The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (14 page)

 

1
Why does a crime family of such might, weight, and ferocity send one old man (Luca Brasi) to a Mafia sitdown with no backup whatsoever?
Granted, he was the most fearsome murder-machine the Corleone klutzes could cobble together to send into battle, but still, why was he there all by his lonesome? After he spends a few seconds trying to act tough, one guy stabs him in the hand with a knife while another strangles him to death with a piano cord. It takes all but twenty seconds to end his life. Seriously, I’ve had a harder time killing a squirrel in my attic.

 

 

2
Why was Fredo assigned to protect the Don out in the street by himself, during a gang war no less?
Who was giving out the assignments that day? “OK, we gotta protect the boss. Fredo, you’re incompetent, an idiot, and a bumbling coward. You got this?”

 

 

3
Again with Fredo. We find out he somehow “betrayed” Michael, leading to an attempt on his life in the “fortified Corleone compound” by guys with machine guns.
Later, Fredo says to Michael, “I swear, I didn’t know it was gonna be a hit.” So, when he let the guys onto the grounds carrying machine guns, what did he think they were there for, to play pinochle?

 

 

4
While Frank Pentangeli is being strangled, the guy robbing him of life says to him, “Michael Corleone says hello!”
Number 1, what does that knowledge do for Frank Pentangeli in the afterlife? Number 2, it wasn’t Michael who ordered the hit. So
why
lie to him as you kill him? Who is he going to complain to? The only answer, which one of my fellow movie pals came up with, is that he wasn’t actually trying to kill him. According to my friend, it was a government plot to “turn” ol’ Frankie Five Angels. But that’s an awful lot of trouble to go to with a man of that age, with a piece of piano wire wrapped around his neck, to further some plot to make him a government witness, isn’t it? Especially because you run the risk of killing him, and a bunch of other people, in the process. Whether it was a mob hit or a government plot, it makes no sense. It’s a ridiculous scene, and it should have been ripped out of the script during the first read-through. Someone, anyone, should have asked the questions I just asked, made the same observations, and seen the wholly unsatisfactory nature of any of the plot outcomes. But this was obviously the best they could come up with for why Frankie turns into a cooperating, reluctant witness. With screaming and shooting and strangling and people getting run over by cars out in the street—just a colossal mess.

 

 

5
When Michael comes back and Hagen (Duvall) solemnly intones that Kay (Keaton) has “lost the baby,” why does Michael ask, “Was it a boy?”
Why does this matter? He already has a boy at this point (and a little girl, if my memory serves correct; I don’t have the energy to rewatch this awful scene). What’s the difference what sex the baby is? Or was it, as I suspect, just some awful way of wedging in yet another example of that eye-rolling, Lilliputian, mega-hack Pacino screaming at his fellow performers because he couldn’t out act them? Duvall lets it ride; had Pacino tried this with a prime Gary Oldman, were they contemporaries, he’d have gotten eaten for lunch.