The device that makes Vito seem sympathetic is repeated in II with Fredo. Even though Fredo betrayed his brother simply because he was "passed over" and more likely than not did know
it was going to be a hit on Michael, at the end we feel saddened that Fredo was killed, and we dislike Michael for taking vengence.

There is a big difference. fredo was never a killer. He certainly didn't want anything to happen to his brother. Vito was not a violent mobster but he still would use violence to get wahat he wanted. Mike just became a psycho when he became don

DT, I'm not sure I understand your analogy. But, stated simply, Vito is a sympathetic figure despite the fact that he is a murderer because he is juxtaposed against other bad guys (whose sympathetic qualities we never get to see). In other words, we see Vito helping people (Nazorine), we see him being a father (the wedding), and we see him just trying to get along ("your business is a little dangerous")and being picked on by those bad guys ("I pulled them guys off.").

That's a matter of opinion. There are many threads here on Fredo's guilt/innocence. It's probably the single most debated topic on these boards.

Bonasera totally disrespected the Don by asking him to kill for money. Vito was not a thug, or as he put it, "We're not murderers." Of course, that doesn't mean that they wont do murder, but that was done out of what they saw as necessity, and was therefore not seen as murder by them. More as an extension of self-defense.

By "not thinking to call him Godfather" he was displaying his own arrogance. Vito did not "force" him to say it, but called him on his disrespect. It's like asking your new girlfriend's father for a favor, and not thinking to show him the respect of calling him Mister.

But because Vito was a businessman, who collected friendships, he was willing to forgo the signs of disrespect, if Bonasera relented, giving him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he was simply ignorant, and not intentionally disrespectful. Which actually may have been the case.

For the un-initiated, it is actually quite easy to offend these "men of honor" even today, without realizing it. Either by making assumptions based on rumors or crap you see in the movies, or even in other ways that you just didn't even think of because you are not in that class of people. Another example might be something like giving a thumbs up sign to someone in Thailand, you would actually be telling them eff you.

I'd say the use violence to get what you want is a simple but good definition of being a mobster.

[quote Kuklinski] Vito was not a thug, or as he put it, "We're not murderers." Of course, that doesn't mean that they wont do murder, but that was done out of what they saw as necessity, and was therefore not seen as murder by them. More as an extension of self-defense.[/quote]
They lied to themselves all the time. Of course, they were murderers. They needed this whole honor-myth (as well as the "It's only business"-talk) to disguise and justify their crimes.

Wow! That's one for the psychiatric journals.

Ok smartass. What I meant was he was mostly low key. he wasn't a Gotti type of mobster who would yell and scream. I not defending him at all. I'm talking about his personality

Ok, let's not start with the name calling or the negative categorizations. Feel free to debate and disagree, but please try to do so without getting personal.

Hey thats no probelm as long as nobody starts with me. Anyway geting back to the discussion I think Vito had limits to what he would do but still he felt he was above everyone

Yes and no. This is the dilemma which haunted Michael all of his life. Was he really doing murder, or was he protecting his family? Is it really murder to kill someone who is trying to kill you or your family?

I think that the murder of is brother is really the only one he felt was a mistake.

Do you define murder morally or per statute? By statute, yes, it is murder to kill someone who is trying to kill you unless the attempt to kill you is imminent. Many states, in fact, maintain the stautory requirement that one tried to flee an attacker before using lethal force. Morally, it may be different, but to bring morality into it regarding a mafioso is a stretch. As has been discussed many times on this Board, Mike eschewed any semblance of morality (or law) by leading the life he did and choosing not to leave it behind.

I dont think Michael was an immoral person. He was trying to protect his family. Which is what drew him into the life in the first place. He hated "the life."

Here's a true story, from Poughkeepsie NY that went down this past year. A gunman opened fire on and killed another man in the parking lot of the Rip Van Winkle housing building. Cold blooded murder? Hardly. Looking back, there was a history between the two. In fact, they had each already been sent to state prison for shooting one another in earlier confrontations. It was inevitable that one day one would kill the other. So the shooting could be seen as sort of pre-emptive self-defense.

