In the screenplay it’s winter, 1945, at dusk, and “the light outside is very cold, and beginning to fail.” Don Vito Corleone comes out of his olive oil office, turns back to the fruit stand on the corner and points at what he wants, and the man bags it for him. Two men step out from the corner. The bag hits the ground, and in the film what rolls out across the street are oranges, the brightest thing in a frame of brown coats, black cars and dark pavement.
It’s the orange everybody remembers, and the reason so many people go looking for what the oranges in The Godfather mean. The answer you usually get is death: see an orange and somebody’s about to die. That’s a strange thing to say about this scene, because the Don lives through it. Count them scene by scene and the first film has five scenes where the oranges are plain to see, three followed by a death and two by nobody’s, and the production designer who put them there says he wanted color, not a message.
Every orange in The Godfather, scene by scene
The first are in the fruit on the tables at Connie’s wedding, where Tessio picks one up. They’re stacked between the candles at Jack Woltz’s dinner in Hollywood. They spill across the street at the fruit stand. At the meeting of the Five Families one sits in the crystal fruit bowl in front of Barzini, and the last is a peel the Don puts in his mouth in his tomato garden.
The sequels keep putting them on the table, and Part III ends on one. First, the five, and what happens after each.
| Scene | The orange | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Connie’s wedding | Tessio picks one up; fruit on the wedding tables | Tessio is led away to be killed in the closing minutes |
| Woltz’s dinner, Hollywood | A pyramid of oranges between the candles | Woltz wakes up next to the head of Khartoum, his racehorse |
| The fruit stand, winter 1945 | Crates of them; they roll into the street | The Don is shot and survives |
| The Five Families | One in the crystal fruit bowl in front of Barzini | Barzini is shot on the courthouse steps at the end |
| The garden | A peel for teeth, to scare his grandson Anthony | The Don collapses and dies in the tomatoes |
Do the oranges in The Godfather mean death?
Three of the five are followed by a death, which sounds like a strong omen until you look at how far apart they are. Only one death comes with its orange: the Don dies in the garden moments after the game with the peel. Barzini and Tessio die too, but long after their oranges, in the closing minutes, when Michael settles all the family business at once.
Then the misses. Woltz eats dinner behind a pyramid of oranges and wakes up next to a horse’s head, and Woltz is fine, it’s Khartoum, the six-hundred-thousand-dollar racehorse, that died. The fruit stand is the biggest miss of all, the orange every list leads with, and the Don takes the bullets in the street and lives.
- Orange 1 of 5Connie’s weddingTessio picks one up at a wedding table.Led away to be killed in the last minutes.
- Orange 2 of 5Woltz’s dinnerOranges stacked between the candles.Woltz lives. His racehorse doesn’t.
- Orange 3 of 5The fruit standThe Don buys fruit on the corner.Shot in the street. He survives.
- Orange 4 of 5The Five FamiliesAn orange in the bowl in front of Barzini.Shot on the courthouse steps, at the end.
- Orange 5 of 5The gardenA peel for teeth, to scare his grandson.The Don dies among the tomatoes.
The feeling of an omen is real, though, and it comes from the viewer. Once somebody tells you the oranges mean death, your eye goes hunting for them: the hits stay with you and the misses fall away. Watch the fruit stand again knowing what’s coming and the oranges turn into a countdown, even though the Don comes home from the hospital.
Why are there oranges in The Godfather? Dean Tavoularis’s answer
The oranges were put there by Dean Tavoularis, the production designer on all three films, and in Harlan Lebo’s book The Godfather Legacy (1997) his answer is about color and nothing else. Lebo calls them another carefully chosen complement to sets that were otherwise dressed somberly. Then Tavoularis, on the symbolism: “I don’t remember anybody saying, Hey, I like oranges as a symbolic message.”
We knew this film wasn’t going to be about bright colors, and oranges make a nice contrast.
