12 Movies Challenge: 'The Godfather Part II' (1974)

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Paramount Pictures

The best way to watch “The Godfather: Part 2” isn’t 15+ years after watching “The Godfather,” but that’s exactly how I did it. I realize “The Godfather: Part 3” isn’t as high a priority for a classic film buff, but stick around and I might tell ya what I think of it sometime in the 2040s.

Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather: Part 2” wasn’t the highest ranked film on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films ever made that I’d never seen entering this project – that would’ve been Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” which I watched earlier this year – but it’s probably the one of the 12 films on my list I felt guiltiest having not seen.

“The Godfather: Part 2” picks up a few years after “The Godfather” left off, and things seem to be going fairly well for Don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who now lives in Nevada and is trying to control gambling and casinos. The film interjects Michael’s ongoings with the younger life of his father, Vito Corleone, first played as a child and then for much of the movie by Robert De Niro, in the role that won him his first Oscar.

The film goes back and forth between these two characters, telling Michael’s story in the present, and showing how Vito wound up in America and crawled his way from a nobody to a feared mob boss.

I found the Vito storyline to be the more intriguing of the two in ‘Part 2,’ whereas Michael’s ascent from a son who’s probably never going to run the family business to being thrust into control of it was the most intriguing part of ‘Part 1’ for me.

I think the problem with the Michael storyline in ‘Part 2’ for me, while intriguing and performed brilliantly by Pacino, is that it moves around quite a lot and quickly – the crux of it is trying to figure out who put a hit out on Michael and his family at the beginning of the family – but it sees us jumping around from Nevada, to New York, to Cuba to Washington, D.C. and all around, and let’s face it running the everyday business of the Corleone family just isn’t as interesting as an underdog story, which is what Michael was in ‘Part 1’ and Vito is in ‘Part 2.’

I’m surprised Pacino didn’t win the Academy Award for his performance in this film – just the rage he’s able to portray in the scene where his wife admits to having an abortion and wanting to take his children and leave him could’ve been enough for most voters. I say this, however, knowing that if I had a vote on this more than 50 years ago, I would’ve voted for Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown” instead. They both lost to Art Carney in “Harry and Tonto,” a film I have yet to see.

By the way, De Niro winning for Best Supporting Actor is fair, but you could certainly make the argument that he and Pacino were co-leads in ‘Part 2.’

In ‘Godfather’ style, there are some great kills in the film, my favorite being the comeuppance Don Ciccio receives in Sicily once Vito is old enough to avenge the deaths of his entire family when he was a young child. You know from the first minutes of the film that this is eventually going to take place, so it had to be good, and, boy, was it ever.