Middle-Aged and sagging, Scott Fitzgerald once lost it when a fan gushed over This Side of Paradise one time too many: "Mention that book again and I'll slug you," he snapped. By now, Francis Ford Coppola may feel the same way about the first two Godfather movies. If he'd only managed to get himself eaten by a tiger while making Apocalypse Now back in 1976, he'd be the most legendary director in Hollywood history. Instead, he's been blamed ever since for not having eaten the tiger himself.

All the same, something Pauline Kael said of Orson Welles holds true of Coppola: "In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt." To lament his chaotic career's failure to equal the Corleones' saga ignores the obvious fact that it was a miracle to pull off such a feat--American movies' greatest fusion of artistic reach and mass appeal since silent days--even once, let alone twice. A phenomenon like The Godfather gains meaning from the alchemy of popular response, and his mob epic appeared at perhaps the only time in the last century when, between Vietnam and Watergate, U.-S. moviegoers were predisposed to appreciate tragedy--albeit of a peculiarly American sort, since the final effect is of evil redeemed by nostalgia.

The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film; The Godfather was the greatest gangster picture ever made, and had metaphorical overtones that took it far beyond the gangster genre. In Part II, the wider themes are no longer merely implied. The second film shows the consequences of the actions in the first; it’s all one movie, in two great big pieces, and it comes together in your head while you watch. Coppola might almost have a pact with the audience; we’re already so engrossed in the Corleones that now he can go on to give us a more interior view of the characters at the same time that he shows their spreading social influence. ...

Much of the material about Don Vito’s early life which appears in Part II was in the Mario Puzo book and was left out of the first movie, but the real fecundity of Puzo’s mind shows in the way this new film can take his characters further along and can expand (and, in a few cases, alter) the implications of the book. Puzo didn’t write the novel he probably could have written, but there was a Promethean spark in his trash, and Coppola has written the novel it might have been.