The character:	Fredo Corleone
The actor:	John Cazale
The movie:	The Godfather Part II

The original AFI Villains list includes Michael Corleone in this same film as their eleventh greatest villain. It is probably the most boring place to call Michael Corleone a great villain, or at least the safest. (The heel turn in The Godfather is much richer, and there is savor in watching Michael, now aged and melancholy like his father, fall into the old ways in Part III.) To prioritize Michael in Part II means stepping over other villains who are much more inspiring. How wonderful Gastone Moschin is as Don Fanucci, the perfect neighborhood boss who must be eliminated in order for a youthful, ambitious Don Vito to rise. How pleasurable it is to see Lee Strasberg venture onto the screen from his school, playing Hyman Roth with restraint, bringing this burbling quiet tone into a world which had heretofore been all punchy iambs. And, most of all, the stringy John Cazale squeaking and cracking until Fredo’s voice reaches equilibrium in the last moments of his life.

When Al Neri takes Fredo out for that final fishing trip on Lake Tahoe, you can practically see Vito’s head appear in the sky, Marlon Brando’s cheeks filled with cotton balls again, murmuring, “You have forgotten who you are, and so forgotten me.” Fredo’s rejoinder, in the way of middle children, would be to accuse his father of having forgotten him. “I was stepped over!”

The crime families of The Godfather work like noble houses or royal dynasties, passing the birthright from father to son. Primogeniture is less the rule in these families, but the events of The Godfather show that the business is meant to go from the father to the eldest son, and then from there. By this logic, Fredo is right. He was stepped over, and stepped over again, and again. Even in The Godfather, he is sent out to Vegas in order to learn the ropes from Moe Green, which is a way to keep him far away from the actual work happening in New York. In Part II, Fredo details indignities: a pointless nightclub, an airport pickup. Earlier in the film, Michael lists three things that make Fredo a bad mobster (“Fredo has a good heart, but he’s weak, and stupid”), and because he cannot send this useless brother into the clergy or the army, he is stuck sending him to the airport.

Insofar as any of the people in these movies have a good heart, Fredo seems to. Maybe I’m the idiot, but it took me multiple viewings of this movie to really catch that moment in the last scene of the film, the one where Michael announces to his brothers that he’s enlisted. I came back to Sonny’s typical anger, to Tom’s typical lament for practicality. I never came back to that moment where Fredo tries to congratulate him, knowing that the room is livid with Michael. “That’s swell,” he says, and he reaches out his hand to shake Michael’s for a moment before Sonny roughly grabs it away. He has a good heart. He is sensitive to what Michael wants, to the depth of feeling that must have pushed Michael to the military when he knew that Vito pulled strings to ensure that his sons would not have to go to war. The heartstrings can snap, though, and Fredo, too stupid to say it, perhaps even too stupid to think it, does not bring up this moment from 1941 when he cries out, almost two decades later, that he was stepped over. By that point, his bitterness has led him to attempted fratricide, and he has rationalized that the attack on the Lake Tahoe complex was acceptable because there was something in it for him, for once. Fecklessness and impotence can be the source of villainy, and it is these qualities that doom Fredo to spend the rest of his nights with the fishes.