Gangsters and G-Men on Screen by Gene D. Phillips

Author:Gene D. Phillips [Phillips, Gene D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Godfather: Part II

The focus of the gangster film in the 1950s and thereafter was not the push to the top and the inevitable fall, as in Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, but the “mundane problems of living legitimately once the top had been reached: the conflict of the old life of crime and the new respectability.” Such is the case in The Godfather: Part II, as Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin put it.1 Paramount Pictures had assumed that the first Godfather film would be a routine gangster picture and a modest success.

When The Godfather (1971) became a runaway hit, the studio brass insisted that Francis Ford Coppola, its director and cowriter, come up with a sequel. The Godfather: Part II would continue to examine organized crime in the 1950s, when the Senate Committee on Organized Crime, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, investigated the Syndicate, which is depicted in The Big Heat. The term syndicate “lacks any ethnic resonance.”2 Nevertheless, in The Big Heat, Mike Lagana is portrayed as a first-generation Italian with Old World origins, foreshadowing the Mafia types in the Godfather films. In Coppola’s Mafia movies, the word family is substituted to signify each of the gangs making up the New York Mafia to mollify the coalition of Italian American groups who protested the use of the word Mafia in the films.

In approaching the screenplay of The Godfather: Part II, Coppola explains, “I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose the ascension of the family under Vito Corleone with the decline of the family under his son Michael, to show in flashback how the young Vito Corleone was building this crime family in America, while his son in the present is presiding over its disintegration.”3 In the documentary that accompanies the Godfather trilogy on DVD, Coppola notes, “I had always wanted to write a screenplay that told the story of a father and a son at the same age: They were both in their thirties, and I would integrate the two stories.”4 Young Vito Corleone’s early life as an immigrant is set during World War I, while the later life of the Corleone family, presided over by son Michael, is updated to the 1950s. The modern story depicts the family as “beset by Byzantine intrigues, marital discord, fraternal rivalry, and internal decay.”5 Consequently, The Godfather: Part II covers nearly sixty years of U.S. history, from the immigrants coming to the United States in the early 1900s until the post–World War II era.

Paramount had commissioned Mario Puzo, author of the novel The Godfather (1969), to prepare a preliminary draft of the screenplay before Coppola came on board, and Coppola incorporated some incidents from it in his version of the screenplay. Most of the events in the modern story were invented by Coppola. Some of them were suggested by contemporary newspaper accounts. There is, for example, the incident in which Michael frames Nevada senator Pat Geary by having a dead prostitute found in his bed in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.