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Clemenza & Tessio

The two original caporegimes — Vito's partners from the dress-stealing days, and the two men who prove that thirty years of loyalty buys you nothing at all.

Peter Clemenza

At a glance

Played by
Richard S. Castellano (1972) Bruno Kirby (young, Part II)
Territory
Bronx / Long Island
Died
Between the films — heart attack (referenced in Part II)
Best known for
The cannoli; teaching Michael to shoot; the sauce

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. Clemenza, after Paulie Gatto's murder

The trilogy's warmest presence, and the one who does most of the killing.

Clemenza is a big, cheerful, entirely unsentimental professional. He teaches Michael how the pistol will be placed behind the toilet tank and, more importantly, how to walk out of the restaurant — let your hand drop to your side, keep walking, don't look at anybody. He explains that these things have to happen every five or ten years to get rid of the bad blood. He shows Michael how to make tomato sauce for a lot of guys. He murders Carlo Rizzi with a garrote in the front seat of a car while Carlo kicks the windshield out.

The cannoli line was Richard Castellano's own, contributed on set. It is the second-most-quoted line in the film and it does more character work in six words than most scripts manage in a scene: a man has just been shot in the back of the head, and the immediate practical concern is his wife's order.

Castellano did not return for Part II. Accounts differ — the most persistent version is a dispute over money and over Castellano's desire to write his own dialogue. The role was reconceived: Clemenza is dead of a heart attack, and his Brooklyn operation has passed to Frank Pentangeli, a character created to fill the hole. Bruno Kirby plays the young Clemenza in the 1917–1920 sequences and is very good — a fast-talking neighborhood thief who hands Vito a gun wrapped in a towel and effectively starts everything.

Salvatore Tessio

At a glance

Played by
Abe Vigoda (1972) John Aprea (young, Part II)
Territory
Brooklyn
Died
1955 — executed for betrayal
Reputation
The better strategist of the two

Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked him. Tessio, being led away

Quiet, cautious, and — Vito's own assessment — the smarter of his two capos.

Tessio's betrayal is the coldest thing in the first film precisely because it is so reasonable. Vito, dying, warns Michael that whoever comes to him proposing a meeting with Barzini will be the traitor. At Vito's funeral, Tessio comes to Michael and proposes a meeting with Barzini.

He isn't malicious. He has made a professional judgment that the Corleones are finished under a boy Don, and he is arranging to be on the winning side. In his own terms it is the correct call, and the fact that he is wrong is the film's argument in miniature.

He is taken away by two men, having asked Tom Hagen — for old times' sake — if he can get him off the hook. Hagen says he can't. Tessio nods. That's the whole scene.

Abe Vigoda was a stage actor and near-unknown at 51 when he was cast; the funereal face and the height made him. He became far more famous afterward as Detective Fish on Barney Miller, and then, for a strange late-life stretch, as the subject of a running gag about whether he was still alive — a gag he participated in cheerfully. He was, until January 2016, when he died at 94.

What the pair are for

Coppola uses Clemenza and Tessio as a matched set to make one point.

Both men have been with Vito since 1920. Both helped build the family from a stolen truckload of dresses. Both have children, and Sunday dinners, and thirty-five years of credit.

One of them murders his boss's son-in-law on command without comment. The other makes one rational business calculation and is dead within a day. Neither outcome has anything to do with what they deserve or what they gave, and the film presents both with the same flat, unhurried camera.

That's the family business.

See also