Accept an offer you can’t refuse and celebrate the 50th Anniversary of The Godfather Part II with a two-night Godfather event featuring big screen presentations of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic classics The Godfather (1972) on Wednesday, May 22, and The Godfather Part II (1974) on Thursday, May 23! Individual tickets required.
Francis Ford Coppola expands upon and deepens the themes of The Godfather with this ambitious sequel that stands as one of the most astonishing cinematic achievements of the 1970s. Picking up where the first film left off – with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) having assumed power over his family’s criminal syndicate – the film tracks the young don as he ruthlessly consolidates power in the Las Vegas gambling world of the late 1950s, while simultaneously flashing back to his father Vito’s (Robert DeNiro) brutal induction into the Mafia in 1900s Sicily and New York. Most of the original cast returned from the first film (including Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale and Talia Shire), with superb help from Gaston Moschin, Leopoldo Trieste and Lee Strasberg as Jewish crime boss Hyman Roth. Coppola’s parallel structure allows him to compare and contrast two American eras and consider the political and cultural changes of the 20th century, an approach that makes the six-time Academy Award-winning The Godfather Part II an epic work of art as well as one the most entertaining crime movies ever made. (Dir. by Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, USA, 202 mins., Rated R)