Word: vito
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What Coppola is attempting is a portrait of a world. The film has a warp in the story of young Vito Corleone and a woof in the story of his son Michael separated by about 30 years. Vito (Robert DeNiro) takes the first steps on the ascent from petty thief to capo di rutti capi in a series of flash-backs interspersed in the main action. Here, Michael (Al Pacino) has to deal with the legacy of his father--an extra-legal fiefdom doing business on a scale Exxon wouldn't sneeze at--and try to adapt it to changing...
...first frame of the film to the last, is the inexorability of revenge. Those who live by the sword may not always die by the sword (Marion Brando died of a heart attack in a tomato garden) but they are forced to go on living by the sword. Vito's father, we learn in the beginning of this film, was an honest man killed by a Sicilian don for refusing to be intimidated, twenty years later. Vito returns to draw an ugly line down the old man's belly with a stiletto. He has succumbed to the revenge ethic...
Neither of Coppola's two Godfathers could be accused of making the underworld life seem attractive, and Michael is even less romanticized than his father. Vito's world was a community where, if he walked down he street in New York's Little Italy, dapper old men and peasant-faced old women would how to him and kiss his hand. Even Michael's own lieutenants in New York would probably be unable to recognize him, his empire grown so large that his isolation at the top is unavoidable...
...full-scale battle, when Michael's wife notices that the windows are open and a second later, burst after burst of gunfire destroys her bedroom--Coppola seems to have spent most of his energy on a few grand set pieces. The big party scene in Godfather I, when Vito's daughter is married, set the precedent for this emphasis and Coppola has created several new ones--Michael's son's first communion, the funeral of Vito's widow, Michael's appearance before a congressional committee, and, most bizarre of all, a long cloak, dagger and revolution sequence in pre-Castro...
LIKE HIS FATHER, Michael is a composite of several celebrated underworld figures--Frank Costello, Vito Genovese and Lucky Luciano. He lives in a world of fifties sleaze--of hideous Scandinavian modern furniture, immense Carmen Miranda style nightclubs, of two-tone deSotos and banana daiquiris. The older generation, at least, lived like old-fashioned Italian dons--eating good food, living in fine old houses, aspiring to a taste for literature and history. The younger generation is caught halfway between Scarsdale and Umberto's Clam House. Surprisingly, the movie Godfather II is closest to is The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: two hard...