re: Does anyone else find Godfather II just a little hard to follow?

Correct, had the cop not interrupted Frankie would've been strangled to death. When he survived, Roth, who wanted Frankie dead, uses that to try and get Frankie to rat on Michael. The "micheal corleone" line doesn't matter if Frankie actually dies.

Michael brings in Frankie's brother to the hearing to shut him up. That's when Frankie changes his story.

Then Tom goes to visit Frankie and explains about in the old times and the family being taken care of, etc. Basically telling Frankie that if he kills himself they'll protect his family and his interests or implying that if he doesn't they'll kill him and frick his family up.

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Michael brings in Frankie's brother to the hearing to shut him up. That's when Frankie changes his story.

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Did Michael bring him in or did he just get lucky? In the meetings they were trying to figure out what to do about Pentangeli's testimony.

All of these issues have been discussed ad nauseam here and on other boards.

There's no way getting around the fact that the movie has major plot holes because FFC was more interested in personal vendettas than business relationships or logical developments.

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No, you're right, the plotting is murky in The Godfather Part II. People overlook it because it's a great movie, but the Lake Tahoe assassination attempt has logic holes in it, and the botched attempt on Frank Pentangeli is unnecessarily confusing because of the "Michael Corleone says hello!" adlib.

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The frank failed assignation was set up Roth. The "Michael says hello" was just a twist of the knife as the guy was dieing.

Fredo was tied to it because he was feeding Roth info that allowed them to into the house. Michael figured it out at the Mandingo show because he said he Johnny ola (junior soprano) Showed him the bar when he previously told Michael that he didn't know him. This is what tipped him off that fredo had been flipped


The Michael story is a bit subtle. I think it gets better as rewatch.

There's a version that shows both movies in chronological order. Saw it on HBO a couple months ago, but I don't remember what they called it and I'm too lazy to look it up for you.

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There's no way getting around the fact that the movie has major plot holes because FFC was more interested in personal vendettas than business relationships or logical developments.

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I agree with this 100%. It's never really clear why Roth wants Michael dead. The only motive implied was as revenge for Moe Green's murder. Also, why is Roth begging Michael to do all this business with him if he is planning on killing him? Wouldn't his death ruin future plans once they were in motion?

Honesty, everything else is clear to me in the movie.

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Fredo was tied to it because he was feeding Roth info that allowed them to into the house. Michael figured it out at the Mandingo show because he said he Johnny ola (junior soprano) Showed him the bar when he previously told Michael that he didn't know him. This is what tipped him off that fredo had been flipped

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I was talking about the logistics of the attempt on Michael, not whether or not Fredo was complicit. We know he was. But how did it actually go down? When you try to work it out, it doesn't add up.

We can intuit that Fredo allowed the assassins onto the compound and possibly even drew back the curtains in Michael's bedroom (or at least somehow let Johnny Ola facilitate those things), but what of the dead assassins? They are found with their throats cut, ruling out both suicide and the possibility that Michael's men killed them before Rocco could command them to take the assassins alive.

So who the hell killed them? Michael confides to Tom that he believes the assassins will already be dead when they're discovered, suggesting he knows a mole on the inside killed them to cover their tracks. But who could that be, given that the perimeters were secured and the compound searched?

Of course, Fredo proves to be the mole, making him the only real option, but it seems utterly implausible that he could have personally iced the button men given his character. Did he really have the intestinal fortitude to not only kill those men, but in that particular manner, and with the element of surprise? If they were found with a bullet in the their heads, you could twist a rational explanation. But cut throats?

Either Fredo was WAY more involved, cold-blooded and capable than he let on (seems a hard sell considering he fumbled uselessly with a pistol in the first movie while his father was being shot) or it's just a sloppy plot point. Pretty much the only thing I buy is that it was Ola and he somehow slipped past the perimeter, but such a Houdini trick seems a stretch. Plus the entire significance of the dead assassins is that it clues Mike into the fact that there's a mole, so it's awkward if it's anybody but the mole who did it. I think they just kind of fricked up. Doesn't change the fact that the movie's a masterpiece.