In the scene where Vito tells tom it was Barzini all along, he also says Tattaglia's a pimp. He could have never out fought Santino. Later, when Michael tells Tom he's out as consigliere, Vito tells Tom he never thought Tom was a bad consigliere, but that Tom was a bad Don. In other words he was good enough to beat Tattaglia, but not good enough to beat Barzini. There are several things I can point to some of which may have been known to Vito and some of which robably were not.

1. Temperament. Sonny did not have the temperament to be a don, which is fairly obvious. He was impulsive and trigger happy. One example is his having Tattaglia's son killed because Michael got slapped around by a cop acting as Sol's bodyguard. If you take the Bonasera example this was not justice. It actually escaated the war and made Sonny a viable target for a revenge killing. And of course his bad temper was his downfall.

2. Judgment. In the middle of a dangerous war it is not a good time to continue to be playing comedy with a mistress who lives in a place that looks like an easy target and which requires the of several body guards who could be of better use doing something else. He also refused to listen to Tom about de-escalation so the family could do more business.

3. Getting Michael involved. Michael volunteered to kill Sol and McCluskey, and they did hatch a great plan, but Vito never wanted that life for Michael, and when he got the news that Michael had killed Sol he was not a happy camper. I think he somehow held this against Sonny. Had Sonny been more cunning or more patient, perhaps he could have found another way to deal with this problem.

Any other ideas?

Sonny would serve best as a capo or underboss having someone over him to reel in his anger while being able to put Sonny's talents to good use.

I wonder how Sonny as underboss and Mike as boss would have worked out. I can imagine friction with Sonny taking orders from his little brother but I also think that Sonny could have helped to keep Fredo in line and he wouldn't have had that unfortunate boating accident.

Getting Michael involved was not a bad idea. It may not have been what Vito wanted but it was the only way to go at the time.

He didn't seem to be that great a capo when he was under his father's authority. He was bored silly when Vito was doling out favors on Connie's wedding day, he spoke out of turn during the Sllozzo meeting, and he was screing a bridesmaid with Vito's tacit knowledge, when he should have been in the meting with Johnny Fontaine.

I don't see him as working well under Michael, first because of the older brother thing, but more importantly unlike Michael he lacked the ability to wait until the right moment to strike, and when he struck it was always at his real enemies. If Sonny were alive in GF II he would have wanted to kill Pentangeli.

I do agree he would have handled Fredo better....but then anyone xould have handled Fredo better than Michael did.

I may be going more based on the book with Sonny's abilities as a war commander. Of course he made mistakes and was a bit of a loose cannon but he could have been very valuable to his allies and dangerous to his enemies. A real .90 caliber.

Wow! Me as Don? I don't know, Geoff might get mad

What do you think this like the Army where you can shoot 'em from a mile away? No you gotta get up like this and, bada-bing, you blow their brains all over your nice T-shirt...

Good points.
I agree with Sonny's temper being a failing. I would say though that the killing of Bruno Tattaglia was not so much for Michael getting punched but for the second attempt on their father's life.

Sonny was not a strategic thinker (as he freely admitted in the book) and perhaps that is where Tom "failed" him. Could Tom have given orders to Sonny's crew that Sonny is never to be allowed off the property? Or could Tom have arranged for Lucy to be moved closer to the compound? Dunno.

Getting Michael involved was not good but it was the only way they had at that time to eliminate a direct threat to Vito's life and make it clear to the other Families that the Corleones were still open for business. Maybe they could have waited but that's where rational thinking goes out the window. Since Sonny, Mike and Tom were Vito's sons, they weren't dispassionate about protecting Vito.

There was another link that someone posted that compared the Corleones to the United States politically. I won't repeat all of that but Sonny's primary failings were that he took things as he saw them and overestimated the ability of violence to attain goals. Basically Sonny is all id.

I agree that Sonny made a bad Don. But I can find justification for some of his actions:
Whacking Bruno could be justified on the grounds that the Corleones needed to show that they were capable of quick, ruthless retaliation--not paralyzed by Vito's shooting. And Michael's involvement could be justified on the basis that no one else was capable of getting close enough to Sol to stop yet another attempt on Vito's life.
I continue to believe that a much better alternative would have been to leak info on McCluskey's corruption to the newspapermen on the family's payroll instead of shooting Mac, rather than after the shooting. Vito was a high-profile victim. Faced with blaring headlines about Mac's complicity with Sol (especially in removing the bodyguards from Vito's bedside), plus pressure from the politicians on the family payroll, the police commissioner would have no choice but to assign 24x7 police guards to Vito. He'd have to suspend or transfer Mac, and arrest Sol. That would have been the politically sophisticated solution. But it would have left us with no Godfather Trilogy.

I agree the smart thing would have been to use the newspaper and political contacts to take out McCluskey, thus paving the way for a hit on Sol. The question is whether this move would force Barzini's hand to show that his muscle, not Tat's was behind the drug business. I think this would have still cause a war to break out and it would result in Sonny making some bone headed move that would get him killed. Ultimately this would cause Michael to come around and become the heir, and we would have a trilogy after all.

They could have ruined McCluskey but then Sollozzo just gets another high profile bodyguard. Waiting to disclose the info was the smart move because you want Sollozzo to feel safe when you get to him.

The mafia is all about power, violence, and money. I think going right after the Tataglias and Sollozzo was the right thing to do. You go to war by attrition and you win then your enemies are devastated and you can build up stronger than ever.

My question is: Barzini and the Tataglias would have needed commission approval to hit Vito. The fact that the other families don't join in against Sollozzo and the Tataglias seems to point to the fact that they did have commission approval for the hit.

Good question, and it should have sent a signal to Sonny and Tom that Barzini was mixed up in all of this...after all Tattaglia was a pimp who could have never outfought Santino.

