part to reinforce through contrast--is essential to understanding him. In the context of what is, after all, a gangster picture, that is a tall and slightly pretentious order.

Yet despite this overreach, a rather messy structure, and great length (3 hr.

20 min.), The Godfather, Part II is a worthy successor to its predecessor. Francis Coppola has made a richly detailed, intelligent film that uses overorganized crime as a metaphor to comment on the coldness and corruption of an overorganized modern world. -Richard Schickel

It was madness from the first. It took months to convince Francis Coppola to do another Godfather at all. He demanded that it be not a sequel but an extension of the original, which Coppola would embellish considerably. Now he dreams of some day cutting both features together into a single huge family epic. He also wanted to have Marlon Brando in just one scene of Part II. Brando refused, not because of the film, but because he was furious at Paramount Executive Frank Yablans, who was furious at him for rejecting the Oscar.

Bad Weather. There were other difficulties. The character of Clemenza, the family loyalist who taught Michael how to shoot and make a good tomato sauce with meatballs in Part I, was written out. Reason: Richard Castellano, who played him, was making exorbitant demands, including a huge salary and the right to rewrite his dialogue. Then the script was redone once again, three days before the scheduled start, after conferences between Coppola and Pacino about adding "shadows" to Michael's character.

When filming actually began, the company moved from Lake Tahoe to Santo Domingo, which was to serve as prerevolutionary Cuba. They were rained out for days on end, although Charles Bluhdorn, chairman of the board of Gulf & Western, Paramount's parent company, comforted Coppola when he complained about the weather. Gulf & Western has holdings in Santo

Domingo, and Bluhdorn reassured Coppola that "the rain is good for my sugar cane." It was not so beneficial for Pacino, who caught pneumonia, forcing a month's delay. Principal photography was finally completed in nine months, but the problems had just started. Editing, always a trial, threatened to go out of control. With whole plots altered or dropped, there was substantial doubt that the film could meet its opening dates at the theaters.

At a sneak preview in San Diego on Nov. 27, just two weeks before the world premiere, Coppola, his wife Eleanor, John Cazale (who is superb as the hapless Fredo), a crew of film editors and a contingent of buddies watched a packed house respond enthusiastically. But the assembled loyalists all knew the film was seriously flawed; the last hour seemed jumbled, confused, cold. All during the showing Coppola muttered notes to himself into a pocket tape recorder. Some scenes needed lengthening, others were dropped. The idea of an intermission was scrapped.

All this was determined at a post-preview meeting Coppola held with his editors and his friends at a restaurant called, with looming irony, The Butcher Shop. "Would you believe this?" Coppola laughed at one point. "It's just like college, doing a play: Johnny Cazale acts in it, Elly does the sets. And Bob," he added, turning to Paramount Executive Robert Evans, "Bob is the rich kid whose father will print up the programs."

At 3 a.m. Coppola and his party left in a private plane for San Francisco, where the final cutting was to be done.

Several weeks' work was compressed into a few days. Coppola now confesses himself "bored to death with gangsters," but adds that "right under the surface of this film is a loose metaphor for America itself. Like Michael, we all have blood on our hands." The director also stoutly maintains that Godfather II marks his last game of sudden death.

"Never, never, never again will I work under such chaotic conditions," Coppola, told TIME'S Leo Janos. "If I had three more months on this one, I'd have a great film."

Benign Tycoon. He should be able to dictate his terms for some time to come. His 6% of the grosses from Godfather I (which are well over $200,000,000), as well as his producer's participation in the bounties of American Graffiti and assorted other investments, has allowed Coppola to become something of a benign tycoon, fleshing out the extravagant fantasies of a middle-class New York childhood. He has bought a San Francisco magazine called City, invested heavily in real estate, including an eight-story San Francisco office building and, round the corner, an exquisite little theater to be used for movies and a small repertory group, which will do plays and act out Coppola's future scripts as he writes them.

Coppola has also bought into a New York-based film distribution outfit called Cinema 5. A group of New York investors has approached him about taking over one of Hollywood's ailing film companies--a proposition that Coppola admits is "intriguing." It would demand that he leave the snug splendor of the large San Francisco house he shares with Elly and his three kids. It would also mean sacrificing two projects he wants yet to do. One is a film about twins who are physically identical but polar opposites psychologically. The other is a biography of the thwarted automobile inventor Preston Tucker, whom Coppola wants Marlon Brando to play.

One friend refers to Coppola teasingly as "the sultan of San Francisco."

The logo of the Coppola Company, which decorates everything from stationery to the tail of the Lear Jet he is in the process of getting, is a little dog wearing an Alpine hat, standing next to a tiny red car and holding a camera. It is a reproduction of the bottom of Coppola's childhood dinner dish. "I would eat," says the director, "to see the doggie with the camera. But now the meaning of that picture for me, and for my company, is that we should always operate with fantasy and fun in mind."

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