[In the following review, Canby complains that "Much of the time it's next to impossible to figure out who's doing what to whom [in The Godfather, Part II], not, I suspect, because its mode is ambiguity, but because it's been cut and edited in what looks to have been desperation…."]

If Francis Ford Coppola were a less intelligent and less talented filmmaker, one might indulge the failed aspirations of The Godfather, Part II—if not the thick fog of boredom that settles in before the film is even one hour old. Clumsy directors may not be entitled but because their gaffs are not exactly unexpected, they are more easily accommodated. We snicker and laugh at multi-million-dollar dreadfuls like The Valachi Papers and Crazy Joe. Our good spirits remain intact since there's no particular surprise or sorrow. The earnest confusions of The Godfather, Part II are something else again. They look like the solemn attempts to rip-off one of the best, most successful commercial American movies ever made, Coppola's original screen adaptation of Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

Rip-off is an unkind word and, in this case, not really accurate since it implies a willingness to take the easy way, to exploit in the most obvious, cheapest manner an earlier success. Now I hardly think that Coppola, Puzo (who collaborated with him on the new screenplay) and Paramount Pictures did not hope to make a bundle on Part II, but it's apparent in the physical scope (New York, Las Vegas, Sicily, the Caribbean), expense and shape of the new film that this was meant to be something more than a sequel, something more than a revisit to a planet of murderous, vengeful apes.

Well it is and it isn't.

It's actually two films cross-cut into each other. The first is the story of young Vito Corleone (who grew up to be the Mafia don played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather), from his early days in Sicily when his father was murdered by the Black Hand to his first rather nobly motivated criminal triumphs in New York's Little Italy in 1917. The second is the story of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who inherited the Corleone Family control from old Vito at the end of The Godfather and here goes on to win a Las Vegas gambling empire, with time out for an aborted attempt to take over the rackets in Cuba just before the Castro revolution.

Part II is as stuffed with material as a Christmas goose. It's a mass (sometimes mess) of plots, subplots, characters, alliances, betrayals, ambushes, renunciations, kisses of death, you name it. Much of the time it's next to impossible to figure out who's doing what to whom, not, I suspect, because its mode is ambiguity, but because it's been cut and edited in what looks to have been desperation, a quality that Part II shares with another Coppola film, The Conversation.

There are dozens of narratives going on more or less simultaneously in Part II, a couple of which give every sign of being material enough for an interesting, self-sustaining individual film if lifted out of this fractured epic. One has to do with the first forays into crime by young Vito, played with a fascinating, reserved passion by Robert De Niro until the shadow of Brando's earlier performance falls over it and turns it into what amounts to an impersonation.

Another promising sequence has to do with Michael's uneasy alliance with a Jewish mob king, Hyman Roth (played by Lee Strasberg, the head of the Actors Studio, in what becomes the dominant performance of the picture), and the efforts of the pair to seize control of Havana with Battista's cooperation.

"We're bigger than U.S. Steel," Hyman says genially to Michael as they sit sunning themselves on the terrace of a Havana (actually Santo Domingo) hotel. The most chilling moment of the film has nothing to do with mob vengeance, with family betrayals or with virtue corrupted. It is a street scene in Havana when Michael watches impassively as Battista's police round up some revolutionaries, one of whom blows himself up with a hand grenade. You suddenly realize not only how isolated from the real world Michael has become, but also how isolated are the concerns of the rest of the film.

One of the most remarkable qualities of the original The Godfather was the manner in which it suggested all sorts of sad truths about American life, business, manners, goals, entirely within a headlong narrative in which character was defined almost entirely in terms of action. The relentless forward motion of the film was as much the content of the film as the gang wars it seemed to be about. The ending was inevitable and tragic.

The cross-cutting in the new film gives it a contemplative air, but the truths it contemplates about fate, family and feuds seem hardly worth all the fuss and time (three hours and 20 minutes).

I've been told that one of Coppola's intentions in Part II was to de-romanticize The Godfather, which some critics had accused (wrongly, I think) of glorifying crime. At the end of The Godfather, Michael Corleone, the once sensitive Ivy League student who has become the new don, is left lonely in his new authority. At the end of Part II he is still lonely, though we are asked to believe that he is now a more ruthless, more wracked man who suspects enemies everywhere around him and as easily orders the execution of a brother as he cooperated in the execution of a brother-in-law in the first film. The difference between Michael in the first film and Part II is not one of real substance but of degree.

Coppola also seems intent on contrasting the comparatively noble criminality of Michael's father Vito, in his early days in Little Italy, with Michael's use of power for its own sake later on. The idea that old-time criminals were somehow less vicious and venal than today's is, however, as romantic as any notion that turned up in the original film. Part II doesn't illuminate or enrich the original film. It simply brackets it with additional information that may not make too much sense unless you've seen the first one.

It also seems to have been written by writers wearing wooly mittens—the dialogue is that clumsy. You get the idea when Kay, Michael's middle-class, WASP wife, admits that what Michael thought was a miscarriage wasn't. "It was an abortion, Michael," says Kay who, though grieving, has a way with words, "just like our marriage is an abortion."