Its 50 years since the release of Godfather Part Two, a film that many critics believed surpassed the original. Aubrey Malone recounts its journey to the screen
It’s hard to believe Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is half a century old this year. Still harder to believe is that it was such a wonderful film. Sequels (The French Connection II apart) aren’t generally noted for living up to their predecessors. In this case the task was even more herculean considering the hoo-ha that surrounded the first Godfather.
This signalled Marlon Brando’s renaissance after a decade in the wilderness. He’d been labelled ‘box office poison’ as a result of that decade. Robert Evans, the head honcho at Paramount, insisted he subject himself to the relative ignominy of a screen test before he considered him for the role of Vito Corleone.
Brando was hard up for cash at the time so he took a waiver on a percentage deal for the movie. In retrospect this was foolish. Earnings from it could have set him up for life financially as it was such a hit but he needed hard cash at the time so took the money upfront.
Coppola deserved great credit for threading the movie together. Right from the get-go he decided it was going to be a different kind of sequel to the kind audiences were usually proferred
When it came to The Godfather Part II, Coppola asked him if he would appear in it briefly. He also wanted to use some footage of him from the 1972 film in a flashback sequence. Brando, however, was still licking his wounds from losing out on a windfall from that film and demanded an astronomical sum from Coppola to use him: $500,000 of a salary and 10per cent of the gross. There was no way Coppola could afford that kind of money so the idea was scrapped.
If the 1972 movie saw the rebirth of Brando, Godfather II was mainly notable for the arrival of the actor sometimes referred to as his spiritual ‘godson,’ no pun intended, onto our screens. This was Robert De Niro, who plays Vito Corleone as a young man. De Niro was a relatively unknown quantity in 1974. It was many people’s first time seeing him act. De Niro had actually auditioned for the part of Sonny Corleone in the original but was unsuccessful. It went to James Caan instead. The fact that Coppola had recently seen him give a sensational performance in Martin Scorsese’s cult movie Mean Streets sealed the deal for him.
De Niro went to Sicily to familiarize himself with the language, bringing a tape recorder with him to Palermo. He learned it in record time. Only three of his lines in the film are in English, one being the famous, ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.’
The young Vito is a kind of Robin Hood figure who shoots a thug operating a protection racket in a seminal scene. (I can still see that dim light blinking). He portrayed Vito as a man who watches everything like a lion in the long grass, behaving in an almost courtly manner to people he meets and greets. His steel side only comes out when he kills.
Accepting the fact that he didn’t look in the least like Brando, De Niro concentrated instead on copying his gestures, like touching his cheek with his fingertips the way Brando did, and adopting the same rasping tone of voice. It seems almost every stand-up comedian in the world has imitated this rasp at some point. In the novel, Don Corleone is described as having been shot in the throat at one point. It was this detail Brando picked up on, stuffing Kleenex in his cheeks to achieve it for his screen test. De Niro was reputed to have watched the 1972 movie over fifty times to try and ‘get’ Brando.
Attention now shifted to whether Al Pacino would again play Michael Corleone, Vito’s son, as he had in 1972. Coppola had to fight hard to get ‘the suits’ to agree to cast Pacino (another unknown quantity at the time) in the original film. In the first few scenes they thought his performance was lacklustre. At one point they were considering getting rid of him. Brando really liked Pacino and said, ‘If he walks, I walk,’ so they kept him on.
Pacino had made two great movies afterwards, the offbeat Scarercrow with Gene Hackman (he once said this was his favourite of all his movies) and Serpico, for which he’d been Oscar-nominated. The double whammy of screen gems made Coppola’s decision to re-employ him for the part of Michael much easier.
In the end it was Pacino who vacillated. He didn’t like the idea of being in a sequel so early on in his career for fear it would limit him but Coppola won him over with his enthusiasm for the project, conveying so much excitement for it that the hairs actually stood up on Pacino’s head. Pacino had received just $35,000 for the 1972 movie. For The Godfather Part II he earned $600,000 plus 10% of the gross.
