Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Year: 1974 Country: U.S. Gender: Drama / Gangster Score: 10/10
Cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, James Caan, John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Talia Shire, Mariana Hill, Danny Aiello, Harry Dean Stanton, Troy Donahue, Roger Corman and Morgana King
continuing saga of the Corleone family with two parallel stories: the election of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) as the head of the family business and the origins and rise of the patriarch, late Don Vito. "The Godfather, Part II" hit the screens in 1974, just two years after the first delivery, a record time for what it is today and became, almost immediately, in one of the best sequels of all time (if not the best). It's a moving film, hard, dark and passionate focus on the real protagonist of the series: Michael Corleone. I must admit that, how critical "amateur" film, the face of a work as perfect in all respects as is "The Godfather, Part II" goes so far as to embarrass me, because the greatness of the work can end up dwarfing any comments you make, however accurate it is. The masterpieces are like this, at once so clear that light can reach inside each one, and yet so hypnotic that eventually settling in some hidden place in the mind, which always, in one way or another, our report back from time to time, both to encourage and cheer, how to wake up and hit us with all the forces that the footprint of the film really left us impressed upon the mind. How sweet melancholy waltz or shot at point blank range and fire spitting blood.
Coppola, who built his spectacular trilogy very similar in conception chronology is concerned, especially the first and third of the series, opens "The Godfather, Part II", in flight from Sicily Andolini Vito Corleone, whom the mafia boss Don Ciccio, has sworn to kill, after kill your whole family (hardness and dryness of the film is clearly expressed in the brutal murder of his mother, projected backwards with great force, resulting from the impact of the bullet in his stomach), to a new promised land, America, in a boatload of Sicilian immigrants. Held by smallpox at Ellis Island, the young Vito, sing a song through her window, where you see the Statue of Liberty. Vito sings the song that is based on church music, while we attended the first communion of his grandson, Anthony Corleone, the same guy who played with his grandfather in his garden, just before he dropped dead. Of course, there is a big party in honor of the young Anthony. And one does not avoid remembering the wedding of Connie (Talia Shire) and the late Carlo Rizzi years ago, where Don Vito received one by one to all your friends to grant favors. But now his son Michael, the only one able to take over the care of the family, died when the temperamental Sonny (James Caan) as Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) is also taken not Italian and Fredo (John Cazale) is too stupid (how to get to call Michael, something that his father suggested) not seem to follow the footsteps of his father. The respectability of the family seems settled, but something is rotten in the Corleone residence.
And in "The Godfather, Part II" we are witnessing the birth and funeral of the family. There will never be peace for the Corleone family. On the feast of the baptism, Michael more than welcome to listen to your friends, get enemies and when you get to friends, these will get no respect, how her own sister had with a stranger saying he is going to marry him. There is no respect or love. In this Michael Corleone and nothing left of innocence presented in the early stages from "The Godfather " (1972), when I played college as a young soldier in love with his girlfriend Kay (Diane Keaton). Now Michael is an ice floe, their anger and pride, are more powerful in him than any other feeling. So when trying to assassinate him at the request of clueless Fredo, there is no more output into a spiral of violence leading to the tomb to anyone who dares to stand or deal with it. Vito (Robert De Niro), meanwhile, forty years ago, is a hardworking and intelligent young man, who befriends his future would-be enemies Clemenza and Tessio. The step that will make him "Don", will be murder in the representative of the Cosa Nostra in Little Italy, Don Fanucci. The murder is filmed in a completely hichcockiano (similar to the murder of sob and Captain McCluskey in The Godfather "), representing the baptism of fire of a Vito, which more than a gangster or a mobster, is presented as a new Robin Hood. Of course, a Robin Hood who ends his enemy with a third shot in the mouth, blood staining the wall and then, after disposing of the weapon, walk the streets stained party and fireworks (Vito beautiful image wrapped in festive fireworks, moving with feline a huge Robert De Niro on the screen) to return embrace with his and her newborn son, Michael.
