Great thread!
Catching up a bit...
He was "forced" to protect Vito by killing them. the only one because Sol only meet Michael to proposition
Mike had choices,but only before Sonny was killed
Michael had choices all along. Hard choices, maybe, but still choices.
Sure, Michael killing Sol and McCluskey himself was expedient but was it really necessary?
The Family knew hours in advance where the meeting was going to be. It was a restaurant that was open to the public. Why not have some of their operatives eating dinner there and have them kill Sol and Mac? Why not have the hundred buttonmen Sonny bragged about make a frontal assault on the restaurant while Michael was in the bathroom? Sol and Mac had no idea that the Corleones knew where they were going to be (or that anyone would dare to kill Mac) so they wouldn't have had much security with them.
It was Michael's desire to control things that made him unwilling to rely on anyone else to kill Sol and Mac. But it wasn't the only way.
I meant choosing to marry her after returning from Sicily
True he lost his first wife killed by the car bomb planted for him and Fredo because Vito stepped over him for his kid brother but no other grief if she had been like Carmela she'd have kept the family together no matter what
1. Anthony would have been at Law school
2. they wouldn't have been at the Opera where Mary was killed
I don't know about that.
Vito and Carmella were the prototypical Mafia couple, but they still had a son go so far as to enlist in the Marines and marry a WASP.
One of the sub-themes in the Trilogy is the tension between assimilating into American society and retaining Old World values.
Maybe Michael and, say, Apollonia would not have gotten a divorce but their son would be even more "American" than Michael was, so he still would most likely have wanted to forge his own path rather than accede to Michael's wish for him to become a lawyer.
