Amazon.com Essentials:
Francis Ford Coppola took some of the deep background from the
life of Mafia chief Vito Corleone--the patriarch of Mario Puzo's
bestselling novel The
Godfather--and built around it a stunning sequel to his
Oscar-winning, 1972 hit film. Robert De Niro plays Vito as a young
Sicilian immigrant in turn-of-the-century New York City's Little
Italy. Coppola weaves in and out of the story of Vito's transformation
into a powerful crime figure, contrasting that evolution against
efforts by son Michael Corleone to spread the family's business into
pre-Castro Cuba. As memorable as the first film is, The Godfather
II is an amazingly intricate, symmetrical tragedy that touches
upon several chapters of 20th-century history and makes a strong case
that our destinies are written long before we're born. This was De
Niro's first introduction to a lot of filmgoers, and he makes an
enormous impression. But even with him and a number of truly brilliant
actors (including maestro Lee Strasberg), this is ultimately Pacino's
film and a masterful performance. --Tom Keogh
Amazon.com Essentials:
Throughout his long, wandering, often distinguished career Francis Ford Coppola has made many films that are good and fine, many more that are flawed but undeniably interesting, and a handful of duds that are worth viewing if only because his personality is so flagrantly absent. Yet he is and always shall be known as the man who directed the Godfather films, a series that has dominated and defined their creator in a way perhaps no other director can understand. Coppola has never been able to leave them alone, whether returning after 15 years to make a trilogy of the diptych, or re-editing the first two films into chronological order for a separate video release as The Godfather Saga. The films are our very own Shakespearean cycle: they tell a tale of a vicious mobster and his extended personal and professional families (once the stuff of righteous moral comeuppance), and they dared to present themselves with an epic sweep and an unapologetically tragic tone. Murder, it turned out, was a serious business. The first film remains a towering achievement, brilliantly cast and conceived. The entry of Michael Corleone into the family business, the transition of power from his father, the ruthless dispatch of his enemies--all this is told with an assurance that is breathtaking to behold. And it turned out to be merely prologue; two years later The Godfather, Part II balanced Michael's ever-greater acquisition of power and influence during the fall of Cuba with the story of his father's own youthful rise from immigrant slums. The stakes were higher, the story's construction more elaborate, and the isolated despair at the end wholly earned. (Has there ever been a cinematic performance greater than Al Pacino's Michael, so smart and ambitious, marching through the years into what he knows is his own doom with eyes open and hungry?) The Godfather, Part III was mostly written off as an attempted cash-in, but it is a wholly worthy conclusion, less slow than autumnally patient and almost merciless in the way it brings Michael's past sins crashing down around him even as he tries to redeem himself. --Bruce Reid
