Vito Corleone ain't gonna win Father of the Year

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2007)

Very few movie dads come off worse than Vito Corleone. As he postures and pretends to be a man of honor and a man who loves his family, he's all the time setting in motion the elements that will wound or destroy his kids. No man is in the Mafia unless he's just a greedy SOB. So, Don Corleone mortgages his children's future at a very high interest rate in order to become a multimillionaire off of bootlegging, labor-union corruption, gambling and loan-sharking. One son is horribly murdered by a thousand bullets, his only daughter, Connie, is eventually left an embittered and tragic widow before she turns 25, his grandson by Connie is left orphaned thanks to in-house vengeance, his eldest son is corrupted and eventually under the mob thumb in Vegas and his idealistic youngest boy is overwhelmed by the old Mafia game and eventually seizes headship of The Commission by committing one of the worst mass-murders in New York history. Don Vito said in the third scene of this movie, "A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man." He should have focused on demonstrating values to his family, not just spending all that time with them.