At what point did Mike turn evil

The character of Mike is one of the better transisitions i've see in film. he went from a pretty good college guy/war veteran to a cold blooded monster. When do people think Mike finally made the turn to evil. I dont think it was at the point of the Sollozzo hit since he still had some hesitation about killing. i think when Appolonia died he pretty much became the psycho don from that point.

I think his final transition happened in SICILY, but not necessarily due to Apollonia's death.

It's been both described in the novel and shown in the film that Michael recognised his "father's" side in him when he was in Sicily. An important moment when he realised this was when he needed to prove himself at Signor Vitelli's restaurant. He suddenly appeared to be a "man to respect".

I don't believe in evil. There's only what we do. So, I don't believe that Mike turned to evil. He did things that we characterize as evil. He didn't think they were. He thought they were justifiable. Concocting the murder of Sollozzo seemed justifiable to him just as his divorcing kay and almost turning her children against her seemed justafiable. If there is evil, he always had it in him. It just took circumstances to prompt its expression.

I don't mean evil like devil worship I just mean evil in the sense of doing horrible things and not having much emotion/remorse for it

Adolf Hitler also thought the things he did were justifiable.

LOL thats true. I mean the reason they are psychopaths is that they don't feel remorse or they dont feel they are doing anything wrong

According to Phil Zimbardo evil is related to power, the will to dominate people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg
(This is just a little summary of his 500 pages book, which in fact is a 1,000 pages book because of the small fonts.)
In my opinion there's a significant change in Michael towards killing. When Tessio and Clemenza discuss the killing of Philipp and Bruno Tattaglia, Sollozzo and others, he asks: "You kill all those guys?" Two or three days later he's ready to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey, and he knows that this will change his life forever. He knows he has to disappear, he has to leave his love. He knows he's acting against the law.
Zimbardo says, we all have both sides in us. The question is, are we ready to resist? We don't know what Michael experiences during WW2 and what he really did there. Very probably, he saw injustice, he saw cruelty, he saw people dying. Definetely more than shooting people a mile away.

Good analysis

After watching it again i think when mike comes back from italy he pretty much left his humanity. Also in part two physicaly you can see how evil he has become from his lips that have turned white to the wrinkles on his eyes. almost like a skull or something

I don't think it was "turning evil" so much as a shift in his values, strongly impacted by his father's shooting and Appolonia's murder. At the wedding, he seemed to reject his father ("That's my family, Kay--that's not me"). But when he was wooing Kay after he returned from Sicily, his father had become "just like any other man with responsibility for others") including senators and governors who have men killed. I think he must have had an epiphany: that virtue and right can be swept away by force, and that the only way to live was to be a force instead of one who was swept away. He had adopted Vito's attitude ("...and I refused to be a puppett...").

He was very different from Vito. Vito obviously wouldn't hurt his family and do other methods that were unsound that mike did

According to the novel, Vito put his own son Fredo "on the shit list", that is, he didn't talk to him any more, except for a few messages.
What methods are you referring to? Vito killed people or had people killed. In "business affairs" he was as cruel and cold as Michael. The only difference was that he was able to keep a lot of friends.
We tend to say that when it comes to family, Vito was much more the loving man than Michael. But I think, the circumstances under which Vito lived were more favorable. Vito didn't have to deal with women's emancipation (and an arguing wife), he didn't have to deal with a brother who betrayed him, etc.

" ... and do other methods that were unsound that mike did."

Such as? What's unsound? Vito named a non-sicilian as consigliere? Vito sent Luca to find out about Sollozzo? Vito said no to drugs although they were "the coming thing." And Vito allowed the fighting qualitie of his capos to erode during ten years of peace.

I mean ordering the deaths of women and his brother

Still, what was unsound about it?

Maybe because its wrong lol. I don't know man maybe i think different because i have a conscience

If so, you should select a more applicable adjective than unsound. Unsound would apply to a business decision. Immoral would be a more applicable adjective for you to use in the context you expressed.

Also,as the novel details, one result of Vito's effort to monopolize the olive oil business was the disappearance of one of his competitors afterwhich that competitor's wife and children were forced to sell their business to Vito.

I know what unsound means. I deleted the rest of my post by accident. I think you just misinterpreted what i was trying to say it happens. Also haven't you ever heard of having an unsound mind as in not whole or mentally normal

1) Why is the the killing of a woman more unsound/unjust as the killing of a man?
2) Why should we believe that Vito didn't accept the killing of women?
3) As I wrote, the circumstances were mor favorable to Vito: He had no brother to kill.

