Watching Coppola’s Godfather again the other day. Great film, but there’s one thing I don’t quite get: what was the point of the sequence with Michael in Sicily?
For those who may not remember, Michael kills a gangster and a cop in the famous restaurant scene and then flees to Sicily to hide. While in Sicily he meets a girl, gets married and then a tragic end of their marriage.
The movie is already almost 3 hours long, and the sequence seems to add absolutely nothing to the movie. The marriage ends before Michael comes back to the States, he never mentions it to his American girlfriend and as far as we can tell he never even mentions it to his family. The whole sequence doesn’t add anything to the plot, it doesn’t develop Michael’s character. It doesn’t explain any future plot points and it doesn’t follow from any past plot elements. Sure we get to see some tits, but they could have had that same 30 second scene for Michael’s second marriage, and anyway tits were hardly needed to lose the PG-13 rating.
In essence they could have taken the whole scene out and nobody would have missed it and the movie would have been reduced to a more commercial length. So why did Coppola and Puzo decide it was necessary to include? What is the audience supposed to get from it?
I think it showed that Michael really had no choice about what he would become. Even in Sicily, living a quiet, common life (albeit with bodyguards), he couldn’t escape.
What I wondered was whether Michael planned to return to the US with his wife, or whether he would have stayed in Sicily if she hadn’t been killed.
And on a totally shallow note – am I the only one who was annoyed by the whining and pouting? She was gonna be high maintenance.
Simply, it was Michael’s experience in the Homeland. It paralleled his father’s experience, a place of love and loss, and never to find it home. It’s their heritage and life and blood that is inescapable.
It was also exposition to the true history of the gangsters of that period and their experiences in Italy, because really, The Godfather is a cobbled archetype of the American Mafiosa history.
**Baker **said it better
FWIW, there was no PG-13 at the time and the film had already assured an R rating due to violence and language. I think the “F-word” set a record for the time, until Scarface. Another Pacino film.
It actually mattered more in the book, where it happened pretty much as in the movie.
What it did, besides what 2-1/2 inches said, was let Michael learn more about his roots. He was hiding out in the place Vito Andolini, who took the name of his town Corleone, came from. He saw what poverty had done to the region, and the power of the Mafia. His father had connections in the region. He met an elderly woman who worked for his host, who could tell him why Luca Brasi was so feared.
Vito at least did know about his son’s marriage, had sent permission. And the bride was pregnant when she was murdered, further fueling Michaels rage. He himself, in the book, was hurt by the explosion, and his first words, on coming back to consciousness, were to enquire after Fabrizio, the bodyguard who’d helped set him up. Something like “Whoever gives me Fabrizio will own the finest pastures in Sicily.” Michael never did forget, and eventually he was found by Michael’s agents, having moved to the USA. His end was not pleasant.
Imagine if Michael’s bride survived-and they went back to NY? She would have turned into a real bitch! I can imagine Michael being cuckolded by his (formerly beautiful) bride-I can imagine he at 250 pounds, with a mouth like a brooklyn sailor!
IIRC—it’s been a long time—after gunning down the two at the restaurant, Michael has to go into hiding. The book emphasized the fact that nobody could kill a NY cop (wasn’t he a police captain or some high rank?) and get away with it. While Michael was off in Sicily (where they could best hide him), they struck up a deal. They found a gangster willing to be the “patsy.” Some time after Michael shot them, this gangster had landed in jail for something else. He was already dying of terminal cancer or something, so why not take the bribe and add the killing to his rap sheet? So the public got their scapegoat, the dying man got a payday for his family, and Michael didn’t have to go to jail. But it took a few years to pull that off, so Michael stayed in Sicily.
And later her murdered the mother too. The poor midwife had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, from guilt and fear, couldn’t work as a midwife anymore. She was also afraid of being found out for her part in the death of the child. So Vito sent her back to Sicily, and set her up working for Don Tomaso. That’s why she was so greatful to Don Corleone.
Luca Brasi was so scary that the book said he was the one man who could make Don Corleone feel nervous.
Mmmmm Stefonetta Simonetti (or some such, from memory)
It’s been a while since I read the book, but for me the whole Sicily sequence makes Michael’s actions when he comes back to the States so much … colder. Just picking right back up with Kay would be weird if he was just away for a while, but after losing his wife?
I can’t take credit for this insight, because I remember it from a prior Dope discussion on the same topic, although I can’t remember who said it:
The sequence did add to Michael’s character development. He was in the old country, and he was “thunderstruck” by Appolonia; love at first sight. She was many, many things that Kay was not: stunningly beautiful, Italian, traditional, not terribly worldly, subservient. This was clearly portrayed as his “one true love”. Kay was a convenient, conventional, educated, WASP=y “modern” wife. Kay was more or less a rebellion against his father/family and everything they stood for. In the book I remember that, as mentioned above, Appolonia was preggers, and Michael lovelove-LOVED that whole “blooming-virgin-cum-mother-cum-new-life-new-family-to-be” vibe. Hard to imagine those same feeling directed at WASP-y Kay.
The whole marriage showed that, as much as he ostensibly wanted to believe that he was nothing like his father, he really fit very comfortably into the traditional ways; Appolonia was a traditional Italian wife [and decidedly ignorant about the family “business”], just as Mama Corleone was.
Also when things (inevitably) did not go well in Michael’s marriage to Kay, it set up how opposite it would have been if Appolonia had lived. She would have been much more a traditional Mama Corleone type, keeping her nose out of “business.” Despite the somewhat whiny appearance in the driving scenes, she was submissive in the old world way, and would never have interfered as Kay attempted to do.
Compare his gentle and proper courting of Appolonia with his “proposal” to Kay. He says he wants her to marry him, that it’s important that they have children, that he needs her, and finally – after a pause – that he loves her. He is lying about that last, of course.
It’s not in The Godfather at all.