I think we have to cut Puzo and FFC some slack here:
They acknowledged the Commission with the Don's conference after Sonny was killed. They made it seem like an ad hoc meeting to specifically set a framework for a nationwide drugs policy. In real life, the Commission met every five years after Charlie Luciano went to prison. But, five years or no, the Commission was not consulted about Albert Anastasia's assassination of Vincent Mangano, or Vito Genovese's assassination of Anastasia.

I think we have to cut Puzo and FFC some slack here:
They acknowledged the Commission with the Don's conference after Sonny was killed. They made it seem like an ad hoc meeting to specifically set a framework for a nationwide drugs policy. In real life, the Commission met every five years after Charlie Luciano went to prison. But, five years or no, the Commission was not consulted about Albert Anastasia's assassination of Vincent Mangano, or Vito Genovese's assassination of Anastasia.

I don't have the book in front of me right now but I think that Puzo's meeting of the Dons after the murder of Sonny was the first formalized Commission meeting (everyone except Chicago) in which it was agreed that they should, among other things, try not to kill each other without a really good reason or at least a majority vote and so on.

So before that in Puzo's timeline I'm not sure there would have been a formal Commission to rule on a hit on Vito. Of course as mentioned in real life Barzini would have ignored a ruling that went against him or even avoided telegraphing such intentions in the first place.

In the movie Clemenza says "..probably all the other families will line up against us" yet Sonny seems primarily concerned with Tattaglia and unaware of Barzini.

In the book at the Dons' meeting everyone seems to know that Tattaglia was not a man to be feared on his own but had most of his strength from Barzini and Solozzo.

In any event Sonny should have realized more quickly the quality and amount of opposition he was up against, which is another reason why he wasn't quite cut out to be the boss.

If not the formal commission, there would have been some kind of informal approval by Baarzini and the other families before an attempt on Vito's life would be made. In addition to Clemenza I believe Hagen also thought all the families would line up against the Corleones for the inexplicable reason that it was almost 1946.

I believed Sol when he said that "...the other families will go along with anything that prevents a war..." (or something to that effect). So, in a non-Commission scenario, the attempt on Vito's life was a fait accompli by Sol and Tatt, with Barzini's encouragement. The other two families would go along because a war would interfere with their day-to-day businesses, and probably because Sol promised them a piece of the drugs business.

For sure. Barzini was in it for big money.

I think they were all in it at the end.

Vito thought always that Santino would make a bad Don.His critisism against Santino is almost insaulting since the beginning of the movie.On the other hand,as made obvious in part II, Vito had a huge love for Michael.(tuo padre ti voule ben assai,as the train departs from Sicily).But he had forseen that the family's buisiness should change, that's why he didn;t want Michael involved. Santino couldn't realize that family would change their way of doing buisiness and tha's why he would make a bad Don according to Vito.

However,Santino was a perfect wartime Don. Michael never forgave Tom for his weekness during the times that Vito was out of action. Santino moved fast and critical,as he should have.He waited for the real intentions of the other families and when it turned out that their primary goal was to kill Vito,he acted. That's what forced Solozzo to talking with Michael.

I know that Sonny is well liked here in the boards (hell i liked Sonny myself)but i might get flamed for what i am about to say.
But i think that every damn move he made was out of pure instinct, he was stupid to a degree, never thought long term, Sonny should of stopped taking things personal, it is all business with the mob never personal, never.
Even i could teach Sonny a thing or two about the mob, even though i never had first hand experience i think that i would of been comparable to Michael, and Michael was not so clever when you think about it, he did have a temper streak in him but not as bad as Santino's.

Sonny wasn't totally stupid. He made a very wise, strategic move in sending Fredo to Vegas after Vito was shot. Fredo suffered an apparent nervous breakdown. With the family at war, Fredo would have been, at best, a distraction to Sonny and Tom; at worst, a very vulnerable target for the Corleones' foes. By sending him to neutral Vegas, under Don Francesco's protection, Sonny removed a serious danger to Fredo and to the rest of the family. He also "planted a flag" in Vegas by putting Fredo in with Moe Green, whose casino the Corleones had bankrolled. It's one thing to finance a casino, another to have your brother inside.

Sonny really wasn't stupid at all. It was his temper, his passion and his love for his family that many times clouded his judgement and caused him to err in some of his decisions. But he was NOT stupid.

As Turnbull pointed out, Sonny made some good moves, one of them being the way that he protected his brother, during a time of war, by sending him out to Las Vegas under the protection of the West Coast family and at the same time having his brother"inside" the Casinos and Hotels that his family had bankrolled and eventually would take over. And although it is not mentioned in the movie, let's not forget that in the book, it was Sonny who successfully commandeered a war many years earlier.

As for your view of Michael not being so clever, I must disagree with you. In the end, personal family aside of course, it was the Corleone FAMILY who came out on top! It was Michael who was the one pulling the strings.

Sonny had some of Vito's characteristics just like all the kids did. None of them was a duplicate. Yes, Sonny's temper led to rash and counterproductive actions. He wasn't a long term thinker. As it says in the novel, he would guard his father's empire until his father could take the reins again. it also says he was a brilliant battlefield tactician and won brilliant vistories. But it also says that he lacked the long-term strategic thinking of his father. He was band-aid.

Well i agree with you all on ur statements.
I kinda exagarated about me being comparable to Mike (how stupid of me).
Mike was clever on the fact that he put all business in front of him (mobsters should always do that, it is hardly personal with those guys) but Michael at the end was too paranoid way paranoid, he was always calculating every damn word everyone said (even though it was for the best of his family) he still ruined his own family at the end of the second one.
Sonny did make the right decision on some stuff, but i meant to a small very small degree.