"This is chess, it ain't checkers!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gafALL-R1nI

Here a link for a brief on the shooting...

http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2010/08/27/blotter/doc4c772bb58e669630871481.txt

No one with any sense of self respect would try to run away from an attacker just to avoid killing them--I don't care what the law says. Where is the honor in that? If the attacker didn't want to be killed, they shouldn't have attacked in the first place!

Regarding Michael, I disagree that he (or Vito for that matter) were immoral or evil people. And even if one totally abhors everything about organized crime, one should remember that if Michael hadn't become the new godfather, someone else would have. It's not as if by choosing to be legitimate he would have put an end to the Corleone crime family. The family and its activities would have gone on--just under someone else, perhaps Clemenza or Pentangeli.

Amen.

Well in the US it depends on the state and the circumstances. Some states have castle law doctrines such that if someone attacks you in your home or car you are under no requirement to retreat. I generally agree with those laws.

On the other hand we don't allow settling of beefs. If there is someone trying to kill me the legal thing to do is to call the police and have them arrest the assailant. Self-defense (in Michigan anyway) is usually only allowed in imminent defense of life. I am not allowed to run after a robber or assailant and shoot them down and then claim self-defense. I am not allowed to shoot someone on the street because we had issues going back years. I can not shoot someone because of what they might do. That's logic for the non-criminal.

Criminal logic is of course quite different and can be very tempting/intoxicating when depicted fictionally on screen or in print but in real life we should remember that such an expanded claim of self-defense (pre-emption) could cause a lot more murders.

In prison if someone blows a kiss at me, stares at me too long, cuts in line for the phone or takes food from my plate it is entirely rational that I would then assault or attempt to kill them. To not do so would be to invite further abuse, rape or death. That would indeed be self-defense. But in "real life" that logic makes no sense and is totally destructive of any sort of society.

Michael initially did the wrong thing for the right reasons (or maybe the right thing for the wrong reasons) but whatever his good intentions may have been he changed from a straight laced college grad to a man who murdered his own brother, oversaw the degradation of hundreds of thousands via narcotics and prostitution and killed other men to take their goods for himself. This all may have been justified under the rules he was operating under but that doesn't make it "good" nor does it mean that he never had choices.

Putting ALL else aside, this man ORDERED THE MURDER of his own brother!!!





On this you are correct. He made a conscientious choice to protect his family fully knowing that he would be a part of "the life" by making the choice that he made.




Did he really hate the life? I'm not so sure about that. Michael was an ego maniac. Heck even before he jumped into the life he sat there and basically bragged to Kay about how powerful his father and his family was. I always felt that the "That's my family Kay, it's not me" line was a crock of shit. Michael was also a control freak. For the most part Micheal loved the power and the perks that went along with the life. The power that went along with being the boss of bosses, the big Don, etc. excited Michael.

He only did so after he thought (probably correctly) that that brother knowingly conspired to kill HIM!! To not mention that fact is grossly unfair. It's like saying "Harry Truman was a mass murderer because he ordered the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" as though this occurred in a vacuum, without any mention of the larger context in which it took place.

VitoC, I just love your analogies!


1)Again, this topic is not one that should morph into a political debate for this thread. Let's save those political debates for the General thread.

2) The debate as to if Fredo knowingly conspired to set up his brother to be killed is one that has been debated for years on these boards. Personally I do NOT think that Fredo INTENTIONALLY or KNOWINGLY conspired with Ola and Roth to have his brother Michael killed.

3)Please don't sit here and tell us that Michael was not an immoral person. There are several definitions of the word immoral and ALL describe and define what Michael Corleone became.

a)Tending to corrupt or resulting from corruption.
b)unscrupulous OR unethical
c)deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong
d)dishonest

Just like his father and the whole Mafiosi genre, Michael eschewed every semblance of civilized behavior by using murder, mayhem, extortion, racketeering, and intimidation with alacrity to achieve his personal objectives. To him, noone else counted if it achieved his end and his end did not extend beyond his own aggrandizement.

