Michael had a girlfriend, Kay, who had been left in America. And he has to go back to America sometime. Why did he dump her and marry Apollonia? If he didn't love her at first, why did he date Kay? Or did Vito Corleone tell him to marry a Sicilian girl and not an American girl? Also, why did he reunite with Kay Adams when he was back in America?
shareI think the short answer is that he simply fell in love with Apollonia at first sight - "like a thunderbolt". She was young, she was innocent, she was gorgeous. What's not to like?
While Kay would turn out to be a fine wife for Michael and probably more his intellectual equal, there was probably something compelling about marrying a beautiful young Sicilian girl like Apollonia. I don't doubt he loved Kay on some level when he left America, but men have fallen for other women under less understandable circumstances.
As for reuniting with Kay, the answer is obvious: she was available and they had history. Kay already knew about Michael's family, so she wasn't a problem from that standpoint. Had Apollonia not been killed, Michael would have returned to the states with her and not reconnected with Kay at all.
Great answer.
I'd add that Michael's trip to Sicily reconnects him with a whole other way of life. It's like it awakens something in his mitochondria that turns him into more of a Corleone than he was before. He starts immersing himself in that Old World stuff, and that's why when he returns he's got a bit more blood in his veins as it were.
While there, Apollonia is part of that. She's part of this old, Italian person who Michael is or never was. When he's there, he's in love with her. When he returns, it's a bit like waking up, and he remembers his past self, too, and that guy is still gonzo for a great woman like Kay. He never recaptures his original self, though, and he winds up getting sorta lost as a result.
I would disagree with your last statement, though. I think that Michael would have been caught between two worlds if he had returned as a married man, and I believe he would have wound up seeing Kay again. It wouldn't have been the same, of course (who knows if Kay would have had an affair) but I think his "American" Michael still would have returned.
One of the most interesting things about Michael is that there is a serenity and pastoral quality to his "reconnected" self which is so desirable. It's divorced from hate and revenge. He only gets galvanised by the assassination. Then his Old World Michael gets vengeful and starts turning evil. Contrast with the more worldly, less "pure" American Michael - but that guy's a war hero and selfless and disinterested in revenge or crime.
This complexity is one of the many things that make The Godfather a great film (and Part II as well).
Interesting take. I don’t see Michael as ‘evil’ though - he does what he must to survive and protect his family. He doesn’t kill innocents, only those who attack him first.
shareI see Michael as starting out good (he's a war hero, he's got a girl he respects and considers his equal, he loves his family but abstains from their "business"). Then he slides a little bit. He seeks revenge for his father - okay, that's understandable, especially as he's trying to "stop the bleeding" and prevent further reprisals. But by the time he's murdering his brother-in-law, it's looking dark. He's dragging Kay into the mess, lying to her the whole time, lying to himself...certainly by Part II he's had ample time to rev things down and try to get out. He's then freezing Kay out completely and...no, while he's not pure evil, he does have that dark side in full swing. But I know what you mean.
It's been pointed out to me a couple of times that one of the reasons the Godfather films work is because they show no "non-combatants", or very few, getting hit. Everybody's a mobster, a crooked cop, etc., and very few characters aren't "involved", so you can parse heroes from villains on that basis. Michael looks more heroic because we never see his actions in the broader context of a nation where he's corrupting judges, conducting assassinations, doing gangland killings, collateral damage, drugs, prostitution, etc. It's all relative and we mostly see other deep-level bad people so when one of them is an honourable family man amongst the gangsters, it works and we can root for him.
And I'm not knocking it, it's clever writing.
But contrast it with the opening of The Untouchables where Di Palma highlights the *horror* that happens when mobsters start doing shakedown rackets. We watch a little girl get turned into bloody shrapnel by a mobster's bomb. These guys aren't schmoes just trying to supply drinks to a thirsty nation, just trying to slip a little fun past a killjoy constitutional amendment put in by domineering Uncle Sam and the Man, nope, we see the violence up close.
Godfather gives us some of that, but because nobody's innocent, it's not "pure evil".
"they show no 'non-combatants', or very few, getting hit."
I don't really buy "all the innocents are left alone" argument. Even though the film does not show more of it, when Don Corleone (and one assumes the other family's) want something from civilians, do you think they get if from friendly persuasion? NO! They used muscle. The famous line "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" makes this clear. It can't be refused not because the offer is so advantageous, but because it is backed by a threat of unacceptable harm if the offer is not accepted. The band leader who had Johnnie Fontane under personal contract was threatened to have his brains splattered on the contract he refused to sign. The Hollywood "big shot" who didn't want to give Johnny the role of a lifetime was intimidated by having his prized stallion (worth $650,000 - A LOT of money in those days) butchered, but this act also contained the implied threat, "Do what we tell you or next time it will be you." Yes, the film highlighted a certain code of ethics (Vito Corleone wouldn't kill the men who attacked Bonasera's daughter because, as she hadn't been killed, "justice" did not demand they be killed), but this code of ethics didn't seem to apply when a civilian refused an "offer" from one of the families. It's clearly not "justice" to murder someone because he does not wish to be extorted.
