THE SCREEN

...The films ends over half a century later with Michael sitting in a chair, similarly alone, at Lake Tahoe...

...Put back into chronological order, however, the story Coppola has told would not be as powerful, as he well knows I'm sure...

...He is concerned not so much with how they relate as father and son, but with how they compare as men...

...This is why Michael's life as a godfather seems in the end so pathetic, so completely an act of self-destruction...

...But only in the new film does Coppola realize fully the potential of silhouetting his characters against the panorama of the world behind them...

...What makes The Godfather, Part II an affecting film, and a better film than part I, is just the way Coppola must cross-cut Vito's and Michael's stories in order to bridge the time gap between them...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...

...The Corleone family's life in America begins in The Godfather, Part II with Vito as a boy sitting in a metal chair in the quarantine unit on Ellis Island...

...The fireworks are for the feast day of his parish's patron saint, but as Vito moves before them they seem instead to celebrate his own ascendancy, his audacity at having shot the local head of the Black Hand...

...The very strengths that made Vito's rise to power possible make Michael's exercise of that power empty...

...In front of his bright and indistinct world, each man appears as a shadowy, dominating figure...

...Like the societies he would corrupt, even the murders Michael would commit are not his own...

...Since Part'II opened Coppola himself-has even done some talking about how he would like to splice the two films together, adding Las Vegas footage now among the out-takes, in order to make a single, six-hour feature...

...The transitions from Michael's story to Vito's are all done by Coppola with fades, as if they were flashbacks-as if we were seeing Michael in the midst of remembering his own earlier days...

...The same is true of his relationship with the wife and children for whom he presumably promulgates this murder and corruption...

...In each man's story in Part II, Coppola is throwing his character into relief against the background of the society in which he lives...

...What made the film's success a foregone conclusion was the fact that it had the most lavish, most effective trailer ever used to advertise a coming attraction...

...Perhaps Coppola has Vito commit his murders with his baroque emphasis precisely to make us realize that Michael does not commit his at all...

...Like Ovid, an earlier master of Italian historical epic, Coppola simply began his story in part I in medias res...

...Far from being a celebration of Michael's achievement, the commotion in these streets through which Michael must pass is a rebellion against everything he represents...

...In Part II we are told, in effect, the story that precedes and succeeds Michael's rite de passage in part I. The two films taken together are the story of the Corleone family from the time Vito is a little boy in Sicily until the time his son Michael is a middle-aged Mafia chief living at Lake Tahoe, Nevada...

...In that shot where Vito passes along a street alight with fireworks, for instance, he is on his way from having committed his first murder...

...The earlier film is essentially an episode cut out of the middle of the later one-just the sort of vignette that a trailer always snips out of a feature to arouse audience interest...

...In fact, Michael and Vito each attempt two murders, and both of Vito's attempts are successful where both of Michael's fail...

...But the fireworks this time are the first salvos of Castro's revolution as it reaches Havana...

...Unlike his father, who is at one with the society in which he makes his way, Michael is at odds with the societies in which we see him...

...In the new film, with Pacino and Robert De Niro, Coppola is concerned with the parallel between the two gangsters...

...Part I really is like a teaser from Part II too...

...He is too isolated and insulated from them-too cut off to be effective in them...

...If there is a comparable moment in Michael's life, it is when he and Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) try to take over Cuba the way Vito took over the neighborhood...

...What was ambition in the father turns unavoidably to compulsion in the son...

...They are the only two moments of extravagance in a personality that is otherwise as unassuming, quiet and retiring as Michael's...

...The idea behind Coppola's treatment of his two main characters here is one which he first developed several years ago as the scriptwriter on Patton...

...and Coppola clearly had that device in mind again when he also began part I of The Godfather with a man delivering a monologue...

...Perhaps it is because we are made to see them both the same way like this that we also see very clearly the differences between the two men's lives and actions...

...It is the idea we see abstracted in that film at the beginning, when General Patton delivers a monologue standing before an enormous American flag...

...That closing image of Michael is a very moving one because the cross-cut, parallel structure of his and Vito's stories ultimately makes" us see them not as two characters, but as a single character...

...Moreover, the one murder that Michael attempts in Havana is of his own partner, Roth, and unlike Vito's attack on the Black Hand, which succeeds because Vito acts as the assassin himself, Michael's attempt fails because he has to send someone else to do it...

...No one needed to be persuaded, or could have been dissuaded, about going to see it...

...It had The Godfather, part I, whose own success was all the publicity campaign Part II ever needed...

...But it is still one story, not really a story and a sequel...

...In scene after scene Michael and Vito appear before a background of diffused light: a window through which the sun is shining, the indirectly lit walls in an otherwise lampless room where Michael conducts much of his business at Lake Tahoe, a fireworks display before which Vito passes on a street in New York's "Little Italy," etc...

...This venture also ends with fireworks in the street, so to speak, and with Michael silhouetted against them...

...The two men's personalities are so similar, and the circumstances and consequences of those personalities so different, that Michael comes to seem a tragic figure as a result...

...Every review I saw was favorable anyway, but that had nothing to do with the film's immediate and enormous popularity...

...In the first film, with Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, Coppola was concerned with the connection between Vito Corleone and his son...

...Vito not only commits his murders himself, but he commits them with relish and flamboyance...

...He can himself be the gunman for neither of his, and both of them are bungled as a result...