Carlo Rizzi¶

At a glance¶

Played by: Gianni Russo
Married: Connie Corleone, 1945
Children: Michael Francis Rizzi, Victor Rizzi
Betrayal: Set up Sonny for Barzini, 1948
Died: 1955 — garroted by Clemenza in a car

The trilogy's most despised character, and — in a story full of murderers — the only one the audience is invited to enjoy watching die.

The character¶

Carlo marries into the family and is immediately, deliberately, given nothing. Vito's assessment is that he is a man of no consequence, so he gets a living and no position. Carlo takes this as the injury of his life, correctly, and spends the marriage taking it out on his wife.

The beatings escalate across a decade of screen time, staged with a domestic ordinariness that is worse than the film's shootings — the belt, the smashed crockery, Connie's voice on the telephone.

When Sonny finds out, he beats Carlo half to death in a public street with his fists and a garbage can lid, in front of a crowd, and tells him that if he touches his sister again he'll kill him.

Barzini's people then approach Carlo with the obvious offer. Carlo beats Connie again, deliberately, knowing she will call her brother; Sonny drives off alone in a fury; the tollbooth is waiting.

The murder¶

The last thing Michael does in the first film.

He waits until the baptism of Carlo's second son, at which Michael stands as godfather. Then he tells Carlo that he knows, that Carlo is being sent to Las Vegas, and that he should get his affairs in order. Carlo, relieved, believing it, gets into a car.

Michael says: You have to answer for Santino, Carlo. Carlo protests. Michael tells him not to insult his intelligence, and that the punishment is not death — he only wants Carlo out of the family business.

Then he closes the car door, and Clemenza puts a garrote around Carlo's throat from the back seat. Carlo kicks the windshield out with both feet as he dies, and Michael watches through the glass without moving.

The lie is the important part. Michael doesn't need to lie — Carlo is in a car with two Corleone soldiers and is not going anywhere. He does it because he can, and because it works, and because he has become someone who finds it easier than not doing it.

Gianni Russo¶

Russo was not an actor. He talked his way into an audition, screen-tested by choreographing the street fight with Caan, and got the part.

He has spent the fifty years since telling a great many stories about his own connections to organized crime, his childhood, and the production — including claims about mob figures on set and about his own past. Very little of it is documented, and much of it has been contradicted. He is an unusually vivid example of the wider problem with Godfather production history: the people who were there have had five decades of incentive to improve their stories. See Contributing on how this wiki handles disputed anecdotes.

Caan reportedly cracked one of Russo's ribs and chipped an elbow during the beating scene, which was shot for real over multiple takes. That much is corroborated by several participants.

The one complication¶

Carlo is a genuinely bad man, and the film uses him to smuggle something past the audience.

By the time Michael kills him, you want it. It is the one killing in the trilogy the audience is permitted to enjoy — and Coppola stages it immediately after the baptism massacre, so that your satisfaction at Carlo's death is sitting right next to five murders you have just watched happen under a sacrament.

That is the whole trick of the film in one sequence. If you cheered for the garrote, the film has just demonstrated exactly how the Corleone family's morality gets installed in a person. See Themes.