Where was Vito Corleone Buried in "The Godfather"?
Any "Godfather" fanatic worth their salt knows that the funeral scene in Part 1 of the "Godfather" trilogy was filmed at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York. But how many people have been there? How many could tell you Vito Corleone's *exact* burial location, down to the section, range, plot and grave number?
Let's find out, as we click through this short series of pictures. Most of these photos are composite, showing how the cemetery looks today compared to how it looked in "The Godfather".
This photo essay began in March, 2007, when a Godfather fanatic named Allen sent me an e-mail. Allen had found my series of photos from Calvary Cemetery in Queens, famous among "Godfather" enthusiasts as the site of Vito Corleone's funeral, and wanted to know if I could direct him to the exact site of the Corleone funeral.
I was surprised to find this information unavailable on the public Internet. Perhaps these details existed in the director's (Francis Ford Coppola's) notebooks or elsewhere in the paperwork of this much-scrutinized film.
I had not seen "The Godfather" in years, but when I found the funeral scene I immediately knew that the funeral was filmed in Section 1-West, with one camera shooting part of the scene from Section 1-South. Determining the exact location of the fictional burial required a few weeks of detective work (and several trips to Calvary), but I found it.
If you are a fan of "The Godfather" who thought this much-scrutinized film had been analyzed and dissected from every possible angle then you will probably enjoy adding Vito Corleone's fictional burial site to your canon of "Godfather" filming locations. You also might enjoy my brief story about the Phone Booth Scene in "The Godfather".
Screen grabs are all taken from The Godfather DVD Collection and are copyright Paramount Studios.
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