At the beginning of the first Godfather, Don Vito Corleone’s daughter, Connie, gets married to the despicable Carlo. Near the end of the film, Carlo and Connie’s baby boy is christened, Michael Corleone stands as his godfather and swears to renounce Satan and all his works, and it’s all intercut with scenes of rival family bosses being assassinated. In the next scene, Carlo gets whacked too.
In The Godfather: Part III, Michael is old enough to be thinking about an heir. His own son Anthony wants nothing to do with the family business; he’s determined to drop out of law school and become an opera singer. That leaves Vincent, a bastard son of Michael’s brother Sonny, the one who got rubbed out at a toll booth because Carlo set him up. Connie has a liking for her nephew Vincent and backs up his ambitions, putting in a word with Michael every chance she gets.
But what ever happened to Carlo and Connie’s son? The one we saw baptized? Connie is on the scene in both GFII and GFIII, but her son is nowhere in sight. Did the writers just forget about him? Or is it simply assumed that, as son of the traitor Carlo, he’s out of the running, even though he’s also the Don’s own nephew and godson?
I would consult with Puzo’s novels – but his novel The Godfather only covers the events of the first movie, and, although I’m fairly sure Puzo wrote the screenplay for both GFI and GFII, I’m very sure he never wrote a “novelization” of GFII. So the movies are the final authority.
Can’t help you with the exact reason, since I haven’t seen III in years, but I will note that Connie and Carlo also have an older son, Victor, according to the DVD. He’s five years older than Michael Francis. So he was left out too.
It might be because they’re sons of a daughter, not a son. Even though he’s a bastardo, Vincent was the son of a son. If Carlo’s throat lasted long enough to start his own family, Michael Francis and Victor Rizzi would be his heirs. Since their dad bought it, they’re SOL.
Working on memory here.
IIRC, Carlo was not killed until after Vito died. In GFII, Mama Corleone chides Connie for not spending time with her children (plural). I think her exact words were “You go see your children first.” So they must have had at least one additional child besides the one she was carrying when Sonny was set up.
Apparently she has just left them in the care of her mother while she goes off doing her thing. Later, Michael chastises her for not even knowing that her son has gotten arrested for something or other.
GFIII was so awful I only watched it once, but I think you are correct that none of Connie and Carlo’s children are ever mentioned again.
Now, Sonny’s children would have been older, anyway, since they had already been born at the start of GFI. I did not recall that Vincent was illegitimate. Are you sure? From what I recall of GFIII, he simply had the right temperament.
Maybe they’re taking the patriarchal aspects of the Italian culture to movie extremes. Married daughters belong to their husbands, so any sons a daughter has belong to the husband’s family. Connie’s son would therefore owe immediate loyalty to his father’s family and be involved in whatever business they have going. By this reasoning, he would automatically be disregarded by Michael when deciding he was deciding who would become the next don. The son of an eldest son, even an illegitimate one like Vincent, would be given preferential treatment for the same reasons.
A simpler explanation might be that Connie didn’t want her son in the family business, or he wasn’t interested, like Anthony.
Vincent was the product of Sonny’s affair with the Maid of Honor at the begining of the film. That woman he’s having sex with against the door during Connie’s wedding.
That was Lucy Mancini. But how did they work in a pregnancy for her? According to the book, after Sonny died she tried to kill herself, and when visited afterewards by(I think) Tom Hagen, as Vito Corleone’s representative, she was asked if she had taken the pills because she was pregnant. She said no. Later the family moved her to Vegas and she became involved with that doctor. Did Godfather III change that somehow?
Godfather III changed Lucy’s story by ignoring it. It wasn’t in the first film, so it didn’t exist. And in addition to what Baker remembers, she also had some surgery done to her uterus, which would have definitely interfered with a pregnancy.
It’s been a while since I read the novel. But I think Puzo’s novel also covers parts of the second movie too…such as the experiences of the young Vito Corleone, his arrival in America and soforth.
Michael says something to the effect of, “Do you even know where your children are? Your son was arrested for shoplifting,” when he was yelling at Connie for wanting to marry Muryl (Meryl?) in Part II.
Baker, GF III disregarded the Lucy Mancini storyline from the book for a more interesting story of Sonny’s illelgimate hot-tempered son, Vincent. Or would have been interesting had Coppola cast a better actress than his daughter, Sofia Coppola, to play Michael Corleone’s daughter, Mary in GF III
Back to the OP, Carlo and Connie had at least two children, Victor, and Michael Francis. Victor would appear to be the elder, who actually started early on a life of crime. In GF II Michael tells Connie “You know your oldest boy, Victor, was picked up in Reno for some petty theft that you don’t even know about.”
The scene happened in 1958, Victor was born in 1946 at the earliest.
Anyway, for reasons unexplained in GF III Connie makes no attempt to push her sons into the Family business, and every effort to push Vincent into the Family business.
Did the movies actually disregard the Lucy Mancini storyline? I thought the woman with whom Sonny was having an affair in GFI was supposed to be Lucy Mancini.
Could be wrong, and even if I’m not, I guess it’d be more of a snippet than a storyline.
I am sorry, that should have been the rest of the book’s Lucy Mancini storyline after Sonny’s murder.
In the book, Lucy moves to Las Vegas where she: becomes a “front” owner in a Corleone controlled casino, has surgery on her naughty bits, and eventually finds true happiness with Dr Jules Segal.
quote…Or would have been interesting had Coppola cast a better actress than his daughter, Sofia Coppola, to play Michael Corleone’s daughter, Mary in GF III
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This is a bit of trivia that you Godfather fans probably already know. Sofia Coppola played two different roles. Not only was she Mary in Godfather III, but she also had the role of the baby boy that was christened in the first movie.
She directs now and has been generally well-received, I think.
In Coppola’s dialogue on the track of GF3, the little girl who dances with Michael and Mary in the Godfather Waltz number is supposed to be Connie’s granddaughter. (In reality, the little girl is Coppola’s granddaughter, making her Sofia’s niece, Talia Shire’s grandniece, and the great-grandchild of Coppola’s parents who play the bandleader and Eli Wallach’s wife, respectively.)
I always wondered why they felt it necessary to make Vincent a bastard rather than either bringing in one of Sonny’s legitimate sons OR make Anthony the Victor character. It would have been interesting to see Michael deal with a son that he wanted to go straight but who had too much of his uncle Sonny in him to be a lawyer or a senator- a reverse of Vito-Michael’s relationship in which Michael wanted nothing to do with the family business but was forced into it.
I also wonder why the Puzo estate hired a writer to write a sideways sequel to the trilogy (I think it covers the time between the Vito timeline of GF2 and GF1) when they never released a novelization of the other two movies (which would have helped a lot, especially in explaining the Rosato/Roth connections). I also didn’t realize that Michael’s death at the end of 3 wasn’t supposed to be until what is now the present, allowing him to cameo in any sequels.
