Hyman Roth¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Lee Strasberg
- Base
- Miami Beach; interests in Havana
- Business
- Casinos, syndicate finance
- Died
- 1959, Miami airport — shot by Rocco Lampone
- Modeled on
- Meyer Lansky
- Oscar
- Nominated, Best Supporting Actor (1975)
This is the business we've chosen. I didn't ask who gave the order — because it had nothing to do with business. Hyman Roth
The antagonist of Part II, and the only person in the trilogy who genuinely out-thinks Michael Corleone.
The character¶
Roth is an old man in a cardigan in a small house in Miami, watching a football game on a portable television and eating a tuna sandwich his wife made. He has an oxygen problem and a heart condition and has been dying, by his own account, for twenty years.
He also controls more money than every family in New York combined, and he is patiently, methodically destroying Michael from the inside.
The strategy is elegant: bind Michael into the Havana casino deal, use Fredo as an access point, arrange a hit that Michael will survive and blame on someone else, set Pentangeli and Michael against each other, and — when the direct approach fails — arrange for a Senate committee to do the work instead.
He nearly wins. Michael survives it and destroys him, and the destruction costs Michael his brother, his wife, his children, and the last of himself. Roth dies in an airport lobby with a smile on his face and everyone he came for is worse off than he is.
The Moe Greene speech¶
The most important two minutes in Part II.
In Havana, Roth tells Michael a story: that he was in Las Vegas when Moe Greene was killed; that he and Greene were like brothers; that he had never seen a man build a business the way Greene built that city; and that when Greene was murdered, he didn't ask who gave the order — because it had nothing to do with business.
Every word of it is a threat, an accusation, and an alibi at once. Roth is telling Michael: I know you killed him, I have known for years, I have never mentioned it, and I am about to. And he does it while explaining a code of professional restraint he has no intention of honoring.
Michael, who ordered the Greene killing, has to sit there and take it. It's the only scene in the trilogy where he is completely outmatched, and Pacino plays it by doing nothing at all.
Meyer Lansky¶
Roth is an unusually direct portrait of Meyer Lansky (1902–1983) — the Syndicate's financial architect, Bugsy Siegel's partner, the man who built the Cuban casino economy under Batista and lost it in a week to Castro, and who spent his last decades trying and failing to be admitted to Israel under the Law of Return before dying in Miami of natural causes.
The parallels are precise: the Havana operation, the Batista relationship, the businessman's self-presentation, the sandwich-and-cardigan modesty, and the sequence in which Roth is refused entry by country after country and finally returns to the US to be shot. Lansky, reportedly, saw the film and complained about the accent.
The Cuba sequence is Part II's most historically specific stretch. Roth divides a birthday cake iced as a map of Cuba among the American corporate men in the room — the single most concise image of foreign economic occupation in American cinema. See Real-World Mafia.
Lee Strasberg¶
The casting is a piece of theatre history.
Lee Strasberg (1901–1982) was the artistic director of the Actors Studio and the most influential — and most argued-about — acting teacher in America, the man who codified "the Method" in its American form. Al Pacino was his student. Marlon Brando famously refused to credit him, insisting Stella Adler and Kazan taught him and Strasberg did not.
Strasberg was 72, had barely acted professionally in decades, and was persuaded into it partly by Pacino. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
So the scene in Havana is Al Pacino, at the height of his powers, being systematically dismantled on screen by the man who taught him. Coppola knew exactly what he was doing.