I don't think so, either, to some extent, depending on how you're defining innocence and depending on how you're defining "hit".
Kay is, to me, one of the most tragic casualties of The Godfather films (at least, the first two; I haven't seen No.3). Michael breaking her is a deeply sad part of those movies. I think the core plotline of these films is the corruption and the misunderstanding of what "family" is winds up, ironically, self-destructing the family. How dark is the scene at the end of Part II with the family sitting down to dinner, show after we watch the devastation wrecked upon them by themselves (well... some of them).
Now, what you're talking about, the off-screen deaths, is true. The crime empires these guys ran were horrible entities that preyed upon the weak and defenceless, and sowed seeds of carnage and chaos everywhere they went. But, within the microcosm of the films' universe, we don't see all that. We hear it referenced, but that's not quite the same thing. It's not as tangible. Your point is well-taken about the bandleader, but that guy is introduced as a big-time sleaze who's petty and stupid, so it still seems to fall into "honourable crime" in the movie's world.
Think about Star Wars, for instance. How many orphans and widows did Luke make by blasting a moon-sized space station into stardust? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? It's at least several thousand, right? Or, in The Matrix, all the cops in the lobby were just humans plugged in, doing their 9-to-5s, hoping for the best pension a bio-battery can scrape together in such a grim, green-tinted world; Neo and Trinity mow those guys down without blinking. Actually, maybe blinking a lot, or with their eyes closed even - the sunglasses make it hard to tell. You see what I'm saying, though, right?
So, I agree with your point: these are horrible people, but cinema has that "off-screen stuff".
Beautifully said! The thing is, his stay in Italy connects him to his Italian side and changes him emotionally, Italian Michael is willing to throw common sense out the window and follow his passions in a way that American Michael never would. I don't know if that's part of the Italian culture he was immersed in or just him giving up on the life he'd left behind and chucking the mindset of a college-educated young man who was determined to go straight, not that it matters why he changed, what matters is that he *did* change.
The terrible irony is that Apollonia would have made an infinitely better wife for him than Kay did, Kay could never get used to being a mobster's wife but Apollonia probably would have accepted it without question. For all her innocence, she'd grown up in a culture where Mobs were just a fact of life, and she'd either have just accepted it and maybe been happy to be on the winning side for once, or ignored it and taken the "He runs the Mob Family, I run this house" attitude of a good Italian wife (quote paraphrased from Mrs. Mussolini, no really!). Kay was second best, and I don't know if she knew it, but I think Michael married her out of desperation. He was lonely and heartbroken after losing the first Mrs. C., so he was fool enough to marry someone who'd always be at odds with his family and his job.
I think it was a combination of factors that made him change, but I think the main one is just being in that country, and he finally connected with his roots. That said, I don't think if Michael had gone to Sicily under different circumstances that he would have "gone mob". Like, if he was honeymooning with Kay, he would've loved it and connected with his family's roots, but not changed like he did. No, first he needed the tragedy of his father's near-death experience and his own fulfillment of that "vendetta" to set him up.
Apollonia would have fit in with the mob family, but I think Kay had qualities that really complemented Michael. For a start, the fact that she was "tougher" and would push back on him - I think that's good. Apollonia could be a bit of a pushover. She also lets Michael slip into crime, whereas Kay challenges him on that and actually does inspire him to want out and be better.
I think Michael married Kay out of a sense of devotion and because he still did love her. Kay was kinda his inner "good guy" putting up one last fight. To me, anyway.
Certainly being immersed in Italy helped Michael change, but mainly I think it was that he was an an extremely vulnerable point, having thrown all his plans for the future, his relationship with Kay, and his previous self-image out the window when he chose to go to the Dark Side. So when he was in Italy, he was not only looking for love, he was looking for a new self-image, a new *identity*.
It was so cruel of him to marry Kay after that (and so stupid of her to accept), but that's how some relationships work. Some people marry someone they see as morally better they are and sort of use that person as an external conscience, so they have a moral guide but don't have to think about anything too much. Of course it rarely ends well, anyone who tries to use their spouse as a sort of external conscience is never going to change, and they'll get damn tired of the spouse's "nagging" in time. And well. We saw how it ended for those two, in the sequel.
