Ahem. Post #437.
Speaking of The Godfather, I always found it implausible that Sonny would be chosen to head up the family. He doesn’t seem to have the critical thinking skills for the job. He’s too much of a hot-head.
Who else is Vito going to pick? Fredo? He wants Michael to be legit. It can’t be Connie. He’s not going to pick someone who doesn’t have the name Corleone. Sure it was a mistake. If things had gone differently and Sonny was head of the family when Vito died there would probably have been a power struggle but it didn’t happen that way. While Vito was alive it was clear he wanted it to be Sonny and no one was going to go against him while he’s alive.
What I find less probable is that Vito is naive enough to think there was ever a chance that Michael could be governor, senator or president. Even if he remained clean his family connection to the mafia would derail any ambitions like that.
may I ask where you got that expression?
Lou was the Turk’s driver who made the mid-bridge U-turn on the way to the dinner at Louis’s in the Bronx. I always wanted a supportive boss like the Turk, with a pat on the shoulder, and a “good work, Lou!”
didn’t stop JFK (his father Joe was part of booze smuggling AFAIK)
Probably not.
What I found was that I went through every parcel of evidence. and anyone who had ever written he was a bootlegger, and I looked at their footnotes, I looked at their sources, I looked at what they had to say on the page. And I discovered,number one, that nobody calls him a bootlegger until the '70s. The Nixon people do everything they possibly can during the 1960 election to smash Joe Kennedy, and they call him everything but a bootlegger. It just doesn’t come up. In the 70s, the conspiracy hunters, trying to connect him to the Mafia and the Mafia to the assassination, develop the bootlegger thesis.
Whether or not he was a bootlegger, he was still a vile piece of sleaze:
It’s baffling to me why Robin Williams didn’t play both Popeye, and Poopdeck Pappy. In the comics it was a source of some of the gags that, except for the beard and some eye lines, they were virtually indistinguishable.
Even if he was shady he wasn’t the head of one of the five families.
The Kennedys were the sixth.
Teddy was Fredo.
I didn’t claim he was a Godfather
I think there’s some kind of law that Ray Walston has to play the grandfather.
There’s a joke that Shelly Duvall was born to play Olive Oil. Ray Walston was born to play Poopdeck Pappy
Should have been Jonathan WInters.
I thought Paul L. Smith was miscast as Bluto.
But then I learned that Bluto was based on a character that Tyrone Power, Senior had played in a 1930 film called The Big Trail. Googling images from the film, Smith was a dead ringer for Power’s character.
How do you figure? My understanding is that Bluto originally appeared in the Popeye comic strip as a pirate. What’s the connection with (checks Wiki) a frontier villain?
Appearance and personality.
Ships, horses, what’s the difference?
from Wiki:
His voice is very loud, harsh and deep, with an incomprehensible bear-like growl between words and sentences. This voice, as well as the dark beard, crooked teeth, and bulk, was similar to that of the villain Red Flack, well known at the time, played by Tyrone Power Sr. in the 1930 film, The Big Trail.
Yeah, he appeared relatively briefly in the Popeye world. He was just one of the crazy villains Segar was always coming up with.
Cecil did a great column on Brutus vs Bluto.