Windows (Motif)
Windows are what the characters in The Godfather, Part II look through to see what is both either physically close or oddly far away. When young Vito first witnesses America on the trans-Atlantic liner, he sees the Statue of Liberty through a port window. Likewise, when he first sets up his business, his desk faces a window to the street, giving him a kind of access to his neighborhood. Of course, for Michael, windows play a little differently. Gunfire showers through his bedroom window, almost killing him and Kay early in the film, and at the end, he watches Fredo's murder on the lake from a cool distance through a bay window. If for Vito windows mean hope and community, for Michael they're portals giving a glimpse of fate.
The Stolen Rug (Symbol)
The rug that young Vito helps young Clemenza steal takes on the symbolic properties of the Rubicon that the future Godfather crosses. Vito has been committed to a noble pride of staying out of the gutter of crime—doubtlessly because he witnessed the heartlessness of Sicilian organized crime up close and first hand. The stealing of the rug changes everything. From that point, Vito commences a quest to realize the American Dream outside the routes of legitimacy which have been denied him.
The Vaudeville Show (Allegory)
We're given a lengthy portrayal of an Italian-language Vaudeville act that the young Vito watches with his friend. It's a story of infidelity and betrayal of a man by his wife—our first glimpse of the misfortune that will befall our central head of the house a generation later, Michael Corleone. This scene, as is this case with much of Vito's story, imbues the immigrant experience with a sense of looming tragedy, but that tragedy is ultimately one that will afflict the next generation of Vito's family.
Oranges (Motif)
All of our powerful Italian mobsters are depicted with oranges in this film, and we can use them to trace plays of power. Before Don Fanucci is killed, he takes an orange from a fruit stand, just as he takes so much from the people in the neighborhood who must pay him fealty. By contrast, we watch Vito humbly accept a gift of oranges from a street vendor when he has risen to a powerful position as a local mob boss. His demeanor accepting the gift suggests to us that this is a guy who's in it for the right reasons. When we see Michael with an orange towards the end of the film, he's eating it alone and ruefully, in the middle of a bout of loneliness and revenge. Perhaps it's significant that we see Fanucci and Michael eating their oranges, but not Vito.
Meeting Batista (Allegory)
Coppola uses a brief scene to create an incisive allegory of the toxic role of American business in world politics. We're given a long tracking shot of a series of American heads of corporations and utility companies, all welcomed to Cuba by President Fulgencio Batista, a dictator installed and supported by the US government. At the end of his inventory of businessmen, he also welcomes Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth. These are all of the people who look to profit off of a Cuba under dictatorship, and Coppola sets us up to witness a collapse of this sickly Versailles-style complicity by showing us the ostentatious entertaining that all of these men enjoy, right up until the revolutionaries force Batista to step down on New Year's Eve.
