Godfather (24 page)

Nevertheless, Coppola managed to pull together a final cut of
Godfather II
just days before it opened. One critic marveled, “Doesn't Coppola always bring his pictures in at the last minute—a surgeon delivering the baby like a parcel, in a dead run, double-parked?”
¹⁷
Coppola had managed to create a vast epic reflecting the historical development of organized crime in the United States in terms of the Italian-immigrant past.

As Pauline Kael says, “We only saw the middle of the story in the first film; now we have the beginning and the end”; The second
Godfather
film
not only chronicles Michael's later career as head of the “family business,” but it also presents in flashback Don Vito's early life in Sicily, as well as his rise to power in the Mafia in New York City's Little Italy after his immigration to the United States.
¹⁸

The parallel structure of the film brings into relief the symbiotic relationship between Vito and his son Michael. The child Vito Corleone, who arrives alone at Ellis Island, will grow up to forge a crime family that will “subvert the American dream to attain criminal wealth,” and his son Michael will follow in his footsteps.
¹⁹
To that extent,
Godfather II
can be called Coppola's requiem for the American dream.

Godfather II
begins where the previous picture left off, with the scene in which Don Michael's lieutenants pay him homage as his father's rightful successor. Then the movie switches to a scene from the childhood of Michael's father, when young Vito's own father is murdered for defying the local Mafia don back in the Sicilian village where Vito was born. Vito's mother and older brother are also killed shortly afterward for attempting to take vengeance on the Mafia chief, and Vito, now an orphan, escapes to America.

In 1901, the child Vito goes through the immigration process at Ellis Island. The wide-eyed Vito Andolini cannot communicate with the American immigration official, so he stands by mutely as the officer mistakenly records his name as Vito Corleone, thereby naming him for his hometown of Corleone. The sallow, thin boy is diagnosed as having contracted smallpox and is therefore quarantined for three months on Ellis Island. The lad comes to America carrying another sickness as well, that of the vendetta. “This child will carry his vendetta-disease to the point of emerging as a Mafia don” and liquidating those who have harmed his family.
²⁰

Back in the present, the film focuses on another youngster, Michael's son Anthony, who is enjoying a big celebration in honor of his First Communion. The party is being held on his father's estate at Lake Tahoe, now the center of Michael's business operations. Michael, like his father before him, privately conducts his business affairs while the festivities are in full swing. “In the first
Godfather
there was a wedding scene in which the principal characters were introduced,” Coppola says on the DVD. “Now the same thing happens at the First Communion ceremony in
Godfather II”

While Michael is engaged in making Machiavellian deals in his shadowy study, he is “swallowed up in darkness; his face is often half-lit; his presence tends to recede into the darker parts of the frame,” reflecting him as an enigma to those he is dealing with.
²¹
Michael bribes Nevada Senator Pat Geary with a large “donation,” ostensibly for the state university but
actually to buy Geary's support in securing a gambling license for one of the Corleone Las Vegas casinos.

The party scene demonstrates the participation by Mafia families in empty displays of religious belief—a Catholic wedding in
The Godfather
and a First Communion in
Godfather II
. But these participants steadfastly ignore the spiritual import of these time-honored religious rituals. The sacraments of Matrimony and of Holy Communion do not touch their lives in any meaningful way. Like Don Vito before him, Don Michael deploys Catholic ceremonies to legitimize his lifestyle.

The sacred First Communion ceremony is followed by a noisy, vulgar outdoor party that demonstrates just how far the Corleone family has drifted from its ethnic origins. “The Italian customs associated with the old country are no longer evident in the scenes set in the modern era,” says Coppola. The hearty Italian street songs of the wedding reception in
The Godfather
have been replaced by suave-sounding dance numbers reminiscent of the big band era. Frankie Pantageli, who is from Vito's old neighborhood, asks the bandleader to play an Italian folk song—a Tarantella that had in fact been played at Connie's wedding in
The Godfather
—but “the hokey west coast musicians can only come up with ‘Pop Goes the Weasel,”‘ Coppola notes in his commentary. This is followed by a cherubic boys' choir serenading Michael with a Tin Pan Alley number, “Mr. Wonderful.”

