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mentalists there was too much happiness in the Corleone family and too much
pictorial beauty in the movie . Despite the disingenuous strategy of
The God–
father
that I mentioned earlier, the charge ofsentimentality makes no sense to
me.
It
ignores the entire second half of the movie, where Michael Corleone
gradually becomes an isolated and ruthless killer, up to the remarkable
moment when he looks his wife straight in the eye and lies, shutting her out
forever . As for the ingratiating visual quality of the film, a grainy, intention–
ally sordid photographic style would actually have been the more convention–
al option for a gangster movie. Instead, Coppola emphasized the beauty of
the gangsters' lives in both Sicily and America, increasing our sense of moral
squalor and violation : they lived in beauty and acted vilely . In any case , it's a
great natural advantage for a movie to be physically beautiful if the director
and cinematographer know what they're doing, and Francis Ford Coppola
and Gordon Willis's work was hardly the soft-focus lyricism of commercial
hacks. Outing the shimmering, slightly overexposed Sicilian sequences we are
meant to feel the corruption gathering in the lemon and green ripeness of the
counttyside. Sicily , that eternally fouled paradise! The rottenness became an
emanation of its heat and sun . This may not impress historians or political
scientists vety much, but it's the most expressive kind of movie shorthand.
The dark brown and red American interiors, a setting for secrets and plots,
carried associations of the corrupted stained-leather atmosphere, the phony
distinguished style , of boardrooms , manor libraries, and clubs . Like so much
of the best popular art,
The Godfather
was almost seductively easy and plea–
surable, but its pleasurableness functioned for the audience as a variety of
knowledge-we were provoked by the satisfaction the movie gave us into new
forms of understanding.
The Godfather II
is also extraordinarily beautiful, but it's a much slower,
heavier, more obviously ironic film, without the paralyzing energy , audacious
wit , or imperious command of the audience . Admirers have found a quality of
new " depth, " but to me it feels like new weight. On the other hand , cynics
who assume the film was made simply
to
sustain an earlier box-office triumph
are dead wrong-this one wasn't made only for the money. My complaint is
that it draws on Part One with rather dismaying reverence and over-explicit–
ness, dulling the interest- through sheer attenuation-of ideas that were
clear and forceful in the earlier film 's closing scenes: the increasing isolation
of the Americanized Mafioso, Michael Corleone, and the persistence of
Sicilian patterns of "honor" through the generations . In Part One the cul–
tural mix of Sicily and America produced some episodes that were funny and
bizarrely "right" (the men plotting tribal vengeance over a take-home
dinner) and also a convincing denouement . In Part Two, however, the inter–
cutting of America in the sixties with earlier periods in Sicily and Little Italy
