Oscar history was made when The Godfather Part II became the first sequel to win Best Picture. Two years after The Godfather became one of the great films of American cinema its epic sequel solidified the gangster genre and continued the rise of acting superstars like Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and Robert De Niro. In fact, De Niro would walk away with the statue for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of the up-and-coming Vito Corleone. It was also the parallel narratives of Vito’s rise and Michael’s peak that helped make The Godfather Part II one of cinema’s more unique film experiences.

Saying Michael’s peak is actually only half of his half of the story. One of the great cinematic and screenwriting components is to create conflict within your character by playing his internal need or want against his external need or want. What writer/director Francis Ford Coppola did with Michael in The Godfather Part II was he created a scenario where Michael was succeeding with his external campaigns while simultaneously losing control of his internal needs. Indeed, the driving theme of The Godfather series is taking care of your family and realizing that nothing is more important than that, and Michael fails miserably at that in The Godfather Part II. Vito himself states in the first movie, “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” I think that in The Godfather Part II Michael honestly thinks that he is taking care of his family, but he’s so focused on getting revenge on whomever tried to have him killed that he loses sight on what’s important and what his father really wanted for him. In that respect, he causes the very disintegration of his family even as he attains revenge on his enemies, including doing the unthinkable to his own brother. Where The Godfather is a drama with a somewhat ambiguous ending, The Godfather Part II is an unambiguous modern tragedy.

That’s where the parallel narratives come into focus for this film, and how important it is to the film’s success. As we watch the younger Vito succeed in painstakingly laying the foundation of his empire so that he can take care of his growing family, we watch as Michael loses his family while trying to maintain that empire and get revenge on his enemies. In the ultimate irony of the story, Vito successfully gets his revenge on Don Ciccio, the man who killed his father, mother and brother at the beginning of the film. He was patient. He waited for years. When the moment came, he took advantage, but he wasn’t obsessed by it. In fact, in what might be the ultimate plant and payoff in cinema history, most of the audience had probably forgotten all about Don Ciccio. The juxtaposition of those dual storylines helped make this such a great film.

One other thing that struck me this time as I watched The Godfather Part II is just how different a film it is from its predecessor. Thematically, many things are the same, but otherwise it’s a completely different film. A whole slew of different characters are introduced. The old days are referred to with much nostalgia throughout the film by several characters, but that only magnifies the differences in this film and this story. Mainly, the storyline of The Godfather Part II is much more intricate than the storyline from the first film. The Godfather has relatively straight forward Hero’s Journeys for both Michael and Vito, and the storyline, as great as it is, is straight forward and relatively simple as well. The storyline for The Godfather Part II is much more intricate and requires much more attention from the audience in order to be able to follow it fully. Indeed there are myriad subplots throughout the film. While Michael is determining whether or not Hyman Roth is responsible for the attack on his life, he’s also entering into a business venture with him in Cuba as the winds of revolution blow throughout the island. He also has to testify in front of the Senate where one of his old allies appears to be betraying him. Speaking of the Senate, the Corleone family now lives full time in Lake Tahoe, NV and Nevada Senator Pat Geary is trying to shake Michael down. And of course there are Michael’s difficulties with Fredo and Kay. What’s impressive about this is that quite often when there are so many subplots competing for our attention, the story can feel muddled and disorganized. Coppola was able to pace the story out in a way that kept everything clear. You had to pay attention, but as long as you did you would be able to follow each plot and storyline. It also helps that Coppola did a great job of paying off all of the subplots by bringing them all back into the main flow of the storyline. This is an intricately woven story with a complex and complicated plot that ends in a satisfying, albeit tragic, way.

What makes the ending even more tragic is the way the story of young Vito ends. The film starts with 9-year old Vito Andolini at the funeral of his father. His brother is also murdered, and then his mother is shot right in front of him. With the help of local villagers from the village of Corleone, Vito is put on a ship for America where the immigration officer changes his name to Vito Corleone, and he’s put into quarantine for small pox. Years later, he’s working for a grocer in the Little Italy section of New York City, and he comes across Don Fanucci who runs the neighborhood and forces residents and businesses to pay him to keep them secure. After meeting young Tessio and young Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), they start a small crime ring that Don Fanucci finds out about and demands that they pay him a cut or he’ll go to the police. Vito convinces Clemenza and Tessio that they don’t need to pay him and that if they trust him, he’ll make it worth their while. Vito then kills Don Fanucci and the neighborhood now belongs to him. He goes to his apartment where his wife sits on the steps with young Santino, Fredo and newborn Michael. Vito takes the baby and tells Michael that his father loves him very much. Vito opens an Olive Oil distribution company as a front and becomes the most powerful don in the city. After the birth of his four children, he takes his family to his birthplace in Sicily. That’s where he finds Don Ciccio and completes his revenge. As they leave the village on the train, Vito tells Michael, here just a boy, to wave goodbye.

