CRelatively speaking, 2024 was Francis Ford Coppola’s biggest year in a long time. Not only was it the release of his first film in 13 years, this film was Megalopolis, a dream project that had been floating around in his head for over four decades. It was a particularly auspicious year for Coppola’s potentially career-defining achievement, because it also marked the 50th anniversary of perhaps his greatest lasting professional triumph: the year in which he released both “The Conversation” and “The Godfather Part II” within a few months of each other 1974. (This year also saw the release of a lavish, failed adaptation of The Great Gatsby, whose script had become legendary, even if the film was not Do it justice.) Given the still-fresh (and crazy) ambitions of Megalopolis, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather II seems particularly notable in Coppola’s evolution as a filmmaker.

The very idea of ​​a prestige sequel was a strange ambition in 1974, when sequels were certainly common – especially to such smashing hits as The Godfather – but weren’t particularly respected. Prequels were even less fashionable. After downsizing with the masterful surveillance thriller “The Conversation,” Coppola went all out for his next film, creating a sequel story about the further corruption of a new Mafia family boss, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with a flashback following the arrival of merged Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, playing the young version of Marlon Brando’s indelible character from the first film) in America and his introduction to a life of crime. He brought Pacino and De Niro together, both young actors at the time; The fact that their characters cannot meet on screen in this form, but only appear together in a few dissolves, has helped to smooth the legends of both actors as they make their way through a breathtaking series of subsequent ’70s films. (Of course, they would eventually appear properly on screen in several films, two of which are notable: briefly but brilliantly in 1995’s “Heat” and even more prominently in 2019’s “The Irishman.”)

Although The Godfather II has long been considered one of cinema’s truly great sequels, it’s worth asking what motivated Coppola to revisit this material. The film is now so well regarded and so closely tied to the original film in our minds that it’s easy to overlook how little of it actually contains new revelations about Michael, who we already know descends into obscurity at the end of the first film or even Vito, whose tender side already came to light in certain scenes of Brando’s performance. Roger Ebert famously gave the film a mixed positive three-star review at the time, feeling that the overlap between Michael’s and Vito’s stories detracted from the film’s dynamics, particularly Michael’s, which he found to be darker and more complex. This is thanks in part to Pacino’s great performance; A large part of his work in the film is watching silently and strategizing so that it feels particularly creepy, desperate and unhinged when he appears late in the film opposite Diane Keaton in the role of Michael’s annoyed wife Kay see is. De Niro deservedly won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work as Vito, but Pacino by nature has a wider emotional range to cover.

But these De Niro-directed sequences are also a key reason why the film endures as a top-notch sequel. Although Ebert ultimately makes a convincing case for the superiority of the first film and is absolutely right that the film does get convoluted at times, particularly with regard to Michael’s dealings in Cuba, I disagree with his assertion that the Vito flashbacks amount to a sentimentalization of the character as the “right” kind of criminal. Set in early 20th century New York, the beauty and detail of these scenes is certainly rich, giving them a certain warmth, and the centerpiece sequence in which Vito knocks out Don Fanucci exudes old-fashioned gangster movie glory. But the weight of the Vito material in the film depends on it playing like a mythical family story – the kind of humble beginning that would surely have been retold in hushed tones within the family and could serve as a quiet justification for Michael’s actions in the present: Look at how far we’ve come; We can’t allow this now. The Vito sections transform “The Godfather Part II” into a more explicit and therefore even more American immigration story. It’s no surprise that the upcoming 215-minute immigrant epic “The Brutalist” seems to quote and invert the famous shot of the Statue of Liberty from Vito’s arrival in New York.

Perhaps this innate Americanism is why some of the material set in Cuba feels less urgent, even in what is probably the film’s most famous moment: Michael hugging his brother Fredo (John Cazale) tightly and angrily and saying, “I know that, Fredo. You broke my heart.” Although the film is far too rich in memorable characters like Fredo and too lavishly entertaining to be truly overlong, “The Godfather Part II” feels a little more indulgent at 200 minutes than its predecessor at 175 – and this was Coppola’s second film of the year! It feels like a special gesture of auteur-driven versatility in a year when several other major filmmakers happened to release their own doubleheaders. Of the pair of films released in 1974 by Coppola, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks and Sidney Lumet, The Godfather Part II is easily the biggest breakthrough, with enough ambition (and almost literally enough story) for two films alone.

In a way, in retrospect, it feels like The Godfather Part II ushered in a different phase in Coppola’s career, the last time his enormous risks paid off in more or less the best way possible. He spent the better part of the next five years making Apocalypse Now, and while that film enjoys its own legendary reputation so many years later, it took a greater financial, mental and physical toll on him than his previous epic (and in contrast The sequel to “The Godfather” didn’t win him an Oscar for best director for his efforts. There are even echoes of Megalopolis in “The Godfather Part II,” a far more staid and accessible film in comparison, whose subject matter and However, excesses are still reminiscent of the Roman Empire, which is explicitly discussed in both films.

The sequel to “The Godfather” had the right kind of excess – a career-enhancing kind. Pacino would become bigger in both his stardom and his acting style after this sequel, and De Niro would become one through his Oscar-winning performance an even better known name. A few years later, the ambition and scale of 1970s American filmmaking faltered and collapsed after several big-budget epics failed to pay off and were followed by blockbuster sequels – a bit like The Godfather II, but perhaps not like that dark, not so long, not so dark – became even more enticing. A film like “Megalopolis” had to be shelved for years, then decades, before Coppola self-financed it and released it essentially as a novelty release. “The Godfather Part II” gave the appropriate but false impression that things could just keep getting bigger for a fierce American visionary.