Throughout the film, Francis Ford Coppola utilizes the colour orange to portray danger, or death that is soon to come. For example, right before getting shot several times and being sent to the hospital, Vito Corleone was purchasing oranges from a fruit vendor. Another time when orange predicts danger is when Sonny is beating Carlo. At that time, Carlo is wearing the colour orange. This happens later in the film, and will be quite obvious in showing that the colour orange is present in dangerous scenes, or places. Also, during the scene when Michael kills Sollazzo and McCluskey, the sign outside of the restaurant, which is blatantly visible from inside the restaurant, seems to be almost glowing and radiating inside the restaurant.
Although there is all this proof of orange predicting danger, during the scene when Sonny is killed, there is no orange visible anywhere. This slightly brings me off of the topic of orange, due to the fact that I believe that if Coppola had been trying to depict orange as danger, then he would have included orange in every important scene with danger, and, seeings how this is a major scene in the film, I believe that orange is not an exceedingly important colour in this film.
Hey Sam,
ReplyDeleteI think that you should reconsider your change of heart on the color orange. Although it is very subtle, orange does show up right before the death of Sonny. As he is driving to the tollbooth there is a billboard on the side of the road promoting Florida Oranges. Although it is fairly hard to see in the film, after looking it up online I found that it is advertising oranges.
I am really stuck with the motif of oranges because I find they show up way too many times to be a coincidence. There are also a few more instances of oranges relating to death. If you do not know them already, check out my blog post I wrote a while back on the color orange.