Corleone (1977)

The lives of two friends from Corleone, Sicily, take different paths: one, Michele Labruzzo, becomes an upright trade unionist who leads the peasants in their demands and in the struggle to win land; the other, Vito Gargano, driven by ambition to make his mark, instead follows Don Giusto Provenzano’s Mafia path. Don Giusto asks Vito to kill Michele: Vito accepts without a second thought and becomes the boss’s trusted man. Gargano also marries Rosa Accordino, Michele’s fiancée. Vito surrounds himself with trusted people: armed men, powerful men with political connections such as the lawyer Natale Calia, and able, competent men such as accountant Biagio Lo Cascio. Vito is so unscrupulous that he eventually betrays and kills his boss in order to take his place. He thus becomes so powerful that he arouses fear in various circles. He is consequently denounced and tried for a series of kidnappings, but is acquitted outright, thanks to accountant Lo Cascio’s testimony and lawyer Calia’s skill in making some compromising documents connected to one of Vito’s companies disappear. The man now feels safe and unconstrained, when the judges manage to issue a second arrest warrant for a series of other illegal activities by Vito. At this point, Calia, whose hands are beginning to be tied, advises him to flee and hide. But at his hideout, an apartment in a residential building, a mysterious hitman reaches him before the police do and kills him in front of his wife and young son. In fact, the hitman is not a stranger: he is Carmelo, Vito’s former right-hand man. In an earlier scene, Calia tells Carmelo at the airport that he will have to eliminate his sworn-brother friend; Carmelo then covers his face with his clasped hands, in despair at the act he will have to commit.