One of the most famous scenes in The Godfather is the moment when Michael avenges his father and fully enters the mafia world of his family.
Vito has been hospitalized, their top enforcer Luca Brasi is sleeping with the fishes, and Michael is supposed to be sent to talk peace in a restaurant chosen by the men responsible, drug kingpin Sollozzo and corrupt Police Captain McClusky. Since Michael is a civilian, they don’t expect he will do anything. Michael calmly excuses himself, goes to the bathroom where a gun has been planted for him, and shoots both men dead. Watch it below to refresh your memory, fair warning it’s obviously pretty graphic.
It’s a big scene. Michael steps up for the family, and never really looks back. It’s shocking, too…these were ostensibly the biggest villains of the movie, and they get whacked not even halfway through. But as I’ve re-watched that scene over the years, I can’t help but notice that it is missing one thing: tension. The hit goes exactly as planned.
Now of course we know Michael will get out of this scene alive, since he is quickly becoming the main character of the movie. But imagine how much more intense things would have been if, for example, McClusky gets up to also use the bathroom while Michael is frantically looking for the gun behind the toilet. Or what if the gun isn’t there at all? Michael decides he still has to go through with it, and he nonchalantly grabs a steak knife from a nearby table on his long walk back from the bathroom.
For all its success, The Godfather trilogy never really learned to up the dramatic stakes of its hit scenes. Each movie ends with a rather matter-of-fact montage of the bad guys all getting assassinated without issue. Part II shows a young Vito kill the neighborhood Don just as he planned, and he also avenges his mother back in Sicily by easily stabbing an elderly Ciccio (an aside: this really should have been Michael doing this, to tie the two storylines together, but that’s another article). Francis Ford Coppola finally learned to spice things up a little by 1990 in Godfather III, opening the movie with a botched attempt on Michael’s nephew’s life, and also having the assassin struggle to finish the job at the opera.
But Godfather III also missed out on a potentially great scene in the Vatican. After establishing that Tom Hagen’s son is a Father in the Catholic Church, Michael never makes him an offer he can’t refuse. The invincible bodyguard Al Neri somehow infiltrates one of the most secure buildings in the world to whack the Archbishop, but imagine how much more memorable this would be if it was Hagen’s son who had to pull the trigger. Having nervous and unprepared characters attempt their first murder is much more interesting to watch then a calmly executed shot from a hitman.
There are a million ways the scene with Michael at the restaurant could have been more interesting, and in the decades since The Godfather was released in 1972, television shows in particular have learned to capitalize on the entertaining idea that it’s very hard to kill someone as planned. Let’s look at three scenes from three shows that illustrate the evolution of “the thrilling hit gone sideways.”
THE SOPRANOS – ANOTHER TOOTHPICK (2001, Season 3 Episode 5)
The Sopranos had several hit scenes, but probably the most memorable for me was the episode where Tony asks an old man with lung cancer (the sickly Bobby Baccaleiri Sr.) to kill his godson, the unstable and violent (and much younger) Mustang Sally.
Burt Young’s coughing throughout the scene really ramps up the stress…he’s in no condition to be doing this. When he lines up a clear shot in the back of the head, Mustang Sally’s friend walks in and alerts Sally to what’s happening just in time. Both men struggle on the kitchen table, and we definitely think Baccaleiri Sr. is about to get killed. It’s a quick scene, but it’s very effective. Again, fair warning, all of these clips are gonna be graphic…
Now even though both of these guys are only in this one episode, the scene is more memorable than the deaths of much bigger characters. One of the main advantages tv has over movies is that a show has more expendable characters to send into battle. We can get to know background characters over several seasons, or even just one episode, and even though they aren’t the ones we care about the most, the stakes are still very high because everyone involved in the scene is expendable. We don’t know who will live and who will die, and we’re on the edge of our seat (It’s also no surprise that this episode was written by Terrance Winter, who ended up show-running Boardwalk Empire, another series we’ll talk about more below). The extra bonus of this scene is that the writers get to have two shocking moments, also killing Baccaleiri in a car crash seconds later.
BREAKING BAD – ONE MINUTE (2010, Season 3 Episode 7)
While Breaking Bad isn’t a show about the mafia, there’s definitely plenty of organized crime involved. And that means there’s plenty of hits. There are a lot of memorable moments from the show, but I think the one that always jumps out the most to me is Hank getting ambushed by Tuco’s twin cousins.
We have seen the twins in action, and we know that they are the deadliest characters we’ve seen yet. Hank is definitely a main character by this point, but the two on one factor is not at all in his favor. He gets shot multiple times, and looks to surely be a goner. Again, warning before the clip that it’s graphic…
Rather than watch from the point of view of the would be assassin, this time we see things from the perspective of the target. While Michael has the element of surprise on his side in The Godfather, the cryptic phone call from Gus Fring to Hank puts him on high alert, immediately upping the tension through the roof here. We are just as nervous as Hank is. Hank barely survives the encounter, thanks to the lucky hollow-point bullet that one of the twins had dropped moments earlier. A key element to having a memorable hit scene is for a character to resort to using whatever is around them. The more desperate the situation, the higher the tension.
BOARDWALK EMPIRE – YOU’D BE SURPRISED (2012, Season 3 Episode 5)
What The Godfather lacks, Boardwalk Empire became singularly known for. There are so many shocking deaths in the show, so many scenes of two characters brutally fighting to the end, that it is very hard to pick just one. But the one that jumps out is the attempted hit on Gyp Rosseti, everyone’s favorite villain who carried the third season beautifully played by Bobby Cannavale.
The screenshot above isn’t from the scene in question, mostly because there’s no way to find an image from it that’s work appropriate. (EXTRA WARNING FOR THIS CLIP, not only graphic but also NSFW…)
Here, the stakes are upped even more. Gyp is in an extremely compromised position when he realizes someone is trying to kill him. He’s also about as evil as it gets, but he’s so damn entertaining that you want him to make it out of this. There’s also the fact that the guy trying to kill him is BUGSY SEIGEL, a real life character who we know isn’t going to die in this scene. By this point Boardwalk has drilled it into you that when a scene like this occurs, characters can and will die. Rosseti is fictional, so it seems like his time might be up. Seigel works his way through Rosseti’s men, but Rosseti is able to get himself loose from the belt just in time to save himself. It is an incredible, pulse pounding scene.
There are plenty of other tv shows currently capitalizing on the thrilling options of scenes like this, Fargo to name a big one. It has been almost fifty years since The Godfather, and it’s clear we have learned a ton on how to elevate a scene with stakes and tension. None of these other shows would exist without it’s influence, but they have definitely one-upped Coppola’s masterpiece in this department. And I’m excited to see how much more intense a hit can get.
Thanks for reading! Have a favorite scene I didn’t mention? Leave it in the comments!
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