Where are all the men?

One of those nagging questions from GF. When Michael visits Corleone, Sicily. He asks where all the men are and Fabrizio or Calo tells him that they are victims of vendettas. Then Michael gets married and there is an all male band and lots of men at the wedding. I thought they were all dead?

Well there are males in Corleone, just not many of them. I mean the simple observation could have been there is a population of 65% females and 35% males. One of the underlying themes in the GF is how brutal the life is, how at one time or another due to the nature of the competition between parties there will be casualties. I think this touch is just added to further this end.

Maybe the band was from another town.

Maybe the band was the Grateful Dead

Or Twisted Sister

*shudder*

Seriously, MC, I think the answer is that almost all the men in Corleone were dead, not necessarily in Sicily has a whole.

From the novel:

"The province held the town of Corleone...but there were no longer any of the Don's relatives alive...All the men had been killed in vendettas or had (also) emigrated... He was to learn later that this small poverty-stricken town had the highest murder rate of any place in the world " (italics mine)

Appolonia was from a different village; remember Mike, Calo, and Fabrizzio had hiked a considerable distance before Mike was struck by the thunderbolt. Their hike took them from the villa where Mike was staying, through Corleone, and then to the village where Apple lived.

The novel also makes reference to Mike renting a car the following week to go see her.

The wedding, I believe, took place in her village.

When I visited my family in Sicily, I asked to go to Corleone, but my family refused to take me. They told me that it was a "dead town", so I guess that the stories are true.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie that runs contrary to the book is the story of how Vito's name got changed. In the book, he took the name Corleone as a rare gesture of sentimentality. In the movie, it gets changed when he goes through Ellis Island, which I believe was FFC flipping the bird, for want of a better term, at the American bureaucracy that was so cold and indifferent to the immigrants that passed through there.

I think the wedding took place in Corleone. The church is used in Part 2 and Part 3 alike when they are visiting Corleone in the flashbacks and in Part 3.

No, the Church Michael and Apollonia got married in is different to the Church in "Corleone" which appears in all 3 movies. I have been to both. The Church where they get married is just about 100 metres up the road from the Bar her father runs in the film.

Ahhh. I am mistaken.

I would love to visit those old places in the trilogy... are most of them still there?

A lot of them are. If you book a trip to Sicliy you can take a tour of them, well worth it for any Godfather fan. The main places are the Bar Vitelli where Michael meets Apollonia's father, the two churches I mentioned above, and various other streets which appear in the films. What the film shows as the town of Corleone isn't actually Corleone at all - its a little village called Forza D'Argo (sp?) not far from Taormina.