The Godfather 2 1/2: Simba’s Pride

A Comparative Approach to The Godfather Part II (1974)

The Godfather Part II (1974) – Comparative

Everybody’s gotta promise right now to be real cool. Do you promise? You gotta be real, real cool here. Internet pinky promise time. I’m gonna hold you to that promise.

I’m reviewing The Godfather Part II (1974) this week, and I’m actively worried about it, especially because the Review Roulette wheel landed on Comparative as our approach. Initially I was like “oh god, this movie is beloved. How will I compare it to anything?” and then I watched it for the first time and talked to my husband about it and, guys, I’m so sorry, but my best analysis is to compare it to (YOU PROMISED TO BE COOL) The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2 (1991). (STICK WITH ME).

I’ve added my reviews of the Naked Gun franchise to this site so you can check them out if you haven’t before, but essentially, I argued that the second film is by far the best of the franchise because it takes everything that was successful about the first one, hones it to perfection, and shrouds it all in a consistent and clear political message. And truly I think that also goes for The Godfather Part II.

Sequels are difficult to land, so when there’s a truly exceptional one, they stand out, like The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride (1998). What The Godfather Part II does so beautifully and so radically is create a prequel and sequel in harmony in the same film. Do I personally have it in my pantheon of greatest films? No. Do I think it’s a marvelous – in the truest sense of the word, a marvel of a film? Absolutely.

For the uninitiated, The Godfather Part II follows the young life of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) from Sicily to Ellis Island and his eventual immigrant Italian neighborhood in New York from 1901 to 1922, as well as the mid-life of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) as he expands his role in succession of his father’s mafia empire in 1958. If you’re a long-time reader, you know that I am an absolute sucker for films that play with time for the benefit of reflection and character development, so having that with two characters in conversation with each other and also their stories from the first film? Gold.

I personally found the Vito storyline the much more compelling and interesting parts of the film, and I was yearning for much more about his early life in that Italian community as an orphaned immigrant coming to America at the age of 9. But I’m a cultural historian and that is, quite literally, my entire jam, so I get why Francis Ford Coppola struck the balance he did with much more of his focus centered on Michael’s mid-century Cold War mafia-ing in Vegas, New York, Miami, and Cuba. But both of these are why it reminded me of The Naked Gun 2 ½.

Coppola could have made a straightforward gangster movie sequel with just the interesting story of Michael, but he didn’t. He chose to make an American historical epic looking back from 1974 on the first half or so of the 20th century from a cultural perspective of how the new and old worlds meet. For Vito who literally ran from the old world, the mafia style that drove him from his home in the first place threatens his friends, family, and neighbors again in the new. As he ages, Vito develops into a fighter for what we understand as a “better” version of the aggressive, selfish, exploitative mafia don in favor of Vito’s version offering true protection for his neighbors. Vito is portrayed as helping women who are being mistreated putting him in stark contrast to the don he unseated who violently attacked a woman and held her hostage while threatening her father. This clash between the old and the new adds so much to the film as we see Michael regress in direct juxtaposition to these scenes of his father’s growth.

Michael is portrayed as what I can only describe as “absolutely desperate for a Xanax”. This man is constantly stressed but Pacino won’t let himself show it. It’s wild. And there’s reason for the stress, I’m not knocking it; he’s building an international empire and has to double and triple cross like ten different people and frame a US Senator for the murder of a sex worker. He’s busy. But in being this busy and murdersome, he’s straying further from the image of his young father as a more benevolent don. He loses family, friends, and neighbors he swore to protect in pursuit of expansion, control, and juicy, juicy antagonism. It’s a little like “The Gift of the Magi” but if O. Henry was supremely fucked up and there was a Cuban Revolution in the middle.

Anyway, adding the prequel element to give context to Marlon Brando’s Vito from the first film elevates the continuation of Michael’s story in a way that almost justifies the 3 hour 22 minute runtime. Coppola saw an opportunity to make the film he wanted to make and ran with such a deft echoing structure that honed what was best about the first film and elevated it with a powerful, purposeful cultural and political historical analysis. We absolutely love to see it.

And that’s all why it’s a good film. Why it’s a marvelous film is because Coppola splits it down the middle and shows us a young Michael roughly the same age as his dad in De Niro’s sequences. He’s idealistic and defending his choice to volunteer for service in the US military after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We get this brilliant short scene of Michael before her is pulled into his cold, dark, in-desperate-need-of-a-Xanax days 17 years later, feeling this passion for the US that mimics the hope of the immigrant community Vito moved into 40 years prior. And then it disappears, fading throughout the post-war period and early Cold War as Michael (and the US) venture further from the hope of that earlier immigrant population’s desire to make the new world better than the old. Art. That sequence really took the film to a whole new level for me.

That’s all from me this week. I have many writing projects on at the moment in anticipation of my new book (Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy out on November 17th!) and my first ever keynote address on November 15th at a FREE VIRTUAL conference on Christmas in Pop Culture! Stop by if you can! Here’s the program and here’s the Zoom Link.