I hope you dont think this way in real life about killings lol. like I said As far as I sa from Vito he was a smart guy but he wouldn't go overboard just to make more money. Maybe it was because of the heat it would attract but I just dont see vito allowing women to be killed or family members

I think it's a gradual process, not one that can be whittled down to a single event. I mean, Mike is still getting darker and deeper in Part II and one could say that the facade of going legit in III while still having a hand in the family business is the darkest of them all.

Michael Corleone is a very complex character...throughout the entire trilogy. And that is one of the reasons the trilogy is so great and powerful.

That said, I do believe the night Mike was at the hospital and saw the determination people had to kill his father was probably the biggest impact to Mike's ability to change into the man he became.

Everyone has made similar points here, and I agree it was more a process than anything else. I think it begins after Vito is shot and Michael is observing up close how badly Santino is handling things. It dawns on him that if the family is to survive he is going to have to become more invlved. So he goes into NY and blows off Kay, goes to the hosital and his worst fears about how this is being handled are confirmed. The guards have all been sent home, and Vito is about to be killed. This is folllowed by the "I'm with you now Pop," scene, followed by Michael cleverly using Enzo to bluff the assassins, followed by him openly accusing McCluskey of being on the take. The following day when he returns home
everyone he learns the war has been escalated by Sonny who whacked Tatt jr (in exchange for a slap in the face???) and he sees everyone in the family hemming and hawing about what to do next, with Tom leading the charge to neotiate a deal. Finally he realizes he is the one ho has to stop Sol, and then when he does it he crosses the Rubicon, so to speak. Then after Appollinia's death, he knows that he is the only surviving son who can save the family. When he is in vegas his attitude toward Fredo is cold and distant, and by then he is a fully developed bad ass.

Good analysis DT. But, of course, that analysis eschews Michael turning to evil which was the original question in this thread. As I posted above, I don't think evil exists; there's only what we do. If you want to label Mike's actions as evil, fine. But, as your analysis points out, it wasn't evil that caused Mike to do what he did; he was exigent circumstances. So, there was no turning to or becoming evil by Michael.

You seem to misinterpret some things. I never said evil as in the exorcist or something lol. I mean evil as in doing disgusting horrible things without remorse.

That's what my post was about. And that's the Lucifer Effect: You think you do something good not realizing what's in front of you. So, the participants of the Milgram Experiment thought they were helping science, when they hit the 450 Volt button.

Exactly. Mike thought he was doing good, but the question: is good for whom? His window of who benefited from the good was quite narrow. Then too, there's the rationalization he may have engaged in to sanction his deeds.

Yes, doing good for whom?

The novel makes the points that, when people came to Vito for help, "never were they disappointed." Later it says that "he got the idea that he ran his little world better" than the pezzanovanti in government.

Unless I miss my mark, the only good Michael did for individuals with no apparent strings attached was to make Jules medical director of his hotels, and keep Lucy on in some capacity--and that was only in the novel. He made a "magnificent endowment" to the State University in Nevada in II, but that was an institutional gift designed to help buy legitimacy. By III, he's literally throwing money at the Church and at Sicily--for the same purpose.

The point of the topic is how people outside view his actions. Of course he rationalizes his actions as good or the right thing because at that point he lost his humanity. I didn't say evil because i know that gets you in an uproar lol

In III he rationalizes it all to Kay. He says first his father was in trouble "so what am I gonna do?" Then the same rationale for doing what he did to "save" his children. I think he crossed the line forever when he had Fredo killed. In essence at that point he was "saving" the family by killing one of its members, traitor that he was.

Yes, Kay put it into perfect perspective in III. Michael rationalizes: "I tried to protect my family from the horrors of this world." Kay replies: "But you became my horror."

And also TB, he never pauses to reflect upon the fact that it was he that, in large part, exposed his family to the horrors of this world.

'Evil' and 'stupid'....not a lot between them really.

