Sollozzo & McCluskey¶
Michael Corleone's first two murders, and the pair that turns a family drama into a war.
Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo¶
At a glance¶
The antagonist of the first act, and a genuinely good one because he is right about the future.
Sollozzo comes to Vito with a proposition: $1 million up front, the Corleones supply political protection and legal cover, and everybody gets rich on heroin. Vito declines. His stated objection is moral — it's a dirty business — and his real objection, delivered a beat later, is strategic: the judges and politicians who are the family's actual capital will not extend protection to narcotics the way they do to gambling.
He is right for about ten years, and Sollozzo is right forever. The American Mafia's post-war history is essentially the story of families that got into narcotics eating families that didn't.
What makes Sollozzo dangerous is that he is careful, courteous, and reads people. He notices Sonny's flicker of interest in that meeting and concludes — correctly — that the son would take the deal if the father were gone. He shoots Vito, takes Tom Hagen hostage, and negotiates rather than escalating. Every move he makes is proportionate and intelligent, and he loses because he cannot conceive that the college boy is a threat.
Al Lettieri (1928–1975) was a superb heavy — The Getaway, Mr. Majestyk — who died of a heart attack at 47. He was, by several accounts, connected to organized crime by marriage, which was not unusual on this production.
Captain Mark McCluskey¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Sterling Hayden
- Position
- NYPD captain, on Sollozzo's payroll
- Died
- 1945, Louis' Restaurant — shot by Michael
The bought cop, and the reason the murder is a crisis.
McCluskey pulls Vito's guards off the hospital and breaks Michael's jaw in the street with one punch. He is not a subtle character and doesn't need to be: his function is to establish that the police are simply another armed faction with a price.
Killing a police captain is what makes the restaurant murder unforgivable rather than merely criminal. It's why Michael has to leave the country, why the newspapers have to be managed, and why Hagen's line — the police are involved, and the newspapers — is delivered as the actual catastrophe.
Sterling Hayden is the most interesting piece of casting in the film. A former merchant seaman, an OSS operative who ran guns to Yugoslav partisans in the Second World War, a briefly-enrolled Communist Party member who named names before HUAC in 1951 and spent the rest of his life describing that as the great shame of his existence. He was also The Asphalt Jungle, Dr. Strangelove, and The Killing. Casting a man publicly ruined by his own capitulation as a corrupt authority figure is not an accident.
The restaurant¶
The scene the film is built around, and the one that saved two careers.
Michael has volunteered. The family is amused by it — Sonny laughs in his face. Clemenza coaches him: the gun will be taped behind the toilet tank, come out firing, let the hand drop, keep walking, don't look at anybody.
At the table Sollozzo speaks in Italian; McCluskey eats veal. Michael excuses himself. He finds the gun. He comes back, sits down — and Coppola holds. The camera pushes in slowly on Pacino's face. A subway train screams past outside, deafening, over the top of everything, for what feels like an unbearable length of time. There is no music.
Then he stands, shoots Sollozzo through the head, shoots McCluskey through the throat and the head, and — against Clemenza's instruction — lets the gun fall from his fingers with his hand still raised.
Coppola has said this scene turned the studio around on both his own firing and Pacino's, which had been actively discussed for weeks. See The Godfather (1972) § Production.
The subway sound was reportedly a late addition in post. It is the single best sound design decision in the trilogy: the noise is inside Michael's head, and the audience hears his nerve breaking and holding at the same time.