The drunken Frankie, who disdains the music at the reception, also notices that Michael's guests are imbibing champagne cocktails rather than Italian vino, and he upbraids Michael for abandoning his roots. Frankie likewise excoriates him for doing business with “the despicable old Jew” Hyman Roth, whom Don Vito never trusted. Michael suggests to Frankie that his policy is to keep his friends close, but his enemies closer. Frankie, however, does not buy his explanation.

Throughout the party scene it becomes apparent that the family still hangs on to some vestiges of venerable Italian customs, such as a toast in Italian at dinner (e.g., “
Cent
' anni,” which means, “hundred years,” as in “Happiness for a hundred years”). Yet the in-laws who have been coming into the Corleone family lately are not of Italian origin and have no sense at all of the family traditions. Mama Corleone (Morgana King, repeating her role from
The Godfather
) expresses her displeasure at the fragmentation of the family and the diminishing of their ethnic identity. Fredo's wife Deanna, who is not Italian, is really a floozy and a drunk and crassly flirts with younger men at the reception. When Fredo futilely attempts to make her behave, she shouts at him that she resents how “these dagos” try to dominate their wives. “Never marry a wop!” she bellows for good measure.

Since Michael is head of the family, Connie goes through the motions of asking his permission to marry a WASP named Merle Johnson, whom Michael rightly infers is a fortune hunter. Connie has become a hardened, dissipated creature since the murder of her first husband, Carlo. Coppola comments on the DVD: “She has these fancy boyfriends. That's the only way she can rebel against her all-powerful brother, who killed her first husband.”

Connie, who had a dream wedding in
The Godfather
, has taken to hooking up with playboy gigolos, and her frivolous marriage to one of them has recently ended in divorce. Now she is prepared to marry yet another one of the same ilk. Connie and Merle hold hands during their audience with Michael in a feeble display of solidarity, but this union is doomed to be short-lived. The wretched marriages of Fredo and of Connie reflect how “the family unity is really starting to break down in this period,” concludes Coppola, referring to his pervasive theme about the role of family in modern society.
²²

After the First Communion reception, which is a major sequence in the film, the story shifts in due course to a key flashback in which we learn how the Old World criminal traditions imported to the New World add to the misery of struggling immigrants like Vito Corleone. The secret crime cartel known as the Black Hand, an early version of the Mafia in America, terrorized the Italian immigrants living in ethnic neighborhoods by extorting “protection money” from them. The term
Black Hand
referred to crude drawings of a shadowy hand that accompanied threats from these racketeers.

During the operetta performance Genco points out Fanucci, a Black Hand extortionist, to Vito and warns him that Fanucci extorts protection money from Italian immigrants. Fanucci's florid cape and curled moustache make him look like a villain from a nineteenth-century gaslight melodrama. When Fanucci subsequently attempts to terrorize Vito, his comrades, and their families, Vito finally assassinates him, thereby committing his first murder and, subsequently, committing himself irrevocably to a life of crime.

Throughout the picture Coppola makes it clear that the higher Michael rises in the hierarchy of Mafia chiefs, the lower he sinks into the depths of moral degradation. His wife Kay is appalled by what he has become and finally comes to the bitter conclusion that Michael will never change his ways and phase out his unlawful business interests, as he has promised her so often that he would. Indeed, it is far too late in the day for Michael to become a legitimate businessman, even if he wanted to. “He can never go back to the time before that moment in the restaurant when he shot his
father's enemies,” Pauline Kael writes. “Michael's act, which preserved his family's power,” ruined his own life by setting him on the road to a life of crime.
²³

Michael is subpoenaed to testify before a Senate Committee investigating organized crime. The congressional hearing in the film is modeled on the televised hearings conducted by Senator Kefauver and Senator McClelland in the 1950s and 1960s (see
chapter 4
). Coppola thought that casting non-actors in bit parts in this scene might make it more real and convincing. He therefore hired real reporters and photojournalists to play the press corps in the sequence. He also cast two of his former mentors as senators: Roger Corman, producer of
Dementia 13
, and Phil Feldman, producer of
You're a Big Boy Now
.

