WHEN IS A MOVIE SCENE TOO VIOLENT? WHEN COPPOLA DECIDES TO CUT IT FROM HIS EPIC CRIME FILM.
PIC INFO: Spotlight on a deleted scene from Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" (1972), in which Michael returns to America to track down Fabrizio, his former Sicilian bodyguard and the man responsible for the death of his wife Apollonia. Finding him in a pizza parlor, Michael blows him away with a shotgun. The scene was ultimately cut from the film due to its graphic violence.
OVERVIEW: "In the "Godfather" book, Michael tracks down Fabrizio, the bodyguard that tried to kill him (but only succeeded in killing Apollonia). In "Part I," there is a scene that shows Michael recovering and ordering his men to find his former bodyguard. Coppola also filmed a scene in which Michael, toting a lupara just like Fabrizio, confronts him and blows him away, but it was so bloody that it was cut. But Coppola returned to it in "Part II," showing Michael getting the news that Fabrizio had been tracked down."
-- THE PASSION OF CHRISTOPHER PIERZNIK, "Some of My Favorite Deleted Scenes from “The Godfather” Films," published April 18, 2016
Thinking about my other favorite sequence in the Godfather.
At the beginning of the movie, Bonasera says “my daughter, she will never be beautiful again.” and asks Vito the favor. Vito gives him the favor, says he’ll be back to collect one day.
That day comes. We’re lowered into the funeral home, Sonny’s body to the morgue. Vito says to Bonasera:
“I want you to use all your powers, and all your skills. I don't want his mother to see him this way.”
and as he cries for the boy they massacred, you realize what he is asking:
I can’t wait until my niece is old enough to watch the beginning of the first Godfather movie and go, “Holy shit this is just like that scene from Zootopia…”
shout out to when i told my dad about goncharov and he figured out it was fake because i told him "1973 martin scorsese film with robert de niro" and he said that wasn't possible because the godfather came out in 1972 and the godfather part II came out in 1974 and they wouldn't have had time to make a movie in between. a perfectly good jest, foiled by this man's weird and vast knowledge set