ROBERT DUVALL ON THE HORSE SEQUENCE
A PRIZE RACEHORSE. Silk sheets. Sticky pools of blood.
The terrible power of The Godfather’s ‘horse head’ scene all comes, in broader context, from one person: Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen, the consigliere to Brando’s Don Vito Corleone. Duvall’s trusted adviser is the family’s personal lawyer, an adopted ‘German-irish’ son who knows he may never ascend the heights of the actual children but makes up for it with an unfailingly calm sense of calculation.
In the film, he is sent to California to ‘talk’ to Jack Woltz, a Hollywood mogul (an excellent John Marley) about casting a family friend — singer Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino) — in a movie. ‘Talking’, both at the studio lot and then in an expansive tour of the mogul’s lavish estate, doesn’t work out, and so Tom Hagen decides to opt for a more — shall we say — direct approach. As Hagen says of his boss: “He never asks for a second favour when he’s been refused a first.”
Robert Duvall is far more plain-speaking than his famously discreet screen counterpart. He loves The Godfather, but hasn’t seen it in many years. “I knew when we were making it,” he says. “It was something special. It was an honour to be a part of it. But I don’t always go back and see what I’ve done.” And about the Hollywood moguls that Woltz was rumoured to be based on, he says simply: “I never met any of them; I didn’t care to.”
When asked how he approached the quiet intensity of Tom Hagen in those scenes, he is just as straightforward. “You just come in and do it,” he says. “You talk and listen; listen and talk, you know? Try not to be premeditated; just go with a moment. See what happens.”
Woltz monologues angrily at Hagen, who responds only with measured politeness. Duvall says of Hagen’s sense of restraint: “He’s always secondary, because he’s an adopted son. So he has to be aware of that. He’s loved, but not definitively beloved. In this family, he can’t afford to overplay and get outside of his niche. His niche is to be restrained.”
To get in the head of his co-star in the scene, he explains, “These [Hollywood] guys ruled the roost, just like the Mafia guys. And Hollywood can be brutal. Where they run, you have to follow. At least… to a point.” Much of the staging is around a too-large dining-room table, but
Coppola did not tell them how to move or react within that space.
“He’s smarter than that. He wants to see what you do,” says Duvall. “And he accepts what you do. And I think that’s why he’s such a good director. He lets us find our own reality in the scene, and its own sense of things. Coppola isn’t like some of these modern-day directors who just overshoot until they wear the actor down. After one, two, three takes, something often happens. And you leave it alone. You got it. Don’t over-intellectualise it.”
When it came to playing the role of a Mafia consigliere, Duvall was also introduced to a few people who could offer him a crash course. “You can’t cantilever your luck with these kinds of people. It’s dangerous. They’re not saints,” he says. “I did observe a guy, who was called [Carmine] Tramunti. He was part of the five families that ran New York. And there was another guy who held his cigarettes, who pulled out his chair for him. He was like a million-dollar gopher. But it’s like the Secret Service, in a way.” It helped him to unlock something important about his character: “That was him [Tom Hagen]. That’s the way I approached the part. I was like a Secret Service guy for Brando. It’s a role some people would look down on, but they wouldn’t say it openly.”
The terrible and persuasive reach of the Corleone criminal empire is well demonstrated by seeing Tom Hagen go from utter civility to, evidently, ordering a horse’s head to be put in someone’s bed. And while that might be going a little far, sometimes the real Hollywood moguls tick Robert Duvall off, too. “We gave an opening night party at the St. Regis Hotel. A very well-known director in theatre and movies — who I won’t name — came over and said, ‘You boys were wonderful in this film. I loved you so much. But I don’t know about the film.’”
So, Duvall got the last laugh. “Definitely.”