Creatively speaking, 2024 was Francis Ford Coppola’s biggest year in ages. Not only did it see the release of his first movie in 13 years, that film was Megalopolis, a dream project that had been kicking around in his head for upwards of four decades. It made a particularly auspicious year for the emergence of Coppola’s potentially career-capping achievement, because it also marked the 50th anniversary of perhaps his greatest sustained professional triumph: the year he released both The Conversation and The Godfather Part II within months of each other in 1974. (For good measure, that year also saw the release of a lavish, misbegotten adaptation of The Great Gatsby, his screenplay for which had become legendary, even if the movie didn’t live up to it.) With the sprawling (and loopy) ambition of Megalopolis still fresh in mind, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather Part II seems particularly notable in Coppola’s evolution as a film-maker.
The very idea of a prestige sequel was a strange ambition in 1974, when follow-ups were certainly common – especially to hits as smashing as The Godfather – but not particularly respected. Prequels were even less fashionable. After going smaller with the masterful surveillance thriller The Conversation, Coppola went all out for his next movie, merging a sequel story following the further corruption of a new mafia family head, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with a flashback prequel following the arrival of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, playing the young version of Marlon Brando’s indelible character from the first film) in America and his introduction into a life of crime. In doing so, he brought together Pacino and De Niro, both still young actors at the time; the fact that their characters cannot meet in these forms on screen, only co-feature in a handful of dissolves, helped burnish both actors’ legends as they worked their way across a stunning array of subsequent 70s films. (They would, of course, eventually share the screen properly in several films, two of them notable: briefly but brilliantly in 1995’s Heat, and more substantially in 2019’s The Irishman.)
