Frederico "Fredo" Corleone¶

At a glance¶

Born: 1919, New York — the middle son
Died: 1959, Lake Tahoe — shot in a fishing boat on Michael's order
Played by: John Cazale
Position: Underboss in name; nothing in practice
Wife: Deanna Dunn
Betrayal: Gave Johnny Ola access, 1958

I'm smart! Not like everybody says… I'm smart and I want respect! Fredo, Havana

The trilogy's most painful character, and the one most likely to change how you feel about the whole thing on a second viewing.

The character¶

Fredo is the son nobody needed. Sonny had the nerve, Michael had the brains, Tom had the education. Fredo was sickly as a child, is not clever, is not frightening, and — crucially — is sweet-natured, in a family where that has no market value.

The films give him a career of small humiliations that add up to a life:

At the shooting, he fumbles his gun on the pavement and sits on the curb weeping while his father bleeds.
He is shipped to Las Vegas to learn the casino business under Moe Greene, who slaps him in public and calls him a dead man's son.
His younger brother becomes Don, and Fredo is given a title with no authority attached.
His wife drinks and humiliates him at a family party, and Michael has to have her removed, in front of everybody.
Michael tells him, flatly, you're my older brother, Fredo, and I love you — but don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again, which is a thing you say to a child.

What he does with that is the tragedy. Johnny Ola approaches him — not with a plot, as Fredo understands it, but with attention. Somebody important is finally treating him as a man worth talking to. He gives up the information that nearly gets Michael killed and he genuinely, catastrophically, does not understand that this is what he is doing.

His defense in Havana is the closest thing the trilogy has to a howl: I'm your older brother and I was stepped over. He is right, and it does not help him.

The kiss¶

At a New Year's Eve party in Havana, having just learned the truth, Michael takes his brother's face in both hands, kisses him on the mouth, and says: I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.

It is the single most quoted moment in Part II and the most misread. It is not a threat, and it isn't theatre. It's a Sicilian death-kiss and a real one at the same time — Michael is genuinely grieving in the act of condemning, and the fact that he can do both simultaneously is the diagnosis of what he has become.

The lake¶

Michael orders that Fredo not be harmed while their mother lives. Carmela dies. At her funeral, Connie engineers a reconciliation; Michael embraces his brother and looks at nothing over his shoulder.

Fredo takes his nephew Anthony fishing — he has a routine with the boy, a Hail Mary said before casting, because it's lucky. Anthony is called away. Al Neri takes his place in the boat.

Coppola shoots the murder from Michael's window: a long lens, the lake, Fredo's silhouette starting the Hail Mary, and then a small distant sound. Michael's face does not change.

John Cazale¶

John Cazale made five films. All five were nominated for Best Picture: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter. No other actor has a filmography like it.

Coppola cast him off Off-Broadway work and then wrote a part for him in The Conversation. He was Pacino's close friend and frequent stage partner. He was diagnosed with lung cancer during pre-production on The Deer Hunter; the studio wanted him replaced, and Meryl Streep — his partner — and Robert De Niro fought to keep him. He shot all his scenes and died on March 13, 1978, aged 42, with Streep beside him.

Pacino on him: one of the great actors of our time — that time, any time.

Fredo is the reason. The performance is built out of things most actors won't do: the wet-eyed eagerness, the laugh that comes half a beat late, the terrible over-eager hands. He plays a man who has been told his whole life that he isn't much and has believed it.

Afterward¶

Fredo dominates Part III without appearing in it. Michael's confession to Cardinal Lamberto — I ordered the death of my brother — is the only time in the trilogy he says a fully true sentence out loud, and he breaks apart saying it. When he strokes out on the tarmac in Atlantic City, the name he screams is Fredo's.

Winegardner's novels give him a substantially expanded interior life and a secret; readers are divided on whether that's a gift to the character or a violation of a man whose tragedy is precisely that nobody looked.