Michael certainly felt remorseful about ordering Fredo's death, and I think his emotion while confessing to Cardinal Lamberto was genuine. But I don't think he belived that killing Fredo was a mistake. I think the depth of resentment Fredo showed in the boathouse scene convinced Michael that he would have been a danger to Michael and his family all of his life.

To me, the moral issue comes down to the life that Michael chose. He constantly put himself in the position of having to use violence to get his way, or to get himself and his family out of the way of violence aimed at them because of his actions. A scene from the beginning of III puts it into good perspective: Michael says, "I spent my life protecting my family from the horrors of this world." And Kay replies, "But you became my horror."

TB, that is it exactly. He continually made the choice to stay in that life until it was too late.

I stand by what I said, Don Cardi. If you reject it, that's up to you. But don't give me this condescension--the whole purpose of this board is for people to exchange their opinions. This is not a matter of factual correctness. I'm not saying the Holocaust never happened or that the earth is flat. I'm giving a value judgment about someone. Frankly, I don't care about what some dictionary has to say about what constitutes "immoral." One of the definitions you provide is purely subjective on its face--"deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong"? Really? Up until the last few decades a white person who dated/married an African-American was "immoral" by that standard. Furthermore, one could view a person as doing a number of things that are immoral, even seriously so, but not label the person as immoral on the whole. This could be true for any number of reasons--including believing that the immoral actions are partially mitigated by context, and/or believing that other aspects of the person's behavior are good and praiseworthy.

Lyndon Johnson's political career included, among other shady things, blatant election fraud in Texas. But I don't consider Johnson an immoral person either, because 1) the Texas political culture was such that one had to be willing to do things like that to survive at that time, and 2) Johnson had numerous redeeming features, particularly his support of civil rights, that I believe outweighed his dark side.

And I don't see anything inappropriate about my Michael/Truman analogy. If the shoe fits... I remember Turnbull, in a different context, making an analogy between the two men.

I don't remember that, Vito. If you find it, please post it.

Part of Philosophy 101 is "ethical relativism." By that standard, Michael was probably no worse than any other Mafia Don, and LBJ was no worse than any other vote-stealing politician. Michael made that exact point in GF when he wooed Kay in New Hampshire: "My father is just like any other man with responsibilities for people...Governors and Senators don't have people killed? Now who's being naive, Kay?" But, IMO, we have to step back and ask, toward what end? A killer's still a killer, and a crooked politician's still a crooked politician. Someone who justifies moral lapses to advance his cause is likely to keep on doing just that, with even graver results down the line.

Amen TB. And the graver results that accrued to Michael's moral lapses? The murder of his daughter.

I think, Michael was at time really apart from his family. He disliked the way, his father handled things. He probably hated Luca. He wanted a modern life, have a modern wife. He didn't like Johnny Fontane.
Only when is father is shot, he realizes that he's the only one who has the guts, the heart, the brain & the talent to handle these things.

Well lets be fair the reason Mike became a good boss was because of Vito. Vito was the one who tole him about a traitor otherwise he would of been killed. Also Mike could have normal life but I agree with the other post he was a control freak and the power turned him into a evil psychopath

I have not spoken to you in a condescending way by any means. Not my intention at all. Yes, the whole purpose of this board is for people to exchange opinions, interpretations and ideas. No doubt about it. And there are appropriate threads that have been set up for all of us to do so with those exchanges and debates being posted according to topic that the thread was specifically created for. This is a thread created for discussions and debates regarding the Godfather Trilogy Movies. While I understand that you were trying to make analogies between fictional characters and real life, you need to understand that all I was trying to prevent was having this debate about the movie and it's characters turn into an all out real life political debate. That's all.







....But by the post that you made above it is quite obvious that you were not able to realize that all I was doing was trying to prevent this from turning into a real life political debate.



Can you please find that post? I, like TB, would love to see it!

Fredo: “Condescended to me. You're one of the longest tenured Board members and you're condescending to me. Did you ever think about that -- did you ever once think about that?”

Michael: “That's the way the Board works. “

Fredo: “It ain't the way I work! I'm smart -- not like everyone says -- not dumb, smart and I don't want to be condescended to. “

I was curious about this, too. I think this is the reference below (the linked post and some following it):


CLICK HERE