Thus all those tender, moving family scenes are immediately crushed by the needs of “business,” Coppola’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 film’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 Corleone’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.”-Francis Ford Coppola Copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1975, 2004

Film the godfather 2