Michael Corlenoe attend Havana, with a dual purpose, to unmask the traitor in his family and kill Roth (enemy that threatens his life.) A time of revolution and Fidel Castro threatens to oust Batista from power and making Cuba a free country. The revolutionary wave and night year-end, get to overthrow the dictator. The same night that Michael, contorted and collapsed inside, he discovers that his brother Fredo, the son of his mother and the son of his father, he has been betrayed, in a grueling sequence, which is betrayed Fredo loudly and Michael, framed in a corner of the screen, raises her hands to her face and winces in pain clear signal. The rest is history film. A hug, a kiss of rage , an "I know it was you Fredo! Broke my heart! Broke my heart!" and some Al Pacino and John Cazale so magnificent that eventually freeze your blood in the seat of cinema. To make matters worse, on his return to Nevada, he discovers that Kay has had an abortion and who will testify against him before a court that wants to imprison. And Coppola is making it all the art that comes out of the hands, Michael, who starts to look vfuriooso, sees Kay also wants to leave him and discovers that abortion was induced. If his father saw him! Italian never commit such an offense. Michael unleashes his wrath, and for the first time, hits his wife in a blow that hurts to the viewer. The family disappears. Same Vito comes in Sicily and kill the elderly Don Ciccio (and a couple of thugs the same in two sequences that were eliminated in the final assembly), it is now slowly dying, under the sponsorship of Michael.
The decision of the new Don against Fredo is unstoppable. Al Neri is commanded to kill Michael Fredo, after his mother dies. Thus, after shutting the door to Kay when you just want to hug her son Anthony, in what would be a comparison of a shot in cold blood, and deceive with a false Fredo embrace at the funeral of the matriarch, leads to one of the most memorable sequences server has ever seen in a penumbra desperate, Neri Fredo murdered while this says a Hail Mary, as did small, along with his brothers, while fishing in the middle of a lake solemnly sad. Michael, alone in the distance, looking down, wrapped in darkness. The darkness and horror ... Fades to black. Recover a postal family, all brothers, Sonny, Tom, Connie, Fredo and Michael, along with Carlo Rizzi and Tessio, awaiting the arrival of Don Vito on his birthday. Carlo flirts with Connie. Fredo and Sonny simulate a fight. Michael says he enlisted in the army, Sonny and Tom reproach him. Don arrives. Everyone runs to greet ... less than Michael, who turns to be alone. Is King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III and Hamlet, seated at a table full of ghosts, tinged with blood and bullets and pain. So much pain. So ... everything in "The Godfather, Part II" exudes beauty and pain. His expertise reaches beyond the first film, is that if this film is more akin to a gangster film, the second part is pure Greek tragedy. If "The Godfather" Coppola reinvented a genre with almost no need to resort to classic how Hawks, Curtiz, Walsh and Huston, in "The Godfather, Part II" will notice some viscontiana footprint of "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960), this film also leave its mark around the future of the genre, or be filmed De Palma, Ferrara, Scorsese, Tarantino Hanson or Mendes.
Francis Ford Coppola, the hand of the master Gordon Willis, whose camera is not only portray the Corleone trilogy, but it would also be directly responsible for some of the best films of Woody decided not to vary the neoclassical style of filming and shown in the first Godfather, and keep the camera slowly as possible, despite the great domestic violence which is in the pictures. The minimum tracking shots of frame to emphasize the decisions of the characters, the ghost of light use, both for the lack of it (home of Michael in Nevada) as the games offered in the crepuscular tone that runs throughout starring the young Vito, and how the slow final kill, which killed far fewer people than the other sponsors, only three people (Roth, Pentangelli and Fredo), but certainly more relevant dramatic, do, in the background, the first two parts of the trilogy. With "The Godfather, Part II", it reaches such a level of great opera, which pretty much isolated any other film made before and after the Coppola. Not even the beautiful imperfection that is "The Godfather, Part III," which Coppola had been called "The Death of Michael Corleone" can get close to the feeling of its prequel, is also worth noting the presence of the majestic soundtrack to Nino Rota is on the same level of presedesora. Tradition, family, murder, power ... the story of the Corleone, in the end we are offering a portrait of the new America, the flood of immigration following Italian, Irish and Jewish, and it pursues ways to settle in the new country, even at base of corruption, extortion and murders. In "The Godfather, Part II", Michael summarizes his philosophy of business owners when he says that "if something history has shown us is that you can kill anyone", however the story ends by showing that there is something Michael worse than being killed is to survive with remorse.
"Everything a classic case, really masterful"
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