Matt Wilson wrote:This is actually the first time I've ever read someone say either part one or two was too long.
Further consolidating my belief that the international attention span is getting lower all the time...
It's not a matter of attention span, it's a matter of being able to justify extending something to a certain length. One of my favourite films is
Heat, from which I would cut about one scene from its 170-minute length. Conversely, I could take
The Good Shepherd (which I saw the other day) and scissor about thirty or forty minutes from its similar length. It didn't, at least in my opinion, have enough material to justify running nearly three hours, and neither (again, in my opinion) does
Godfather Part II have enough to really warrant being nearly three and a half hours long.
For what it's worth, another of my favourites is Abel Gance's
Napoleon, which (in the 1981 American version sponsored, funnily enough, by Francis Ford Coppola) runs just under four hours, or about half an hour longer again than
Godfather Part II.