In the original he was somewhat awed by Brando. This was appropriate as at that age Michael was just a young man finding his way in the ‘family business.’ In the second film he’s a few years older and also a few years more corrupt – and he doesn’t have Brando breathing down his neck. At times Michael reminds one of a Roman emperor, a sad despot losing everyone around him as his lust for power takes him over.
This was an emphasis Coppola wanted. So did Puzo, who collaborated with him on the screenplay. Coppola used Puzo’s scenes from Little Italy from his novel but added a narrative skein that included the Corleone family’s involvement in Latin America, taking in the fall of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and the arrival of Fidel Castro in Havana in 1959.
Diane Keating played Al Pacino’s his wife again. She admitted she was only ‘background music’ in the 1972 movie. In the sequel she has much more to do and does it brilliantly
Some critics of the original movie accused Coppola of glorifying the Mafia in it, portraying them almost like other iconic American dynasties like the Kennedys and the Rothchilds, even though at the end of the film we see Michael lying to his wife and closing the door on her. Coppola was anxious to make his callousness more patent in the sequel. In The Godfather Part II we’re in little doubt that this family is more akin to the Borgias than the Kennedys.
‘I had bounce in the first Godfather,’ Pacino said, ‘In the second one the bounce has gone. There’s only the badness. That gave me a different kind of challenge.’ Such badness results in him even ordering the killing of his brother Fredo in one scene.
Diane Keaton played his wife again. She admitted he was only ‘background music’ in the 1972 movie. In the sequel she has much more to do and does it brilliantly.
Lee Strasberg played the Jewish mobster Hyman Roth
Another interesting casting choice was Lee Strasberg as the Jewish mobster Hyman Roth. Strasberg was the legendary director of the Actors Studio. Both De Niro and Pacino had studied at this, and indeed Brando for a time.
Strasberg had never stepped in front of a camera before The Godfather Part II but Coppola was still terrified of directing him. How could he direct the ‘godfather’ of The Method? He was as nervous about the task as he had been directing Brando, another living legend, three years before but in the end he found the task entirely pleasurable.
Coppola deserved great credit for threading the movie together. Right from the get-go he decided it was going to be a different kind of sequel to the kind audiences were usually proferred. This was even conveyed by the title. Calling the film The Godfather Part II instead of Godfather II was unusual. Once again, the ‘suits’ didn’t like this, imagining viewers would see it as the second half of a movie rather than a complete unit, but Coppola got his way. He also got his way in the diametric manner in which the film was structured, mixing Michael’s fall from grace with the rise of the young Vito in another country.
‘You’re making two separate movies,’ he was told at one point, ‘Get rid of one of them.’ But Coppola stood his ground and it reaped dividends. Lighting genius Gordon Willis contrasted the hazy mistiness of the flashback sequences with the sharpness of the contemporary ones to convey the manner in which the family’s world had changed in the interim.
The film took nine months to shoot and came in at a budget of $13 million, $2 million more than was estimated, but by the end of 1975 it had earned over $30 million in America alone. It also won six Oscars, three of these going to Coppola, for Best Director, Best Film and Best Original Screenplay. Another Coppola, Francis’ father Carmine, was a co-winner of the Best Musical Score Oscar so it was a real family night. The film also won Best Art Direction and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for De Niro. In typical Garboesque fashion he didn’t attend the ceremonies. Coppola collected it for him. Disparaging to the last, he afterwards remarked, ‘Lots of people win the award who don’t deserve it but I suppose it’s not bad.’
It was only the second time in movie history that an Oscar was awarded for a subtitled part, the other being the one given to Sophia Loren for Two Women in 1960. This was also one of the few times in Oscar history where two Oscars were conferred on the same character. (Brando famously refused his one for playing Don Corleone in 1971.) Both Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix both won Oscars for playing The Joker in different Batman movies some years down the road.
Trivia buffs among you might also like to know that Paul Newman was nominated for an Oscar playing the pool shark Eddie Felson in The Hustler in 1961 and won one 25 years later for playing Felson as an older man in Martin Scorsese’s The Colour of Money.
Brando was the big loser on the night by throwing away the chance to be a part of it all. He would have been 100 on April 3 of this year. Let’s spare a thought for the great man who has, as the Don himself might have put it, been ‘sleeping with the fishes’ since 2004.
