Michael Corleone does not die then. That would be mercy. An old man in a Sicilian courtyard. White hair. Sunglasses. He slumps in a chair, alone. A dog barks. A young priest passes. Michael takes off the glasses. His eyes are hollow. He thinks of Apollonia. Of Fredo. Of his father’s garden. Of Kay’s face the day she told him she had aborted their son. Of Mary.
That refusal costs him five bullets in a street market. It nearly kills him. It wakes his youngest son. Michael Corleone is the don’s hope for legitimacy. Ivy League, war hero, engaged to a WASP woman. He stands outside the family business—until he watches his father bleed on the pavement. He volunteers to kill a police captain and a drug dealer in a Bronx restaurant. The act is supposed to be tactical. It becomes spiritual. the godfather trilogy: 1901-1980
His Sicilian exile, his marriage to the innocent Apollonia, her death by car bomb meant for him—these are the Stations of the Cross for a man becoming a monster. By the time he returns to America, the gentle boy is gone. He becomes the Don after his father’s heart attack, and at his nephew’s baptism, he renounces Satan while his men execute the heads of the Five Families. Michael Corleone does not die then
By 1945, he is the Godfather. His daughter is married in a garden while his men sing and his enemies watch. He refuses to enter the narcotics trade, because drugs, he knows, will unravel the very world he built. White hair
And outside that door, the real America: built by immigrants, baptized in blood, and forever haunted by the question of what we become when we get what we wanted.
The most famous montage in cinema is also its most damning: a child’s soul offered for power.
His son Anthony refuses the family business to become an opera singer. His daughter Mary, innocent and loving, is drawn into his world like a moth to a burning altar. His former enemies have become collaborators; his collaborators have become traitors. The Vatican bank is a sewer. A hitman named Mosca—the “fly” in Italian—waits in the wings of a Sicilian opera house.