This whole storyline is about the creation of something. It’s about the creation of Vito’s family and how, even though he’s built all of it through lawlessness, he’s at heart a good person who protects his family and also uses his strength to protect people that can’t protect themselves and have no recourse through the law. That’s the huge difference between Vito and Michael. We never doubt that Vito, despite his faults, is at his core a good person. Michael, on the other hand, has become sinister and vengeful, and is everything his father was not. This is punctuated by yet another shot of Kay having a door shut in her face as Michael refuses to let her see their children. Perhaps the most tragic shot in the film is the last shot where we see Michael sitting alone. His father was never alone, and yet Michael has no one. Vito was loved and respected by everyone that knew him and that love and respect bred loyalty that cannot be bought. Michael, on the other hand, has successfully driven away or killed everyone who was close to him. He has destroyed everything that his father built. What could be more tragic than that?

Even though they’re as different as they are, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are essentially companion pieces. Together, they form one overarching and complete story. The fact that they were released within two years of each other also helps with the continuity of the story. Sixteen years after the release of The Godfather Part II, Coppola would try to rekindle that magic again with The Godfather Part III with mixed results and to a mixed reception. It picks up the story some 20 years later as an aging Michael tries to once and for all bring the Corleone family out of the shadows and into legitimate business dealings. Various forces prevent that from happening and the story ends the only way it really can. Unfortunately Coppola wasn’t able to restore that magic and the third film in the series suffered from the confusing and muddled plot that he was able to avoid in the second instalment. The third film is very disconnected from the other two, and is not nearly on the same level in terms of storytelling or filmmaking. The fact that the second film is a continuation of the same story at essentially the point where the first one left off helps the continuity of the stories and each film feeds off of the greatness of the other. The third film was made in a completely different era and there is a lot of film history between the first and the third film. It was clearly an attempt to rekindle an old flame, but the magic was gone and the third film probably should never have even been made. That wasn’t enough to keep it from being nominated for Best Picture, but it was unable to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, a fact that will be dug deeper into in about 4 months from now.

Did the Academy get it right?

I’m actually going to go out on a limb and say that no, they did not. I realize that I just typed 1600 words espousing the virtues and greatness of the film and its themes and the depth of its characters. In almost any other year, The Godfather Part II would be a slam-dunk, no-brainer to win Best Picture. The epic size and scope of this film should be enough to stifle any questions about whether or not it deserved to be named as such. It was certainly better than Lenny, the erstwhile bio pic of comedian and satirist Lenny Bruce. For the second time in three years a terrific film by Bob Fosse would lose to a Godfather film. I liked Lenny, but didn’t love it, and certainly wouldn’t have voted for it for Best Picture. The Conversation, also directed by Coppola (more on that in a moment) was nominated, but wasn’t nearly as strong a picture as The Godfather Part II. In fact, I found The Conversation to be very slow and boring. I don’t mind if a film is slow, but there was very little about The Conversation that I found to be engaging. It had a cool twist at the end, but that wouldn’t have been enough for me to give it a vote for Best Picture. The Towering Inferno is a super-entertaining action film, but not really the type of film that one thinks about when voting for Best Picture. The film that I would have voted for would have been Chinatown, which I think is an absolute masterpiece. As great as The Godfather Part II is, and it is great, Chinatown does it one better. It’s complex story, but is way more compact and streamlined. It’s a smart story and has wonderful performances by Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It has moments of humor that give it balance that is missing in The Godfather Part II and it has a lot more personality. Deciding between these two films is like deciding between a Mercedes and a BMW. You can’t go wrong either way, but I prefer Chinatown and would have voted for that film in 1974.

There is one more thing I’d like to mention. A few months ago, I pondered whether any director had ever had a better year than Victor Fleming had in 1939 when he directed Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, both of which were nominated for Best Picture and have gone on to become pantheons of not only cinema, but also our popular culture. Francis Ford Coppola came close in 1974 with The Godfather Part II and The Conversation. While neither of those films has reached the cultural status of Fleming’s films (The Godfather Part II is close), it’s still a major and very impressive accomplishment to have two films nominated for Best Picture in the same year.