Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 follow-up runs two stories side by side, Vito Corleone’s rise in New York and his son Michael’s hollowing-out at Lake Tahoe, and it became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Godfather Part II ends where few crime films of its time were willing to end: with the man who has won every fight sitting alone by a lake, after ordering the death of his own brother. Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1974 film takes the empire built in The Godfather two years earlier and spends 200 minutes taking it apart from the inside, while telling, in parallel, the story of how that empire began. It is a sequel and a prequel at the same time, and that double shape is the whole idea of the film.

Two stories, one family

In 1958, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is the Don. He runs the family from a compound at Lake Tahoe, wants a stake in the Las Vegas casinos, and is courted by the Jewish mob boss Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), who wants him to invest in Havana under the Batista government. An attempt on Michael’s life at the compound, on the night of his son Anthony’s first communion, convinces him that someone close to him has betrayed him. The search for that traitor runs through a Senate committee on organized crime and the fall of Batista’s Cuba on New Year’s Eve, and ends with his own brother, Fredo (John Cazale).

The second story begins in 1901. Nine-year-old Vito Andolini escapes the Sicilian town of Corleone after the local chieftain, Don Ciccio, kills the rest of his family; at Ellis Island an immigration officer registers him under the name of his hometown. By 1917 the young Vito (Robert De Niro) is married, has an infant son, Sonny, and loses his job in a Little Italy grocery because of Don Fanucci, the Black Hand extortionist who preys on the neighbourhood. He starts stealing with his neighbour Peter Clemenza, kills Fanucci, and becomes the man the neighbours turn to for protection. In 1922 he returns to Sicily, sets up an olive oil import business and settles his account with Don Ciccio.

The film cuts between the two timelines instead of telling them in order, so the father’s rise and the son’s fall comment on each other. Coppola described the plan as setting the family’s ascent under Vito against its decline under Michael, a father and a son seen at the same age, both in their thirties. Vito gathers people around him; Michael loses them one by one: his wife Kay (Diane Keaton), his capo Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), and finally Fredo, the brother he once protected.

The Godfather Part II (1974) — *The Godfather Part II* (1974) — the original theatrical poster. Paramount Pictures.

How the sequel got made

Mario Puzo, whose 1969 novel was the basis of both films, started writing a script for a follow-up in December 1971, before The Godfather had even opened; its working title was The Death of Michael Corleone. Puzo and Coppola wrote the screenplay together, and Paramount Pictures, after the commercial success of the first film, gave the director far more control than he had the first time. Coppola has said that the double structure was his way of not simply making the first film over again. He met Martin Scorsese about directing the sequel, but Paramount refused.

The production almost stalled before it started. Al Pacino’s lawyers told Coppola that the actor had serious doubts about Puzo’s script and would not take part; Coppola spent a night rewriting it, Pacino approved the new version, and the shoot went ahead. The original budget of $6 million rose past $11 million. Principal photography ran from October 1, 1973, to June 19, 1974. The Havana sequences were shot in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, and the Sicilian town seen in the film is Forza d’Agrò.

Coppola also fought for the title. Paramount doubted that audiences wanted more of a story they had already seen, but he insisted on calling it Part II, and it became the first major American film to carry a number that way; numbered sequels became standard practice after its success. Three weeks before release, critics and journalists who had seen it called it a disaster, mostly because the cross-cutting between Vito and Michael was too frequent. Coppola and the editors, Peter Zinner, Barry Malkin and Richard Marks, went back to the cutting room to restructure it. By Coppola’s own account, the Senate hearing was modelled on the Valachi hearings, with Pentangeli as a Valachi-like witness.

The actors who came back, and the ones who did not

Several faces from the first film returned: Robert Duvall as the consigliere Tom Hagen, Diane Keaton as Kay, Talia Shire as Connie, John Cazale as Fredo. Others did not. Marlon Brando agreed to appear in a flashback to Vito’s birthday on December 7, 1941, but, feeling mistreated by Paramount’s board, he did not show up for the single day of shooting, and Coppola rewrote the scene that same day. Richard S. Castellano did not return as Clemenza, and the part of the plot meant for the older Clemenza went to a new character, Frank Pentangeli. James Cagney turned down the role of Hyman Roth because he had retired from acting, and the part went to Lee Strasberg, the acting teacher best known for his work at the Actors Studio. James Caan came back as Sonny for the birthday scene alone.

Robert De Niro, who had just broken through in Mean Streets, played the young Vito largely in Sicilian, the same character Brando had played two years earlier. Brando had won the Oscar for the role in 1973; De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for it, the first time two actors received Academy Awards for playing the same character. Pacino, who had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the first film, was nominated for Best Actor this time and won the BAFTA, an award shared with Dog Day Afternoon. Gazzo and Strasberg were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Talia Shire for Best Supporting Actress.

The craft behind the camera

Most of the first film’s key collaborators came back. Gordon Willis was again the cinematographer, and his warm, amber-toned photography of the early-century chapters is one of the most recognisable looks in 1970s American film. Dean Tavoularis designed the production, from turn-of-the-century Little Italy and Ellis Island to a 1950s Nevada lakeside compound and pre-revolutionary Havana; he shared the Oscar for art direction with Angelo P. Graham and George R. Nelson. Theadora Van Runkle was nominated for the costumes. The Godfather Part II was also the last major American film to have its release prints made with Technicolor’s dye imbibition process until the late 1990s.

The score is by Nino Rota, with additions by Carmine Coppola, the director’s father. Rota’s themes from the first film return alongside new music for the Sicilian and New York chapters, and the score won the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score. The film runs 200 minutes, in English and Sicilian, and was produced by Paramount Pictures and The Coppola Company.

Six Oscars and a lasting argument

The film premiered in New York on December 12, 1974, and opened across the United States on December 20. It earned $47.5 million in the United States and Canada, less than the original but enough to make it Paramount’s highest-grossing film of 1974, and about $93 million worldwide over the years. At the 47th Academy Awards it received eleven nominations and won six: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for De Niro, Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola and Puzo, Best Art Direction and Best Original Dramatic Score. It was the first sequel to win Best Picture, and The Godfather and its follow-up are still the only original-and-sequel pair in which both films took the top prize. Coppola also won the Directors Guild of America award.

Its standing has only grown since. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1993. The American Film Institute ranked it 32nd among American films in 1998 and again in 2007, placed Michael Corleone 11th on its list of screen villains, and put “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” on its list of the most memorable lines in American film. Michael’s words to Fredo, “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart,” are among the most quoted in the whole saga.

Coppola went back to the material more than once. The Godfather Saga, a chronological re-edit of the first two films with unused footage, was prepared for television and broadcast by NBC in 1977, and The Godfather Part III followed in 1990. The first two films were restored by Robert A. Harris for a 2008 release and remastered again for the 50th anniversary of the original in 2022.

What keeps drawing people to it is its shape: a crime epic of more than three hours that refuses the usual sequel formula of more of the same, and instead asks what the ending of the first film cost. The Godfather asked whether Michael could stay out of the family business. Part II answers that he became it so completely that, by the last scene, there is no one left around him, only Michael alone at the compound by the lake. Whether it surpasses the original is a debate that has gone on for fifty years, and that alone sets it apart from almost every other sequel.