For the family is the last apparent refuge against the enforced socialization and alienation of human activity under capitalism. The idealized familial cohesiveness and the power this cohesiveness seems to assure the threatened individual in our irrational, dehumanizing society explain, in part, the current interest in the Mafia and the popularity of the gangster film (especially those couple-on-the run films such as SUGARLAND EXPRESS, BADLANDS, etc.). All the tender and moving moments in the film are only warm interludes among the lies, horror, brutality, and murder. VitoвЂ™s brutal murder of Fanucci is the prelude to his success. VitoвЂ™s mother is shotgunned because the very existence of the young Vito threatens the business and life of Don Ciccio.

The next time we see Michael, after the scene with his mother, he is denying before a Congressional committee that he runs drug traffic, prostitution, gambling, and other вЂњnefariousвЂќ business activities in the State of New York. Connie and Michael never speak after the scene mentioned above. Thus all those tender, moving family scenes are immediately crushed by the needs of вЂњbusiness,вЂќ CoppolaвЂ™s word for capitalism in the film. The counter theme and the real strength of the film is its demonstration that the benefits of the family structure and the hope for community have been destroyed by capitalism. The filmвЂ™s all-pervasive theme is the warmth, strength, and beauty of family ties which, in bourgeois society, alone appear to meet the desperate need we all feel for human community.

When Michael reaches out to Connie, who has returned to the family, when a confused Michael seeks the advice of his mother, when Vito CorleoneвЂ™s mother begs for the life of her only remaining son, when Vito builds his family and gathers his friends-I am affected because these scenes evoke in me the past experience of and the present need for the community that is being expressed and groped for on the screen. I left it behind, but deep inside many of those ideals and the childhood experience which gave then strength remain intact. I spent the first sixteen years or so of my life surrounded by relatives the experience was mostly positive and comfortable. I grew up in a large, newly urbanized, upper middle-class Pennsylvania German family whose religion was Mennonite. I think the film affected me so powerfully even after several viewings because it presents and plays on most of the now threatened bourgeois values which I was taught to believe in and respect-family ties, social mobility, the quest for security and respectability in a competitive world, the friendship between men engaged in the same work, the importance of religion, and individualism.

GODFATHER II is the greatest Hollywood film since CITIZEN KANE and one of the three or four best Hollywood films ever made. Michael as America.вЂќ-Francis Ford Coppola Copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1975, 2004

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