The Godfather, Part II

When Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola teamed up to make a sequel to their smash hit film The Godfather, the problems were obvious—how do you follow what was already being considered one of the greatest films ever made? The Godfather, Part II, the results of their collaboration, exceeded everyone's expectation, and many even consider it superior to the original. Together, these two films are two of the major highlights of Seventies Cinema.

To make the sequel, Coppola and Puzo took a major subplot from Puzo's novel that did not make it into the first film—a story about young Vito Corleone as he emigrates from Sicily to the United States in 1901 and rises through the ranks of organized crime in New York City to become the Godfather—and intersperses it with a "modern" story about Don Michael Corleone as he moves his criminal empire to Nevada, becomes involved in affairs in Cuba at the time of the Revolution, and is betrayed by someone close to him. Part II is very much a movie about family: the story of young Vito, as he builds his family (a real one at first, and then his Mafia "family" is compared to that of Michael, whose criminal empire (inherited from Vito) reaches its zenith at the same time his real family is falling apart. Watch for the famous penultimate scene at Lake Tahoe, which is in many ways the center of the trilogy: all the events from Parts I and II have been building to and the consequences of which drive the whole of Part III. Especially compare it to the final scene, which features a cameo from someone who appeared in the first movie. What does the juxtaposition of these two scenes say about how the characters have developed throughout the two films?

The Godfather, Part II also raises some interesting questions about the difference between film and the printed page. Part I and the "young Vito" parts of Part II together comprise one of the more faithful translations of a book onto film; every significant plot point from the novel, with the exception of a longer thread involving Johnnie Fontaine and a weird subplot about Sonny's mistress Lucy Mancini and her gynecological problems, is covered in these two movies, yet the novel is considered perhaps the archetypal mass-market thriller—though a very good book, it's the kind of book for which the paperback was invented—and the movies are universally considered two of the greatest films of all time. Why is this? Note, too, that this is atypical—generally, when a movie is made from a book or vice versa, the one that comes first is better. Why is The Godfather different?

Watch for Dominic Chianese, who plays Uncle Junior on "The Sopranos." He plays Hyman Roth's associate Johnny Ola, who plays a pivotal role near the beginning of the film.