GODFATHERS AND SONS

...As the Revolution boils over on the streets outside, Hyman Ross (Lee Strasberg), Michael's Jewish partner, prematurely congratulates everyone on the wonderful things they have achieved-big nightclubs, luxury hotels, bars selling every kind of perversion...

...He is the system, the man on top- Calley's untouchable superiors or the Nixon behind Watergate-a person so buffered by money and force, so far removed from the hands that carry out his orders, that he always emerges without a wrinkle in his expensive suit, while his underlings get it in the neck...

...This continues throughout, though absolutely nothing Michael does is inconsistent with his being a thoroughly awful man, someone the audience should hate...

...With the flair of Bertolucci (whom he admires), some terrific crowd scenes, good music, and a cast of actors that alone may win this film the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, Coppola has made a movie no less seductive than The Godfather...

...Most of the "business meetings" take place against the background of elaborate social rituals, and as in The Godfather, the eruption of violence often seems to breed cut of a slow religious procession or event...

...After an extravagant party (recalling the wedding of Connie Corleone, which opened The Godfather), an attempt is made on Michael's life, and by the end of the film Michael avenges himself-as, in flashbacks, Vito avenges his family...

...In our final glimpse of him at this age, he sits singing in his hospital cell, looking out the window to freedom and perhaps to home...

...Coppola reminds us of that choice...

...In scenes set in Miami, New York, Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, Godfather II shows that where dollars and power are, there too are corruption and oppression...

...This flashback device reinforces the identification in the audience's mind, and we are therefore apt to extend to Michael the same understanding we gave to Vito -forgetting that while the one began his life as a victim, the other began his as a millionaire's scion who chose, when the time came, to wear his father's mantle...

...Michael is hooked into a network of vice that includes senators as well as foreign presidents, and in Batista's Havana (filmed in Santo Domingo) he wheels and deals with representatives of America's largest corporations...

...When the movie leaves Vito, he is roughly the same age as Michael, who has in every way identified with his father's history, values and social role...

...even when he has his brother killed...

...Instead, Vito's decision to become The Black Hand of the Mafia is fuzzed over as the act of a Robin Hood who defends old women against bullying landlords, and whose life of crime is the only alternative to passivity...

...Primarily, however, it is the logic of the narrative that locates the viewer's sympathies...

...In this respect, Coppola's film is no different-except that he is an ambitious and talented director, and if the studios now think they can only get us to pay $4 a throw by offering disasters even greater than the ones around us, I'd rather go down in the Sodom and Gomorrah style of Godfather II than in that of The Towering Inferno or Death Wish...

...It wholly identifies with Michaelwhen he slams the door in his wife's face because she finally dares to hint to him that she is a person...

...Assisted by Mario Puzo, he has turned the leftovers from Puzo's novel into a three-and-a-half hour panorama of sleazy characters who plot to rub each other out, talk about love of family when they clearly mean pride of possession, and engage in destructive enterprises (prostitution and gambling, for example)-yet he almost has us believing we're not looking at a million-dollar gangland spectacular but a Spenglerian epic about The Decline of the Western World...

...But that isn't where the moral focus of the movie is, and the audience responds accordingly...

...Indeed, the picture is so well paced that we are willing to sit through long sequences of dialogue and relative inactivity for the drama we see preparing itself in the wings...

...and because of what it does with time-because it is about fathers, and fathers of fathers, as well as sons-it is more a fleshing out of The Godfather than a sequel...

...Their loyalty is based on that...

...All our people are business men," Michael remarks early on...

...We last see Vito back in New York as a man to be reckoned with, established in a small business that is a front for his illegal activities, and enjoying his new power...

...Nevertheless, Godfather II is a very effective movie, much better than its predecessor...

...the future Godfather asks his friend...

...Yet this reminder is the most superficial bow to honesty, since the film presents Michael as a tragic figure by fusing him with the young Vito, and that's a lie...

...It's an interesting scene, and a more thoughtful director would have explored its implications, both moral and psychological...

...The code of the Mafia is presented here as the logical extension of "The American Way...

...when he comes away unscathed from a Senate committee investigating organized crime...

...Michael's unsmiling, largely expressionless face implies great inner pain, and his commitment to invulnerability ultimately leaves him a man alone...

...As a young man living in New York and struggling to support his wife and small children, Vito (played here by Robert De Niro) again encounters evil, this time in the person of Fanucci, "The Black Hand," who terrorizes the shopkeepers in "his area" into making substantial payoffs out of their meager incomes...

...When Vito resists Fanucci's pressure and kills him, we are glad Little Italy has been delivered...

...Nino Rota's music is lush and poignant...

...Coppola, his production designer Dean Tavoularis (who was also the art director for Bonnie and Clyde) and Gordon Willis, the director of photography, all have an eye for images-the arrival of the immigrants at Ellis Island (shot in Trieste), the weeping Christ plastered with dollar bills that is carried in the San Rocco festival, the re-creation of Little Italy Street life, and the composition of the characters in scene after scene...

...He is not the little guy who's beat the system...

...In rapid succession the brother and mother are also killed...

...The scene then fades into another procession 65 years later at Lake Tahoe: The Corleone clan is being reunited by the first communion of Michael's son...

...The child Vito looks like the man Vito, who himself, in speech and bearing, suggests Brando...

...Miraculously, Vito escapes...

...In another flashback, he shows us the scene from The Godfather in which Michael, the only member of the family who desired and got a college education, announces to his astonished brothers that he has joined the Army and wants none of the family business...

...They have no one to protect them," is the answer...

...In part, the film's romanticism produces this identification...

...These social occasions give rise to some of the film's most brilliant visual moments...

...But the implications of this film are much more contradictory, going beyond the Mafia to the corporate money-machine in general...

...Michael is making his exit from the Corleone's world-only to "come home" later by pulling the trigger on one of his father's enemies...

...But he's Italian himself-why does he steal from other Italians...

...Thus, two cycles of retaliation are completed...

...But it has been a season of waste for American movies...

...Vito loses his job because of Fanucci...

...Incredibly, the actors who as characters are supposed to resemble each other actually do...

...The original ended with the death of Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and the succession of his favorite son, Michael (Al Pacino in both films...

...the brooding color suggests a Rembrandt self-portrait...

...Most have had Buy Me stamped all over them, and have sold by appealing to the crudest instincts of their audiences...

...That time around, the audience's affection for the criminals was won by their macho ethic, Brando's magnetism and the fantasy of omnipotence captured by Puzo's book...

...The movie opens with a hot Sicilian landscape and a funeral procession-Vito as a small boy with his older brother and mother, accompanying the coffin of his father who has been slain by Don Ciccio, the local chief...

...We follow Vito to Ellis Island, where he is brutally introduced to the New World by a three-month quarantine for smallpox...

...Nor can we help being involved in his revenge when he returns to Sicily and kills Don Ciccio...

...In the process, the action weaves in and out of the lives of both Michael as the Godfather, and Vito in his youth...