Vincent Mancini-Corleone¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- 1948 — Sonny and Lucy Mancini's illegitimate son
- Played by
- Andy García
- Becomes
- Don Vincent Corleone, 1980
- Oscar
- Nominated, Best Supporting Actor (1991)
Never let anyone know what you are thinking. Michael to Vincent — the same lesson Vito gave Sonny, and it didn't take then either
The heir, and Part III's best idea: Michael's succession problem is solved by the arrival of a young man who is, in every respect that matters, Sonny come back.
The character¶
Vincent arrives at Michael's papal-honor reception uninvited, working as muscle for Joey Zasa and furious about it. Within ten minutes he has called Zasa a name, been called a bastard in return, and bitten a chunk out of Zasa's ear in front of the family.
Michael is appalled and — visibly, wonderfully — delighted. He takes the boy in.
What follows is a straight repeat of the trilogy's oldest mistake. Vincent is brave, loyal, physically fearless, and completely without judgment. He kills Zasa during a street festa without permission because Connie sanctions it behind Michael's back. He conducts an affair with his first cousin Mary. He is the most alive person in the film, and everything he does makes the situation worse.
Michael's education of him is the film's most interesting relationship: an old man teaching a young one to stop being the kind of person who gets killed at a tollbooth, while knowing perfectly well that it didn't work the first time.
The succession¶
Michael abdicates and hands the family over on one condition — that Vincent give up Mary.
Vincent agrees, and takes the Corleone name.
It is the closest thing to a genuine tragic mechanism in Part III: Michael forces the boy to trade love for power, exactly as Michael himself did, and both of them know it, and it happens anyway. Minutes later Mary is dead on the theatre steps.
Vincent as Don is never shown. The unmade Part IV would have followed him through the 1980s, ruining everything — a war, the loss of the family's standing, and Mary's death eating him alive.
Andy García¶
García beat Alec Baldwin, Val Kilmer, and reportedly Robert De Niro to the part, and it made him a star. His nomination for Best Supporting Actor was the only acting nomination Part III received, and it's earned — he is playing a man who is essentially a walking flashback and still making him a person.
He has said in interviews that the fourth film came closer to happening than most people realize.
The problem with Vincent¶
He does not exist in any novel written before 1990.
The films establish, in one line, that Sonny fathered him on Lucy Mancini — a character the 1972 film reduced to a single wordless scene at the wedding, because Coppola cut her substantial and much-mocked subplot from Puzo's novel. So Vincent's parentage lands, for most viewers, as an invention rather than a payoff.
It isn't one. It's in the source; it's just not in the film that made everyone care. See Book vs. Film and Continuity.