Vito Corleone¶

At a glance¶

Born: Vito Andolini, 1891, Corleone, Sicily
Died: 1955, his garden, Long Beach, NY — heart attack
Played by: Marlon Brando (1972) Robert De Niro (Part II) Oreste Baldini (age 9)
Spouse: Carmela
Children: Sonny, Fredo, Michael, Connie; Tom Hagen (informally adopted)
Position: Don, Corleone family
Oscars won by the role: 2 — Brando (1973), De Niro (1975)

I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life — I don't apologize — to take care of my family. Vito to Michael, the garden scene

The only character in cinema to win two Academy Awards for two different actors, and the only person in the trilogy who gets what he wants and dies content.

Life¶

1891, Corleone, Sicily. Vito Andolini is nine when the local chieftain Don Ciccio has his father Antonio murdered over an insult. His brother Paolo swears revenge and is killed. His mother takes the boy to Ciccio and begs; when Ciccio refuses, she puts a knife to his throat and screams for Vito to run. She is shot. Vito is smuggled onto a ship.

At Ellis Island, an immigration clerk reads the tag — Vito Andolini from Corleone — and enters it wrong. He is nine years old, alone, does not speak English, has smallpox, and now has a different name.

New York, 1901–1917. He is taken in by the Abbandando family; he grows up with Genco; he works in the family grocery and marries Carmela.

1917–1920. The Black Hand extortionist Don Fanucci forces the grocer to give Vito's job to a nephew. Vito falls in with Clemenza and Tessio, stealing dresses. When Fanucci demands tribute, Vito talks his partners down to a third of it and then, during the Feast of San Rocco, kills Fanucci on a tenement landing. He is not yet thirty. He walks home and holds his infant son.

The neighborhood, having no idea what happened, comes to him with problems anyway — because he is the man who is polite, who listens, and who somehow gets things done. He does favors. He never asks for money.

1920s–1940s. Genco Pura Olive Oil becomes the largest importer in the country and the front for everything else. Vito builds the family on the principle that the useful assets are not guns but judges, politicians, and unions. In 1925 he returns to Sicily and cuts open the blind, ancient Don Ciccio.

1945. He refuses Sollozzo's narcotics proposition and is shot five times outside a fruit stand. He survives, loses his eldest son, sues for peace, and hands the family to Michael — the son he had specifically kept out of it.

1955. He dies in his tomato garden, playing at being a monster for his grandson, with an orange peel in his mouth. No last words.

What he actually is¶

The trilogy's great trick is that Vito is genuinely admirable and the film knows it's a trap.

He is courteous, patient, loyal, and unshakeably devoted to his family. He refuses narcotics on what look like moral grounds and are actually strategic ones — it's a dirty business is followed immediately by the real reason, which is that the politicians will not protect a drug trade. He gives more than he takes and he keeps his word.

He is also a man who murders his way to control of a neighborhood and then a city, whose entire enterprise runs on the credible threat of violence, and whose central innovation is making that violence so rarely necessary that it stops looking like violence at all. The horse's head is the perfect Vito operation: nobody is hurt, nothing is said, and the man does what he's told forever.

The AFI ranked Vito Corleone the #10 greatest hero in American film. Not villain — hero. That placement is the single best piece of evidence for what the film does to an audience. See Themes.

The two performances¶

Brando built him from the outside in: the jaw stuffed with cotton (dental prosthetics after the screen test), the shoe-polish hair, the wheeze taken from recordings of Frank Costello's televised testimony, the hands that seem heavy. He is 47 playing 60s and 70s. The performance is almost entirely stillness; the eyes are in shadow for most of the film, on Gordon Willis's deliberate insistence, so that you cannot read him.

De Niro had the harder job: play the same man at half the age, in a different language, without doing an impression. His solution was to take almost nothing from Brando's voice and everything from his economy — the watchfulness, the way he lets other people fill silence. He learned Sicilian for the part and speaks almost no English in the film. He won Best Supporting Actor and did not attend the ceremony.

The two never appear together and never overlap by a single scene. Watching them consecutively is the best acting lesson in the trilogy.

In the novel¶

Puzo gives Vito far more interiority. His reasoning is laid out, his business explained, and his backstory told as a long retrospective block — the material Coppola cut in 1972 and filmed in 1974. The novel's Vito is more explicitly a strategist and slightly less mysterious; the film's Vito is more frightening because you have to guess.

Real-world models¶

A composite rather than a portrait. The most-cited components:

Frank Costello — the "Prime Minister" of the underworld, who ran on political influence rather than violence, and whose rasping Kefauver-hearing voice Brando copied
Carlo Gambino — quiet, courteous, patient, and the most successful boss of his era
Vito Genovese — the name, and the narcotics conflict
Joseph Bonanno — the family-as-tradition self-presentation

See Real-World Mafia.