Agreed. It's one of the most tragic parts of the movie is these two people, who should have loved each other and made a great life together, trying to reclaim this thing that has already been sacrificed on the altar of crime, or perhaps family, if one is feeling more charitable.
shareHe married Apollonia to tighten the relations between the Corleone's and the Sicilian mafia back home.
shareBut she and her family were not related at all to the Mafia. That is one of the things that made it so sad. It shows that no one emerges unscathed from the evil of the mob.
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Agree. In repeated watchings, I see Apollonia's father apparently OK with Michael being mafiosa. Michael tells him this at their first meeting, and her father readily agrees to arrange for Michael and Apollonia to court and later marry. I always wondered what he thought after his daughter was killed in the assassination attempt.
She was Sicilian and from his parents home town and that trumps everything.
Also he was on the run hiding out. That makes everything more urgent and important. Regardless how much he loved Kay he knew it would be a long time before he would see her again(It was like 2 years) and for all he knew she would have found somebody else.
He stepped over the line when he became a mob assassin. Kay was the life he was supposed to have, the Dartmouth grad, war hero, legit life his father dreamed for him. In Sicily he was reconciling with the choice he made to follow in his father’s footsteps. Appollonia was the wife for a mob leader. She may not have been from a mob family but she knew the Sicilian way. Her father approved of her marriage to Michael, even though he had two armed bodyguards and admitted to being in hiding.
I don’t know why Michael went back to Kay. I think she still represented his dream of making the Corleone family legit. In marrying Kay he was trying to get back on track, plan for an honest future but the daggone Cosa Nostra kept pulling him back in.
Excuse me, but did you SEE her breast?
Okay, joking aside, he fell head over heels in love at first sight. It would not be right to marry someone, if you are crazy in love with someone else. He was dating Kay, but they were not engaged, so he was under no obligation to marry her instead. And since he was banished from America, it probably seemed unlikely that he would see her again any time soon or that she would wait for him. Frankly, I think she was crazy to accept his offer of marriage after his return. Have you ever in your life seen a colder and more emotionless "I love you." as the one Michael offered her?
> Why did he dump [Kay] and marry Apollonia?
The movie doesn't convey the intensity of Michael's reaction when he first saw Apollonia. He was instantly obsessed with her, feeling the most intense desire of his life. From that moment until his wedding night, when he went to bed he had to drink himself to sleep. After the wedding he didn't have that problem, the two of them went at each other insatiably each night until they were both exhausted.
In the book, Sicilians call it "the thunderbolt." Maybe in real life too. I think they used the term in the movie but don't remember. Imagine getting slugged in the face by Mike Tyson, full force, when he was in his prime. A quite different experience, but in terms of intensity and the duration of the aftereffects, something like that.
To be fair to Francis Ford Coppola, there was simply no way the movie could convey that. Michael Corleone is not a demonstrative kind of guy, and it would have been quite out of character for him to do anything other than what he did -- stop and stare. The two shepherds, Fabrizio and Calo, immediately recognize what happened. They don't have to explain to each other because they know what it is. They sure as hell don't have to explain to Michael what's happened. The only thing Coppola could have done would have been to use some very dramatic music or other device which would be a jarring break in style from the rest of the movie.
So why did he dump Kay and marry Apollonia? The moment he saw Apollonia ... Kay? Who's Kay?
> If he didn't love her at first, why did he date Kay?
Lots of people date who don't love each other. Merely liking each other is sometimes enough, and there's something to be said for simply being warm at night. Michael did feel affection for her, but there are some hints here and there that he was never wildly in love with her. For example, in the book she was his college girlfriend at Dartmouth, and so their relationship was certainly established before he enlisted in the Marines and went off to fight the war. But what kept him going during the war was looking forward to returning home and being with "a girl like Kay." And in the scene after his return from Sicily, when he finds Kay and proposes to her, he doesn't say "I love you" until after he proposes, and even then it seems to me he only says it because he thinks that will get her to accept.
My take on it is that Michael viewed Kay as a good friend, a compatible personality, someone he enjoyed spending time with and who would be a good mother to his children.
What is interesting about Apollonia is that she is a completely different person after marriage than during courtship— at least that is how the film represents it. Pre-wedding, she is aloof and reserved and afterwards she is bubbly and cheerful. And probably a total freak in bed.
But I think he did love Kay. Someone asked the much married Mickey Rooney what he recommended in a wife. He simply said, “Marry someone you like.”
It sounds simple and obvious— but it really isn’t. Passion fades. Affection does not.
Affection does fade. How many stories do we hear women saying their husband's aren't loving toward them anymore. Everything fades when one loses interest. Michael didn't seem to really love Kay until after they had kids.
shareEven in the movie it was clear that whether or not Michael loved Kay, loving her wasn't the only reason he was with her. She was part of the life he wanted to build outside the mob, someone who wasn't Italian, who had nothing of the Mob in her mindset or her DNA, someone who was moreover educated, middle-class, and WASPy, someone who'd help him ease into mainstream professional social circles.
