The Godfather Part II continues the saga of the Corleone family and unfolds with inter-related parts told through flashback and a neat set of bookends that reference the original film. The first direction concerns young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) growing up in Sicily under the shadow of a local crime lord and is then forced to migrate to New York in the early 1900s. As a man he eventually assumes the mantle of neighborhood protector and establishes himself as the head of the Corleone crime family by quickly stepping up his organization's competition with all other mobsters.

The second strand of action concerns Vito's youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), who settles into his role as family patriarch in the 1950s after having inherited the position with Vito's death as told in the first film. Among his struggles are various attempts to diversify the family interest with business ventures in Las Vegas, Hollywood and Cuba along with the strain of managing his family that's constantly falling apart at the seams.

Talia Shire reprises her role as Michael's disaffected sister Connie just as Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton and John Cazale continue playing their characters, each of them as foils to Michael's unraveling story as family scion. Interestingly, the film was also the debut of Lee Strasberg playing the Jewish mobster Hyman Roth.

Not specifically known for his recorded work as an actor Strasberg had been remarkably influential on the New York stage in adapting Stanslavsky's teachings through the establishment of "method" acting. Using acting schools, theatrical productions and on-going relationships with various actors and actresses beginning in the 1930s and continuing through his death, Strasberg exerted an extraordinary influence on two generations of stage and screen actors. His Hyman Roth also demonstrates the increasingly global business pursuits of the Corleone family in that his non-Sicilian ancestry and more coldly calculated weighing of human value versus business interests weighs in as an important lesson for Michael.

Most impressively some of The Godfather Part II's biggest moments are precisely those that contrast the intimate times in the family setting with the spectacular possibilities of a changing world. Among such notable sequences are the birth of the Cuban revolution as the culmination and failure of a particular Corleone venture, the grandiose Corleone estate set against the seeds of discontent eating away at Michael's wife Kay (Keaton) and Vito's immigration at Ellis Island where he's quarantined with the Statue of Liberty viewable from his holding cell.

Supporters and detractors for this film abound but one common overall reaction is the deep impression of how utterly ambitious the film is when remembering the minimal expectations of its source material. Having only gotten off the ground because novelist-turned-screenwriter Mario Puzo's book became a bestseller, The Godfather itself was produced as a B-level genre picture although it went on to define a moment in American filmmaking like few other films before or since.

With its pedigree and fan base secure the go-ahead for a sequel was given although that sequel was to have a more self-consciously epic style to extend all the various plot lines originated in the first film. Thus the tension of Michael's leadership in the family as its one member raised under legitimate, non-criminal circumstances is continually at odds with the American crucible of capitalism.

For some this extended study of family relations, the mafia and its historical setting across two continents is enough to elicit yawns and derision. To others the subject was conducive to being the definitive example of good movie storytelling and is deserving of every word of praise ever offered.

To both sets of critics and movie watchers alike there is a space for discussing the movie with regard to what it symbolizes.

One casualty of Michael's struggle, and of the Corleone family's struggle more generally, is the slipping importance of blood ties when thrust into the consumer marketplace. Where the elder Vito Corleone warned his sons and allies of the dangers of new industries like the drug trade in the first film, he was subscribing to an old-World perspective where few things are more important than the connections of family loyalty.

In Michael's experience as family Don in the sequel, rampant globalization and the development of a truly international drug trade have put the family's needs second to the demands of commerce. His inheritance is indeed a family business but a business just the same. It is this new dominance of corporate direction over personal considerations that becomes the purpose of the sequel as both an indictment and, perhaps, confused celebration of commercial impulses.

Just as critics of consumer capitalism have long theorized that the tension between a culture based on exchanging material goods and more traditional values of humanism and interpersonal relations destroys people even as it stands to make them rich, the same argument holds for the Corleone family. Michael has his brother Fredo (Cazale) killed for selling out the family because it's in the family's interest to do. Earlier he had Connie's husband killed for a similar reason and although these decisions were difficult to sanction, so was the possibility of Corleone failure in the mobster underworld.

Budgeted at $13 million, a sum quite lavish in 1974, The Godfather Part II did what few sequels have ever managed to repeat. It eclipsed the critical enthusiasm and box office success of its predecessor while also successfully expanding the franchise for further growth. As a side note, it was also the last film printed in the United States using the Technicolor "imbibition" process which is an expensive method for printing copies of an original negative using Technicolor's native three-strip dyes instead of relying on the now-dominant photochemical and digital process that deteriorate over time.

Earning some $57.3 million at the domestic box office, the film repeated the Best Picture honors of The Godfather. This first sequel also demonstrated the Midas touch of producer-director-writer Francis Ford Coppola and, for a few years at least, it made him the envy of global filmmaking if not its outright king.

Nominated against Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny and The Towering Inferno, The Godfather Part II was from the moment of pre-production leaks about its content through its release a movie sensation that was very closely tied to its primary creative force. So powerful and influential was Coppola during the period, and so fantastically successful was he, that no fewer than two of his movies, The Conversation and the Corleone sequel, were nominated for Best Picture of the year. No slouch with regard to screenwriting either he was also nominated for the accompanying screenplays as well as for the adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

If taken in isolation or even as part of a career progression, Coppola's 1970s is without precedent in movie history. With an Oscar-winning effort for his contribution to the script of Patton in 1970 through his Palm d'Or win for Apocalypse Now in 1979, his 1970s saw almost no limiting factor save the boundaries of his imagination and his will towards ever greater accomplishment.

With prodigious efforts in the varied roles of film producer, writer and director, not to mention his on-going project of re-producing the classical studio system through his own company called American Zoetrope, Coppola's career was at its absolute apex in 1974. His troupe of collaborators, favored actors and financiers were trust-worthy to a one and his specific, thorn-like tap of the zeitgeist through movie after movie after movie is utterly remarkable.

His eventual lapse into failure and relative obscurity during the 1980s and '90s is both an echo of his decade of success but it is also the necessary result for someone having lived and worked so ambitiously and so decadently for as long as he did. Still, we celebrate his pair of Best Picture honors as given him with The Godfather Part II not for what they suggested about who he would become but, instead, for the fundamental force of his person in the moment when he truly was his own greatest ally.

The Godfather Part II may not be great without its relationship to The Godfather. Yet it is undeniably a test of vision and courage to have strode so far off the normally trod commercial path in pursuit of success.

Lightening may not strike twice very often but when it does the coincidence of creation and destruction demands we pause to marvel.