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The Godfather: Part II Movie Content 1974 Production

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Director :
Francis Ford Coppola

Writers :
Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola

Genre :
Drama, Thriller

Cast :
Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Talia Shire, Lee Strasberg, Michael V. Gazzo, Richard Bright, Gastone Moschin, Tom Rosqui, Bruno Kirby, Frank Sivero, Francesca De Sapio

Summary :
The Godfather Part II is a 1974 motion picture directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a script co-written with Mario Puzo. The film is both a sequel and a prequel to The Godfather, chronicling the story of the Corleone family following the events of the first film while also depicting the rise to power of the young Vito Corleone. It is ranked as the third best movie of all time by the Internet Movie Database, with the movie's predecessor, The Godfather, ranked as #1, and the American Film Institute lists it as #32.[1][2] The Godfather Part II is considered by many as the greatest sequel of all-time, being nominated for 11 Academy Awards and winning 6, including the Best Picture Award (the only sequel except The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2003 to do so) and the Best Supporting Actor Award. It is considered by some critics to be even better than the original. The Godfather Part II has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Critics

Lucia Bozzola :
Both sequel and prequel to The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) delves further into the dark side of the capitalist American dream by paralleling the young Vito Corleone's 1910s rise with his son Michael's 1950s spiritual fall. To create a more contemplative view of the Corleones' American success story, Coppola cross-cut between Vito's story (in subtitled Italian) and Michael's, revealing how the honorable aim of protecting the family degenerates into an excuse for wielding lethal power, for the sake only of business. Images of Vito's parental concern and immigrant neighborhood dealings dissolve to Michael's familial disintegration and U.S. Senate subterfuge. Cinematographer Gordon Willis' warm sepia tones for the Vito sequences recall period photographs, contrasting sharply with the crass brightness and cold shadows of 1950s Lake Tahoe and Havana. With the memory of The Godfather present in Robert De Niro's uncanny evocation of Marlon Brando and in flashbacks to 1942, Coppola underlines how much The Godfather's potentially alluring myth of family unity begat horrific violence; the film becomes both a critique of responses to the first film that may have glorified its family-oriented violence and a more explicit and mournful allegory of American corporate violence and corruption across the 20th century. These aspects, together with the unique cross-cut narrative, give the movie a richer dimension and a wider scope than the first one's family drama, and it was hailed by most observers as the rare sequel that equaled, or even surpassed, the original. A box-office hit, it was nominated for ten Oscars and won six, including Best Picture, the Director prize denied Coppola in 1972, Supporting Actor for De Niro, Art Direction, and Score. Years of sequel plans finally produced The Godfather Part III in 1990; and parts I and II were later cut together in chronological order for TV as The Godfather Saga, eliminating this film's cross-cut structure. Often equated with Citizen Kane (1941), The Godfather Part II remains one of the most artistically challenging popular films ever made.