The Godfather Part II: Two Films Cut Into Each Oth
The Godfather Part II (1974)
The first sequel to win Best Picture runs a rise and a ruin side by side, seventy years apart.
Runtime
202 minutes
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Budget
$13 million
Box office
$48 million worldwide
Cinematography
Gordon Willis
Parallel Construction
Coppola's structure is the whole achievement: the young Vito's arrival in New York and rise in Little Italy cut against Michael's consolidation and collapse in Nevada and Havana, each strand commenting on the other without a line of dialogue connecting them. The father builds something out of a neighbourhood and the son inherits it and cannot keep a brother. Where the first film was warm and crowded, this one is cold and depopulated, staged in enormous rooms where Michael sits alone at the far end. De Niro plays Vito in Sicilian for most of his screen time and never shares a frame with Brando, and Fredo's arc turns the family loyalty of the first film into the thing that has to be destroyed.
Watching The Godfather Part II
Wonder
/
Chapter
"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
"Michael Corleone · The Godfather Part II · 1974
It is the first sequel to win Best Picture, and the only case where both a film and its sequel have won, which remains true fifty years later.
De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for a performance delivered almost entirely in Sicilian, and Brando won for the same role two years earlier, the only time one character has produced two acting Oscars.
Coppola wanted to call it a coda rather than a sequel and refused the simple commercial option of more of the same. What he delivered instead established the idea that a follow up could reinterpret the original: after this, the first film's warmth reads as an illusion the family sold itself. Everything from Aliens to The Empire Strikes Back to Before Sunset operates in the space this opened, though almost nothing else has used parallel timelines this severely.