Frank Pentangeli¶

At a glance¶

Played by: Michael V. Gazzo
Nickname: Frankie Five-Angels
Position: Caporegime, Brooklyn — inherited Clemenza's crew
Died: 1959 — suicide in protective custody
Oscar: Nominated, Best Supporting Actor (1975)

Your father did business with Hyman Roth. Your father respected Hyman Roth. But your father never trusted Hyman Roth. Frank Pentangeli

The old-country capo who cannot understand why the rules have changed — and the character created because Richard Castellano didn't come back.

Where he came from¶

Clemenza was meant to carry his role into Part II. Castellano did not return; the most persistent account is a dispute over money and over his wish to write his own dialogue.

So the script killed Clemenza off-screen (heart attack) and invented Frank Pentangeli to inherit the Brooklyn operation and the function: the loyal old-guard soldier who represents everything Michael's move to Nevada has abandoned.

The replacement is arguably an upgrade. Pentangeli's whole existence is nostalgia, which lets the film say things Clemenza couldn't.

The character¶

Frankie is loud, warm, entirely of the old world, and increasingly bewildered. At Anthony's First Communion party he can't get the band to play a tarantella and ends up bellowing at them, alone, while they play "Pop Goes the Weasel" — one of the best small scenes in the trilogy and a complete statement of his situation in about forty seconds.

His grievance is real: the Rosato brothers are taking his territory, and they are protected by Hyman Roth, and Michael won't let him move on them because Michael needs Roth. Frankie cannot process a world in which his Don sides with a Jewish financier in Miami over his own capo in Brooklyn, and says so.

Michael then uses him. He tells Pentangeli that Roth tried to kill him and asks him to make peace with the Rosatos — knowing it may get Frankie killed, and needing Roth to believe Michael blames Pentangeli. The Rosatos garrote him at the meeting, a beat cop interrupts, and Frankie survives believing Michael ordered it.

So he talks. He goes into federal protection and agrees to testify.

The hearing¶

The Senate committee is Part II's coldest sequence, and Michael's counter-move is the trilogy's purest expression of what he has become.

He does not threaten Pentangeli. He does not contact him. He flies Frankie's brother Vincenzo in from Sicily, walks him into the hearing room, and sits him down where Frankie can see him.

Pentangeli looks at his brother. Then he retracts his entire sworn statement — says he told the FBI what they wanted to hear, that he made it up, that he never knew any Michael Corleone. The case collapses. The Corleone counsel demands an apology. The brothers do not exchange a word, then or ever.

Frankie has just destroyed his own life to protect a family in Sicily. Michael never had to say anything at all.

The bath¶

Tom Hagen visits him in protective custody. They talk about the old days, and about the army camp Frankie was at.

Then Tom, conversationally, observes that in the Roman Empire, when a plot against the emperor failed, the conspirators were always given a chance to let their families keep their fortunes — they had only to go home and open their veins in a warm bath, sometimes with a little party first.

Frankie says, the family would be taken care of? Tom says yes.

He is found dead in his bath the same day. Neither man says the word.

It is the most chilling scene in the trilogy, and it is two men being polite to each other about Roman history.

Joe Valachi¶

Pentangeli is modeled on Joseph Valachi, the Genovese soldier who in October 1963 testified before the McClellan Committee on live television — the first made member ever to break omertà publicly, and the man who gave the American public the phrase Cosa Nostra.

The staging is direct: the hearing room, the banks of photographers, the senators, the counsel. Coppola has confirmed the parallel.

Frank Costello's 1951 Kefauver testimony contributes too — Costello's refusal to let his face be televised, resulting in the famous footage of only his hands, and the raspy voice that Brando borrowed for Vito.

See Real-World Mafia.

Michael V. Gazzo¶

Gazzo (1923–1995) was primarily a playwright — A Hatful of Rain (1955), a landmark Broadway drama about morphine addiction, which he also adapted for film. He acted comparatively rarely.

He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and split the vote with Lee Strasberg, both losing to their castmate Robert De Niro.