It really wouldn’t have made a difference if it was Michael himself in that scenario. Him knowing who Rocco was would not help. It’s just another version of the monkey business illusion.
I still disagree with this post and the other posts in this thread which have essentially made the same argument.
All of these arguments require that Roth be an idiot; somebody who is absolutely oblivious to very obvious things that are going on around him over a period of decades.
If Roth was this stupid then Michael could have just ignored him and let him fail on his own. At most, Roth might have annoyed Michael with his fumbling attempts and moved Michael to swat him like an mosquito. But Roth never would have been a serious threat to Michael.
I feel this undercuts a lot of the narrative of the movie. I think that we’re supposed to see Roth as a worthy opponent to Michael; somebody who could have beaten Michael if Michael hadn’t been playing at the top of his game.
No, they don’t. They require him to be a normal human being. You are completely missing the point, it would not be weird to miss Rocco… for anyone. It’s the absolutely normal and expected thing to happen.
As I’ve said, I find this very implausible.
Roth was a gangster. In his business, the police were always trying to catch him breaking the law. And rival gangsters were always trying to take away his business. As a gangster, you either learn to be aware of people plotting against you or you quickly end up imprisoned or dead. Roth had survived and prospered in this environment for decades without being killed or imprisoned.
Roth knew the Corleone family was trying to kill him. So for him to let a known Corleone hitman walk up to him in a public place, stand five feet in front of him, and then pull out a gun and shoot him is implausible. If Roth was that oblivious, he would have been killed back in his twenties.
And I 100% knew there was a monkey in that video, and I missed the other two things they did.
Um, he wasn’t that great, after all in this scene he has been caught and there was a switch-off between authorities. He had been on the run from US authorities for some time.
He didn’t avoid the police forever. He wasn’t able to spot every threat coming all the time.
There were so many thousands of low level crooks that dreamt of becoming crime bosses. Don’t ascribe superpowers to the very few that made it to the top. Someone had to survive to be made boss if anything else by default.
Slightly disagree. The continuity tricks you a bit. At the end of the scene it appears Rocco pushes his way through the crowd but if you go back to 0:30 it shows Rocco front and center, not obscured at all, staring straight at Roth (interesting to note that the spotlight isn’t lighting Rocco’s right side).
Jumping ahead to 0:39 Roth appears to be staring him straight in the eyes. In that whole scene, I did not see Roth squinting.
My $0:02 worth is that Roth would have and should have known one of Michael’s top enforcers.
ETA: I think Rocco was probably dressed as a reporter to fool the cops (to get close) - not Roth