He probably thought he loved her, but nothing like the thunderbolt passion he felt for Apollonia when he met her. Like I said above, Apollonia would have been a much better wife for him.
I just read your other post. I don't know either, why Kay married Michael.
shareAre you sure you saw the film? How could Vito tell him to marry a Sicilian girl when he was shot and had no contact with him? He had no idea he would go to Sicily. He didn't "dump" Kay. He had to leave the country because he just killed a police captain and the Turk. He loved Apollonia at first sight, so she gained a husband instead of lost a father. What didn't make any sense at all was why Fabrizio blew her up. He wanted to go to America, so Michael would have arranged it. Instead he took Barzini's money to kill him?! Made no sense.
He reunited with Kay after Apollonia died for obvious reasons. He needed her, but it was a marriage made in hell. Also there was no mention of him telling her about Apollonia. "By the way I was married but my wife was blown up by mistake; they were trying to kill me. When should our wedding be?"
What didn't make any sense at all was why Fabrizio blew her up.
Apollonia would not have been, "...an acceptable casualty." Fabrizio made a point of asking if she was going with him. When the answer was, "No," he planted the bomb. Otherwise he would have waited.
That's immaterial really. If Michael was killed in the explosion, then they would have accepted her death as collateral damage as long as it would also guarantee Michael was also killed, even if killing Apollonia along with Michael wasn't plan A.
Also, asking if Michael's wife was going might have been something Fabrizio always asked and did so again in order to keep things appearing as normal and routine as possible.
Besides, there remains the possibility that if Apollonia was planning to go with Michael, she might start the car and bring the car up to the door to get Michael, something that a student driver might be eager to do, and something that would blow up (sorry) the plan to kill Michael -
Apollonia's death in the plot to kill Michael would not be, "acceptable," under any circumstance.
The whole point of asking if she was going with Michael was to know whether or not to plant the bomb. This is obvious.
Obvious?
Okay, let's figure this out.
Apollonia was an unknown daughter of an nondescript cafe owner. What possible reason would they care if she was killed along with her husband? In a land where vendettas are carried out as daily routine, and the children of the victims of vendettas are also targeted, would assassins care if the mark's wife was killed?
Do you remember when they killed Tattaglia? They sprayed his bed with machine gun fire killing the woman in bed with him, and when they set up Senator Geary in GFII, they killed the prostitute when they drugged Geary to make him think he killed her with rough sex. Seems like mobsters don't care much about the innocents.
Regarding his remarks about that day's road trip, maybe Fabrizio was just chit-chatting.. "is your wife going with you"? It's called making small talk - useful when attempting to make someone at ease before you murder them by keeping the daily routine, well, routine.
It may be obvious to you, and indeed, you may be right, but it's not obvious to pretty much anyone and everyone else.
In the GFII Don Ciccio killed Paolo, who was just a boy, because Paolo swore revenge for the death of his father. Don Ciccio would have killed young Vito for fear he would also seek revenge someday, however warped this may seem. It is the way he and other Sicilian Mafiosi would react to this situation. Vito's mother was killed because she held a knife to Don Ciccio's throat. Don Ciccio would not have considered the mother and the brother, "innocents." He had his reasons, however skewed according to our values, for these killings. And killing Vito would have been justifiable in his mind.
The death of a prostitute would have been considered acceptable collateral, she being of such low station. But, as a matter of fact, in the book only Tattaglia was shot. Better to have done it that way in the film.
We don't know that, "they," killed the prostitute. Geary may have accidentally done it. At any rate the reason given above would have applied.
> [Fabrizio] wanted to go to America, so Michael would have arranged it. Instead he took Barzini's money to kill him?! Made no sense.
Fabrizio was in America in GF2, so he got there somehow. It's never explained how but I think it's safe to assume Barzini got him there. With Michael, Fabrizio would have got his ride to the US, plus maybe a little help getting a job or starting his own small business. With Barzini, he probably got all that plus a small fortune.
> "By the way I was married but my wife was blown up by mistake; they were trying to kill me. When should our wedding be?"
LOL! Yep, definitely not the way to propose.
Fabrizio was not in GF2. He is not seen again after he runs away just before Apollonia is killed in the original film.
There is a deleted scene of him being killed by a car bomb but this would have been in the original had it been used.
The Godfather Saga contained a scene in which Michael personally kills Fabrizio. In the timeline this would be within the events depicted in the original.
In the novel, Fabrizio's death occurs at roughly the same time as the executions of the heads of the other families.
I thought it was pretty obvious - he was instantly crazy for her. He'd have been very young at the time. Struck by lightning as they say when he saw her. Intelligently made friends with her Dad - and then married her. It made perfect sense to me.
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