SOURCE: A review of Godfather, Part II, in Cineaste, Vol. VI, No. 4, 1975, pp. 38-9.

In the following review, Quart and Auster assert that despite operating within the commercial form in The Godfather, Part II, Coppola has created "an epic about immigrants which begins to take hold of the whole saga of Americanization and the spiritual dissolution that resulted from it."

The Hollywood epic has usually meant Charlton Heston in beard, toga, or armor, spectacular effects and battle sequences, an inflated budget, and an adulteration of history and myth. In fact, Hollywood has rarely even bothered to vulgarize American history and myth, preferring to mine less controversial properties like the Old and New Testaments, the Crusades, and the Greeks and Romans.

There have, of course, been a number of puerile and a few brilliant epic films about the American Experience: Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind and...