Frankie Pantangeli, who has become completely alienated from the Corleone crime family, is the star witness against Michael. When Frankie takes the stand, he sees that Michael has imported Frankie's revered older brother Vincenzo from Sicily to witness his testimony. Acknowledging this old family tie, Frankie fakes an attack of “amnesia” and withdraws his charges against Michael.

Coppola created an air of authenticity in the scene by filming the testimony of Michael and other witnesses with a somewhat-less-than-polished photography and sound recording than he normally employed in the movie and thereby giving the sequence the genuine look and feel of a newsreel. Such craftsmanship on Coppola's part is all too often overlooked in critical assessments of his work.

Because Kay is now aware that Michael is a hardened criminal, she finally informs him that she is going to leave him and take their little boy and girl with her. At the climax of their dreadful quarrel, Kay reveals that the miscarriage she had told Michael she had suffered earlier was actually an abortion. She killed their unborn son, she explains, because she would not bring another child into the vicious Corleone world. Michael is shocked to learn of the loss of a second son, who would have helped to keep the Corleone name alive, and he angrily slaps his wife across the face. But it is Kay who has delivered the severest blow. Michael orders Kay to get out but to leave their children behind. “That Kay had deliberately aborted the baby was the suggestion of my sister Talia,” says Coppola in his commentary. “Kay is appalled that Michael has gone scot-free after the Senate investigation.” She tells him what she has done as her way of “resisting the terrible evil which is spreading out from the man she once loved. She had the abortion because she knew Michael would never forgive her, and she wanted out of her Mafia marriage.”

The film continues to develop two separate story lines by showing both young Vito and Michael exacting revenge for earlier treachery. We watch Vito return briefly to the Sicily of his boyhood in order to stab to death Don Ciccio, the local Mafia chieftain responsible for the deaths of his parents and his brother decades before. Don Ciccio is an aging, decrepit man at this point, so Vito's gruesome vendetta-killing of the pathetic don, a crime committed with ruthless premeditation, illustrates the savage side of Vito's nature that lurks beneath the charming and civilized facade that he cultivates. In a parallel act of vengeance, Michael arranges for the assassination of rival mobster Hyman Roth, who had plotted to have Michael slain. Michael also has his weak and ineffectual older brother Fredo shot when he learns that Fredo, who all along had been jealous of his kid brother Michael for superseding him as head of the Corleone family, had cooperated with Roth's scheme to kill Michael.

Mario Puzo states in the documentary, “I didn't want Fredo killed, but Francis was adamant. So I said, ‘Okay, but don't kill him until after his mother dies.' If Michael murdered his own brother while their mother was still alive, the audience would never forgive him, whereas they might forgive him if he did it afterwards.” And so in the film Michael decides to spare Fredo while Mama Corleone is still matriarch of the family. At her mother's wake Connie, who is no longer the brazen hussy she was at the beginning of the movie, entreats Michael to forgive Fredo's treachery (in a scene that helped to win Talia Shire an Oscar nomination). While Michael hugs Fredo in a spurious gesture of fraternal affection, he glares at Al Neri, Michael's enforcer, thereby signaling to him that the time to take vengeance on Fredo is at hand.

The murder occurs when Fredo goes fishing just off the pier from Michael's Tahoe estate. Fredo says a “Hail Mary” to ensure that he will catch a fish. “When I was a boy of eight,” Coppola recalls on the DVD, “I adored the Blessed Virgin Mary, who loves children. I believed that, if I said a ‘Hail Mary' when we went fishing, I would catch a fish, and I did. So Fredo says a prayer to catch a fish just before Neri, who is in the boat with him, pulls the trigger.”

Coppola shot the scene in which Neri liquidates Fredo in long shot in order to depict how it looked from Michael's point of view as he witnessed the killing through the Venetian blinds in his office. When Fredo is murdered, says William McDonald, the stony figure of Michael “stands gazing out of a window in the family compound.” His transformation to monster now complete, “he has lost his soul as surely as Fredo's soul has departed.”
²⁴
In essence, Michael has lost his moral compass and may never find it again.