Luca Brasi¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Lenny Montana
- Position
- Vito's personal enforcer
- Died
- 1945, Tattaglia nightclub — garroted; hand pinned to the bar
- Fate reported as
- "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes"
The most feared man in the Corleone organization, dead within forty minutes, and the reason everybody afterward is frightened.
The function¶
Luca is a device, and an elegant one. The film needs you to understand that Vito Corleone's power is not merely social, and it does not want to show you Vito being violent. So it gives Vito a dog.
Everything you learn about Luca is secondhand and appalling. Michael tells Kay at the wedding, cheerfully, that Luca is very frightening. Later — in the novel and in the restored cuts — we learn what he did in his younger days, and it is worse than anything shown on screen.
And then Luca himself appears, and he is a huge slab of a man standing in a hallway, sweating, rehearsing a formal little speech of thanks to the Don over and over under his breath, terrified of getting it wrong.
That is the joke and the point. The most frightening man in New York is frightened of Vito, and Vito is so much more powerful than him that he doesn't need to be frightening at all.
The death¶
Luca is sent to infiltrate the Tattaglias, pretending to be available for hire. Sollozzo and Bruno Tattaglia are ahead of him. At the bar, someone pins his hand to the wood with a knife and a garrote goes around his throat.
Coppola shoots it in close, badly lit, and lets it go on far too long — the only killing in the film staged for physical horror rather than for shock.
The message arrives at the Corleone house wrapped in a fish. Clemenza translates: it means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. The line has outlived almost everything else in the film.
Luca's death is the alarm. If they could get Luca, they can get Vito — and forty minutes later, they do.
Lenny Montana¶
The casting is the best-known piece of Godfather folklore, and unusually, it's documented.
Lenny Montana was a professional wrestler (as "Zebra Kid" among others) and, at the time, a genuine associate of the Colombo family — one of the men present around the production during the Italian-American Civil Rights League negotiations. Coppola saw him, liked the size and the face, and cast him.
Montana was not an actor and was visibly terrified of Marlon Brando. He kept fumbling his lines rehearsing the speech to the Don.
Coppola's response was to keep it and then build a scene around it — the shot of Luca in the hallway, muttering the speech to himself, exists to make the fumbling in the office deliberate. A non-actor's genuine stage fright was converted into the single most humanizing beat in the film.
Whether the reported nerves were entirely genuine has been debated for fifty years, as everything about this production has. The scene works either way.
In the novel¶
Puzo devotes considerably more space to Luca, including a backstory grim enough that Coppola declined to film it. Ed Falco's The Family Corleone (2012) dramatizes his recruitment into the family in 1933, presenting him as a genuinely independent and terrifying figure whom Vito acquires rather than creates.
Both accounts arguably do the character a disservice. Luca is more frightening as a rumor.