Apollonia

Michael did become the evil gangster, full of lies and cold-blooded murderousness, AFTER Apollonia's death. Hers was the death of an innocent, and, poor girl, she was what? 15, 16 years old. She was beautiful and full of life, but she had to meet Michael Corleone. It was destiny, fate. That is why The Godfather is so awesome.

Kay is to Michael a WASP woman who gives him already a feeling of belonging to America and the country's upper social levels. He settles for Kay because he knows her and wants a wife and children but in the way the other mafiosi heads have them.

Even though I don't like Part II that much, I'd agree that the Michael-Kay relationship is one of its strengths. Michael never felt a romantic love for Kay, and it is quite evident that the one time that ever happened in his life was right from when he met Apollonia until her death. If we consider the Pacino screen persona, something similar would happen in Scarface. It was lust (rather than love) at first sight when he met his boss' gun moll Elvira, the way it was fulminating love at first sight with Apollonia. Maybe Pacino is too intense to ever fall in love gradually through time, at least in his iconic roles. However, in Elvira's case, Tony Montana needed her in the way Michael Corleone needed Kay. Which makes this love story (Michael-Apollonia, needless to say) in The Godfather movie and trilogy in general all the more moving.

In the original book by Mario Puzo, the young Vito story is told as fact that becomes myth because of its own nature and relation to time: a gangster story from an historical past. But in the film, the young Vito is a hero of a sepia-colored world which looks strangely familiar not because of its own nature and relation to time, but because the values and principles that Brando as the Godfather represented in the original film seem to permeate everything in the representation or evocation of that world. The possibility of Michael "remembering" that past through his father's character is there. Don Vito was born with a heart, and Michael just couldn't make the right moral decisions. Vito Corleone became the Godfather because he refused to be a victim and instead decided to fight the oppressors, the "bad" mafiosi, and help the victims. Michael was born to be a very bad mafioso, and a pretty successful one at it --the gangster as a professional killer who is willing to destroy his father's family in its own name--, which of course is the irony and the tragedy of the whole picture.

It seems clearer now that Michael was perhaps only able to see beautiful things in a romantic way, but never to get in touch with them in the real world --Apollonia and Sicily were the ideal world, too good to last forever (more so when it belonged to his father's own making as the hero: as if Michael had been transported back to that past and his version of it all). Michael is the antihero obviously, and becomes the antagonist of his own life in Part II: he is so calculating, so cerebral as to be detached from any real human emotions, even his own --yet he arguably remains a human being after murdering his own brother.