The ensemble cast also features Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Morgana King, John Cazale, Marianna Hill and Lee Strasberg.

Coppola, who was given more creative control, had wanted to make both a sequel and a prequel to The Godfather that would tell the story of Vito's rise and Michael's fall.

[5] It was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1993, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

In 1901, nine-year-old Vito Andolini escapes from Corleone, Sicily in the Kingdom of Italy to New York City after mafia chieftain Don Ciccio kills the rest of his family.

Johnny Ola, representing Jewish Mob boss Hyman Roth, promises support in taking over a Las Vegas casino.

Hagen visits Pentangeli at the army barracks where he is held and they discuss how failed conspirators against a Roman emperor could commit suicide to save their families.

While the family waits for Vito, Michael announces that he has dropped out of college and joined the Marines, angering Sonny and surprising Hagen.

Mario Puzo started writing a script for a sequel in December 1971, before The Godfather was even released; its initial title was The Death of Michael Corleone.

Marlon Brando initially agreed to return for the birthday flashback sequence, but the actor, feeling mistreated by the board at Paramount, failed to show up for the single day's shooting.

[22] Charles Bluhdorn, whose Gulf+Western conglomerate owned Paramount, felt strongly about developing the Dominican Republic as a movie-making site.

[15] Coppola discusses his decision to make this the first major U.S. motion picture to use "Part II" in its title in the director's commentary on the DVD edition of the film released in 2002.

The cross-cutting between Vito and Michael's parallel stories were judged too frequent, not allowing enough time to leave a lasting impression on the audience.

[24] It was the last major American motion picture to have release prints made with Technicolor's dye imbibition process until the late 1990s.

In 1981, Paramount released the Godfather Epic VHS box set, which also told the story of the first two films in chronological order, again with additional scenes, but not redacted for broadcast sensibilities.

The Godfather DVD Collection was released on October 9, 2001, in a package[25] that contained all three films—each with a commentary track by Coppola—and a bonus disc that featured a 73-minute documentary from 1991 entitled The Godfather Family: A Look Inside and other miscellany about the film: the additional scenes originally contained in The Godfather Saga; Francis Coppola's Notebook (a look inside a notebook the director kept with him at all times during the production of the film); rehearsal footage; a promotional featurette from 1971; and video segments on Gordon Willis's cinematography, Nino Rota's and Carmine Coppola's music, the director, the locations and Mario Puzo's screenplays.

[26] The restoration was confirmed by Francis Ford Coppola during a question-and-answer session for The Godfather Part III, when he said that he had just seen the new transfer and it was "terrific".

It received mixed or average reviews and sold poorly, leading Electronic Arts to cancel plans for a game based on The Godfather Part III.

[29] Although The Godfather Part II did not surpass the original film commercially, it grossed $47.5 million in the United States and Canada.

[N 1] Pauline Kael in The New Yorker was an early champion of the film, writing that it was visually "far more complexly beautiful than the first, just as it's thematically richer, more shadowed, more full."

"[19] Variety noted that Canby had been downbeat on the original too and claimed that he was in a minority of one and reported that the film had drawn mostly strongly admiring reviews.

[38] Roger Ebert awarded three out of four[39] and wrote that the flashbacks "give Coppola the greatest difficulty in maintaining his pace and narrative force.

The story of Michael, told chronologically and without the other material, would have had really substantial impact, but Coppola prevents our complete involvement by breaking the tension."

Though praising Pacino's performance and lauding Coppola as "a master of mood, atmosphere, and period", Ebert considered the chronological shifts of its narrative "a structural weakness from which the film never recovers".

[41] Whether considered separately or with its predecessor as one work, The Godfather Part II is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films in world cinema.

The consensus reads, "Drawing on strong performances by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola's continuation of Mario Puzo's Mafia saga set new standards for sequels that have yet to be matched or broken.

"[44] In his 2014 review of the film, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote "Francis Coppola's breathtakingly ambitious prequel-sequel to his first Godfather movie is as gripping as ever.

"[45] The Godfather Part II was featured on Sight & Sound's Director's list of the ten greatest films of all time in 1992 (ranked at No.

[50][51][52] In 2006, Writers Guild of America ranked the film's screenplay (Written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola) the 10th greatest ever.

[63] Ebert added the film to his Great Movies canon, noting he "would not change a word" of his original review but praising the work as "grippingly written, directed with confidence and artistry, photographed by Gordon Willis ... in rich, warm tones."

You will hear an evocative echo of Bernard Hermann’s score for Citizen Kane, another film about a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it."