Mike did not expose the family to the horrors of the world. Vito did the moment he killed the Don in Sicily, at that point he and his family became part of a criminal element. Mike did not join the mafia he was born into it. His choice to kill Sol and the Captain was a decision he made to protect his family, he knew it had to be done, he did not turn evil, in his mind killing Sol and the Captain was no differnt than killing Nazi's both times he was protecting his family. Mike would have been evil if he killed indesciminetly, but he didnt, ever person that he had killed were killed to protect the family, which is what he believed his job to be as the family head. I think that what everyone is seeing as hard is in actuallity the result of a person being thrust into a world and life he never really wanted to be a part of but had too with the shooting of Vito and the death of Sonny. His continual efforts to take the family legit is in my mind a sign of remorse and desire to leave a world he never wanted to be a part of. Sonny wanted that life and taking the family legit would have been the last thing he would ever want to do. In my opinion.

For Vito too, the move into the criminal world was slow. It started when he took Clemenza's guns. (Evil always starts with small steps.) He was present when Clemenza stole the carpet. Later, he joined the robberies of Clemenza and Tessio. There may be some reasons to justify that but you can't call these cations "good". The first murder Vito commits is the killing of Fanucci. And in the given situation of anarchy in Little Italy at that time, where the government had no intentions and no means to bring peace and justice to the neighborhoods, even that murder may be justified. But Vito was already at a point where he wasn't free of selfish reasons. Later, the killing of Fanucci was viewed as an act of heroism, but in fact: one robber killed the other. In the film (not in the novel) he seemed to acquire a taste for killing, so he went back to Sicily to kill those who were responsible for the killing of his parents and his brother.


No difference to his father. Vito did not want to be a Mafia boss. Mike thought that by killing Mac&Sol he would do good. As you say it was like "killing Nazis". But that was the first step across the Rubicon. Probably, he subconciously chose to be part of the game after the shooting of Vito when he joins the discussions of Sonny, Tom and Tessio.
The social pressures - family, situation, role models - were so strong that it looks as if he had no choice. But he had. At any given time.


Good thought.

Whether you agree that "evil" is a proper choice of words for what Michael (and Vito) became, I cannot agree with the contention that their actions were somehow unavoidable based on the circumstances in which they found themselves.

Vito and Michael both faced choices in their lives. Granted, they were often very hard choices, but they were choices. They continually chose a course of violence and criminality.

Vito could have kicked some $$$ to Fanucci, like all the other criminals in the neighborhood did. He still would have made a nice living. He instead chose to murder Fanucci and take over his rackets. He could have let Don Cicci live. Etc. Etc.

Michael chose to be the person who killed Sol & Mac. He had choices. He could have had the Family's newspapermen spread dirt on McCluskey, forcing him to distance himself from Sollozzo, then exposing Sollozzo to one of Sonny's 100 buttonmen. He could have gone to the meeting and have someone else ambush Mac and Sol. Or he could have said, "that's my Family, that's not me" or "this is the business they've chosen" and let the chips fall where they may.

Easy choices? No. But choices nonetheless.

Exactly Woltz. As we've postedin other threads, Michael could have walked away from his life at any time. One thing that never gets stated is that as a Mafia don, Vito and Michael presided over a vast criminal empire that included just about every piece of human scum who murdered, maimed, and otherwise destroyed the lives of God knows how many people.

There is no question that both Vito and Micheal made a choice to be a criminal and to remain a criminal, but dont all criminals make that choice. My contention is that Mike choice to kill Sol and the police captain to protect his family, he knew that without killing them his father would remain a target and would be killed eventually. I think that had Sonny not been killed, Mike would not have stayed in the family business beyond killing Sol and the Captain. As a good sicilian he could not leave his family and the family business without a Corelone at the helm.

Yes, and yes again. Michael had choices at every turn. I posted a thread about it here:

http://www.gangsterbb.net/threads/ubbthr...true#Post561802

Then what's the definition of "a good Sicilian"? Someone who obeys every order and remains loyal, no matter how cruel such a demand is?
What Vito called "family business" was robbery, infiltration of labor unions, loansharking, extortion, blackmailing, murder. Oh, and of course a little olive oil import.

You are what you do, not what you say you are. In Michael's case this is perfectly clear.

I was being a little sarcastic about being a good sicilian, but as a sicilian I was raised that no one comes before my family, nor was I ever to turn away from my family at a time of trouble, this line of thought is common in Sicilian and Italian familys. Is Micheal a Criminal, yes, is his upbringing an excuse to justify his decison making, no, but was joining the "family" business something he sat out to do, no, his decision to do so was forced by the perceived needs of his family.