Talk:Michael Corleone

Died Alone

How do you know this? his family could have been in the house all along and he could have just been sitting outside, enjoying the nice weather, how do we know he died all alone?

Because that is how his death is portrayed in GF III. We have no other knowledge or detail elsewhere. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/The Welsh Buzzard 09:45, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Arrogance

Where's the proof of this arrogance? Panda

    Michael is headstrong and willful, arrogantly viewing himself as the sole and only rightful master of his fate. He drops out of college and joins the marines during WWII, against his father's and family's wishes (Vito had won Michael a costly deferral from military service, to which Michael reacts violently, asking why he was not consulted). He calls out a corrupt police lieutenant in front of his subordinates, netting himself a broken jaw, then insists on personally carrying out an assassination of the police officer, as well as the renegade mob boss Sollozzo; this action forces him into hiding in Sicily, and deals a severe blow to his relationship with his fiancé, Kaye. Michael's insistence on dealing by himself with the threat of Hyman Roth alienates him from his lieutenants, causes unnecessary strain on his criminal enterprises, and exposes his family members to unnecessary risks. He arrogantly believes he can avoid an all-out war with his enemies by cozying up to them, and then shooting them one by one in the head when they aren't looking.

    Michael treats people around him with arrogant condescension, including his siblings, his wife, and especially his business partners, whom he sees as inferiors. Michael treats his older brother and his foster brother as servants and subordinates; he sends Fredo away to Las Vegas to apprentice under Moe Greene, only to react violently when informed his brother had to be disciplined there (Here I note: the real-life Moe Greene, Ben 'Bugsy' Siegel, was offed not because of his 'bugsy' temper but because he was a bad businessman); he demotes Tom as family consigliere only to berate him later on for wanting to abandon the family; Michael, who romances and marries a Sicilian girl while still engaged to Kaye, humiliates Tom by mentioning and ridiculing Tom's mistress. Michael preaches morality to everyone around him, while engaging in increasingly amoral, Machiavellian, and selfishly self-interested behavior. Dangling a Damoclean sword over clueless Fredo's head, Michael waits until his mother passes away, then has his brother executed. Years later Michael moans and swoons theatrically over this, going so far as to seek absolution for the crime; he seems legitimately surprised by his enemies' capacity to nurse grudges, even as he slowly plots and schemes the destruction of business partners, and even family members, over periods of several years.

    Perhaps the worst of Michael's personal excesses is his lack of diplomacy and unwillingness to negotiate. His answer to most of his problems is murder, murder, and murder, usually in that order. Fredo may well be weak, and unsuitable as a mafia boss, but he is never given the chance to redeem himself after the attempted hit on Don Vito in Hell's Kitchen. Minimized by his own father (who views him as weak), Fredo is then marginalized by his brother, who packs him off to Mafia School like a red-headed stepchild, more to get Fredo out of his hair than to actually educate him in the fine science of funny dice. Refusing to be more conciliatory to his underboss Pentangeli, Michael keeps key information from him, setting up the attempted hit by the Rosato brothers that catapults Pentangeli into the role of Federal Informant, and later to the role of blood-flavored bathtub float. Unwilling to even try to negotiate with a bigoted and intransigent US Senator, Michael deliberately offers him nothing, and then blackmails him with the old 'Woke up with a dead prostitute gag'... which is fine unless you're the prostitute (didn't Tom say that was one of Fredo's places? Would that make the prostitute one of his prostitutes?). Unwilling to accept the pain he has caused his wife, he responds to her admittance to having had an abortion by punching her out. Cravenly attempting, decades later, to reconcile with his estranged wife, Michael puts his wife and his two children in the crosshairs of an attempted hit on himself, and then hauls off like a horse with a heart attack when the bullet meant for him finds his daughter instead: 'If only I'd a opened a haberdasher. Too ra loo ra loo!'(scene ends to the tune of 'Intermezzo' from some one-act opera about some guy who thought he could sleep with another guy's wife and nothing would come of it).

    What did Roth say in GF2? 'THIS IS THE LIFE WE'VE CHOSEN!' Let's not kid ourselves here... Michael is a man WHO CHOSE HIS OWN FATE. No one was going to tell him otherwise, and no one around him really lived long enough to tell him they told him so. Fredo complained of being passed over, but it was the baby of the family, Michael, who acted against his own family position and dared be his father's Number One Son. Arrogant son-of-a-bitch, he gets everything that comes to him.

Etherdave (talk) 21:33, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

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