best of mafia cinema
@TheMafiaPoint • 67,856 subscribers
Your daily dose of mob cinema. Cold looks, quiet threats, bad decisions. In collab with @bestofsopranos
Shorts
Videos
The Godfather never shows you a single victim. No women trapped into prostitution. No lives destroyed by gambling. No one ruined by theft or fraud. The only cop with real lines is corrupt. For almost three hours this lifelong criminal does nothing you can bring yourself to disapprove of. Coppola shows you the Mafia from the inside, on its own terms. The outside world just disappears. What's left is a closed world where one man is both the power and the law, and the only real sin is betraying the family. So when Vito finally falls dead among his tomato plants, an old man playing with his grandson, you don't feel like a criminal died. You feel like a giant passed
best of mafia cinema1,350,676 views • 1 month ago
There's some delicious irony in the fact that for all the waves Tommy made, he was ultimately a complete nobody in the eyes of the mob. The only reason he got away with all the stuff he did was because the people he bullied around and killed were also complete nobodies. The moment he killed Billy Batts and made himself a nuisance to the mob, they disposed of him with all the effort of swatting a fly with a roll of newspaper. The movie made him out to be the last guy you'd ever wanna cross paths with and in reality he was just a small-time thug and a violent bully with an extremely fragile ego. Gotta love the irony.
best of mafia cinema243,551 views • 12 days ago
Something I just realized about this scene (and I've seen Goodfellas a thousand times) is that Jimmy didn't want them buying anything not just because it could draw heat from the police but also because he didn't want them spending the money that he was just going to take from them when he whacked them anyway. Can't believe all these years and I just realized this. And there's another dark detail in the same scene: “Frosty the Snowman” is playing when Frankie Carbone enters the Christmas party. Later, Carbone's frozen body is found inside a refrigerated truck.
best of mafia cinema204,158 views • 17 days ago
This scene was so important because it was shown minutes after Fredo got killed. It shows that Fredo trying to shake his hand was a core memory for Michael and that's why the betrayal hurt him so much. He knew Fredo was weak, but Fredo had always shown that he had a good heart toward Michael. At the same time, Sonny isn’t mad at Michael for joining the Marines. He’s afraid of losing his brother to what he sees as a stupid war. Getting angry is the only way he knows how to show his emotions.
best of mafia cinema198,729 views • 18 days ago
Joe Pesci originally auditioned for Max, but Sergio Leone convinced him that he wouldn't be quite right for the role. As a favor to Pesci's friend Robert De Niro, Leone told Pesci that he could pick whichever of the available roles he wanted as his own instead. He chose the part of Frankie, which was considerably larger in the original script than it is in the finished movie
best of mafia cinema220,298 views • 20 days ago
One of Michael's goals which he never achieves is to become legitimate. Here he is about to marry his niece off to some rich old money WASP family and his idiot brother barges in announcing the presence of some street gangster Michael would like to forget. The best part was his statement: "This contempt for money is a trick of the rich to keep the poor without it." That statement hit me like a ton of bricks when I heard it as a teenager because it is so true. It is the one enduring truth of American society.
best of mafia cinema98,940 views • 11 days ago
It makes a lot of sense how Frankie was so easily and viciously able to turn on Nicky in the end. Just watch his body language and subtle reactions to Nicky's behavior in this scene and throughout the movie. He was incredibly loyal to the bosses and the organization, so he protected Nicky no matter what. But it's clear he really disapproved of and was growing exhausted of Nicky's unnecessary, egotistically destructive bullshit. Scorsese did a good job of keeping it on the periphery and not giving it too much focus, so as not to foreshadow Nicky's demise, but it's there if you watch for it. Especially after the bus stop scene where Nicky threatens to wanna go to war with the bosses.
best of mafia cinema90,225 views • 14 days ago
I love how when Mo Green brought up talking to Barzini, Michael immediately changed the subject and focused on Fredo. He didn’t want Mo to realize he made a costly mistake. He sided with the enemy and conspired against the Corleone Family. Beautiful way to utilize smokescreens to throw your enemy off the scent.
best of mafia cinema341,544 views • 2 months ago
Nobody dies in this scene. Nobody negotiates anything. There's no Vito Corleone speech. And yet the Sonny and Tom Hagen argument, with Michael quietly watching from the corner, might be one of the best scenes in the entire Godfather. In just a few minutes, it shows three completely different versions of Corleone leadership sitting in the same room. Sonny is all fire. He wants revenge immediately, and every line out of his mouth already sounds halfway to war. Funny, childish, loyal, furious, impulsive, dangerous - all at once. James Caan gives you the entire character in a single scene: the love, the rage, the ego, the total inability to slow down. Tom is the opposite. Calm, controlled, almost painfully rational. Sonny insults him, pushes him, cranks up the temperature of the room, and Tom never breaks. He doesn't need to raise his voice because he understands the situation better than anyone in it. War is exactly what their enemies are hoping for. That's why Sonny's silence after Tom scolds him actually matters. He doesn't fire back. He might explode at everyone else in his life, but not at Tom. Blood or not, Tom is family. And then there's Michael. He barely says a word, and the scene still works because of him. He's the younger brother watching two forms of power collide in real time - Sonny's emotion against Tom's calculation. In that room, Michael quietly clocks why Sonny is too volatile to ever lead, and why Tom, brilliant as he is, could never fully command the family the way Vito does. That's the real genius of the scene. It's not just two brothers arguing. It's the future of the entire Corleone family being decided, quietly, before Michael even realizes he's watching it happen.
best of mafia cinema129,908 views • 1 month ago