Yes, spoiler in the title, but “The Godfather Part II” is 49 years old.
I don’t quite grasp Vito’s approach to the Don Fanucci problem. Fanucci demands a little tribute from Vito and friends. Vito tells his friends he will take care of it, and later goes to Fanucci and gives him less than Fanucci demanded. Fanucci admires his guts, accepts the money, and says he wants to work with Vito. Then, later than same day, Vito stalks Don Fanucci to his home and murders him. It seems to me he always planned to murder Fanucci.
So… why? Why didn’t he just murder Fanucci and not bother with the while negotiation thing? Note that Vito takes back the money after killing Fanucci - so why even bother NOT paying him the full amount, when it’s established he could have, if he was gonna take it back anyway? Why risk the meeting going sideways?
I seem to recall the movie compressing the time frame involved, but it makes sense to lull your enemy into complacence so you can get to him more easily.
And if there’s one or more witnesses to your having had a cordial meeting with Don Fanucci, you’re less likely to be a suspect in his murder.
Also, Fanucci was supposed to be connected to the Black Hand, and his actions showed he was not. He’d used the name, and bluffing, as a tough guy, to exact the tribute.
This. Vanucci flunked the test. That gave Vito the green light to commit the murder. Had Vanucci handled the meeting differently, the rest of the scenario would have played out very differently.
Including having Vito eating his own gonads in the very next scene, courtesy of some unusually persuasive friends of Don Fanucci.
I think this is the heart of it: not merely weak, but unconnected. Being unconnected meant he could be killed. But that’s not why he needed (in Vito’s mind) to be killed.
Unlike how Vito carried himself as Godfather, Fanucci was a parasite: nothing more and nothing less. Where Vito fancied himself as using his powers to do good for his community, to make the lot of Sicilians under his “protection” better, Fanucci was all about exploitation. He didn’t build himself up by building up his community around him and making loyal “subjects” as Vito would, but rather he built himself up at the expense of the community.
So that’s why Vito killed Fanucci (or at least, I imagine that’s what Vito would tell himself: that he did it not for himself, but for the greater good, like removing a blight from the community). But before he did, he tested Fanucci just to make sure there wasn’t more behind the curtain. That Fanucci was such an easy pushover for a two-bit criminal like Vito, with a couple of friends but no real connections at the time, was the proof that Fanucci could be eliminated without consequence.
that and he personally pissed vito off over the years
in the book fanucci was the reason Vito lost his job at his foster parent’s grocery because fanucci strongarmed them into putting his nephew in the store by threatening to cut off the black-market goods they were getting during WW1
Then when vito goes through the robbery with Clemenza and tessio he signs his death warrant when he shakes Vito down in fact the lines reads something like "while vito was outwardly calm inside he was in a seething rage thinking who the hell was he to demand a cut of the money that he and the other two risked life and liberty for " andthen some exposition that if fanuccui was on fire he wouldn’t even piss on him to put it out in so many words … and them becomes to the conclusion fannucci must die
All of what you wrote explains with Vito killed Fanucci. But it doesn’t explain why Vito went through the charade of offering money to Fanucci before killing him. As others explained, the reason for that was to test Fanucci and see if it was safe to kill him.
Which explains why Vito rose to the top of the Mafia. He didn’t act on impulses. He could be mad enough to kill somebody but pause before killing to consider the consequences.
Also to make Fanucci complacent and let down his guard. In the book it is obvious that Vito overplanned the murder but then again that section shows how Vito operates.
Either the smart ones who want to not look as conspicuous to the authorities, or ones who are strictly middle management and are really only there to to have someone to monitor things. He was clearly neither of those though.
And Vito planned the killing in a clever way. During the parade he went back into his own building, making sure he was seen to do so… So he then went to and over the roofs, as seen in the film. Then came back to his family. So he couldn’t possibly be blamed for the death. And the cops didn’t, or wouldn’t care, as they also saw Fanucci as a two bit hood.
He considers the consequences, but the episode also demonstrates that Vito had the ruthlessness to do what has to be done while staking his life on his perception of the situation and regardless of personal risk. If he were wrong about Fanucci being connected, it would have been curtains for Vito. Later, he goes to Sicily and walks right into Don Ciccio’s estate (under a pretext, like in the case of Fanucci), surrounded by shotgun-wielding guards, for his undelegated revenge, served cold and calculated but served inexorably.
Vito’s rise was due to his capability to both kill people and to not kill people, depending on which option worked best for him. Even when his own son was killed, he was able to see that his long term situation required him to negotiate a settlement.
in the book there wasn’t any parade lol he just followed him back while everyone was gossiping outside …now how Sonny supposedly followed them both to see the murder I’ll never know
One thing that always bothered me about the movie was the fact that Vito only paid him $50, instead of the $700 that he paid him in the novel. Fanucci was expecting $900, and it doesn’t seem plausible that he would be satisfied, even temporarily, with only $50. Also, it gives Corleone a much bigger incentive to retrieve the money later.
Well $700 was a huge amount of money even in 1970, it would have been a massive amount of money in the late 1920’s. Its not really a believable amount of money for a criminal enterprise during that timeframe from that aspect, as Vito’s crew was selling dresses cheap since they we stolen goods. Coppala must have seen that flaw in the novel and sliced the amount down for the sake of the movie being more realistic.
$700 in 1925 is about $12,000 today. That’s a lot of money, but it’s not an unrealistic amount for a criminal who just pulled a job big enough to have word on the street spreading about it to have.
Not a bad theory, but in the novel (as I recall), it was purely transactional. Fanucci was nothing to Vito. If Fanucci needed an operation to save his life that cost the same amount of money, Vito would not have donated it, Vito rationalized. Why would he pay him, then, when killing him made the whole problem disappear? To Vito, the two scenarios were exactly analogous.
Also as I recall, the charade was exactly for the reasons noted: It confirmed that Fanucci was a poseur, not worthy of respect and as a result, doomed.