Dean Tavoularis, in Harlan Lebo’s The Godfather Legacy
The film he was dressing was Gordon Willis’s. While he was shooting it, Willis told American Cinematographer he felt it “should be brown-and-black in feeling,” and he described the look he was after as “a black-and-white print out of the New York Times, with a little color introduced.” For Sicily he planned to shoot through heavy chocolate-brown filters, and he knew exactly what brown does to a picture: “It de-saturates the primary colors.” Thirty years later, on Fresh Air, he described what he’d settled on for the first film as “this kind of brassy yellow look,” and added, “Don’t ask me why, it just felt right.”
Brown and brass are dark, quiet oranges, so a real orange sits in the same warm family as the wood, the skin and the lamplight around it, only with far more color. Push a picture toward brown and the cool colors go first, a green cloth turns muddy and a blue one nearly black, while an orange keeps most of what it has, because it already lives at the warm end. Tavoularis kept putting Willis’s “little color” on the table, even at Woltz’s house in Hollywood, which Willis planned to shoot with a “cleaner, crisper, sort of West Coast-y, California quality,” and the oranges are still the strongest color there.
Painters knew the trick long before any production designer. Francisco de Zurbarán put a basket of oranges in the middle of a table in 1633, between a plate of lemons and a cup, against black, in the only still life he ever signed and dated. Put the light anywhere in it and your eye still goes back to the basket.
The orange peel: how Vito’s death got into The Godfather
The garden orange nearly wasn’t in the film. In the third draft of the screenplay, dated March 29, 1971, the Don never dies on screen. He and Michael walk through the tomatoes, he warns him that Barzini will move against him first, and then the script cuts to Mama and Kay at church, and from there to the flower cars lined up outside Bonasera’s funeral home.
Coppola has told the story of how it got shot. Talking to CBS Sunday Morning, he said the studio had cut the Don’s death at the script stage, so he set up a little tomato patch near the location where he was shooting Connie’s wedding and tried to grab the scene between setups with two cameras, while a studio man on the set tried to shut him down. The boy playing Anthony was taking longer than they had, and Brando saw Coppola was in trouble. “I’ll do something I do with my kids,” Brando told him, and Coppola remembers that “he took the orange peel, put it in his mouth, and scared the little kid, and the little kid was scared, and ran away.”
So the most famous death orange in the film is a trick a father did for his own children, on a setup Coppola had to sneak past the studio. It hits as hard as it does because of what it shows: a man who spent his life deciding who lives and who doesn’t, playing a monster with a piece of fruit to send a little boy running, a moment before he falls among the tomatoes.
Oranges in The Godfather Part II and Part III
Tavoularis designed all three films and Willis shot all three, and the oranges kept coming. Part II gives the cleanest pair. Early in the street festa Don Fanucci, the neighborhood’s extortionist, grabs an orange off a fruit stand as if he owns it, the way he takes everything else on those streets, and before the festa is over young Vito follows him home and kills him. Later, once Vito’s name means something in the neighborhood, a fruit seller won’t take his money. In the 1973 draft of the script Vito picks out “some choice oranges and peaches” and the vendor says, “It is my pleasure to make this a gift.” Same fruit, one taken and one given, and only the man who took it dies.
Then the fruit passes to Michael. Johnny Ola brings him an orange from Hyman Roth, “our friend in Miami,” the man who wants him dead. Michael lives, and Ola is killed in Havana on New Year’s Eve. Toward the end Michael is seen eating one of his own, alone.
Part III is full of them, and it ends on one. In the 1990 cut Michael, old and alone in Sicily, struggles to put on his sunglasses, his hand falls to his side, he drops the orange, and he slumps sideways and falls to the ground with the chair. He’s diabetic in that film, and when his blood sugar crashes earlier on it’s orange juice they give him, so the fruit in his hand is the sugar he never gets to eat. Thirty years later Coppola recut it as The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone and took the death out. In the Coda Michael puts the sunglasses on, looks up, and the film fades to black on a card about the Sicilian wish cent’anni, a hundred years, a long life, which for this man reads like a sentence.
The XPRMTS print to hang beside this essay is Signs of the Solstice, and it runs the other way from Willis’s brown. A woman in an orange shirt stands in a summer garden thick with red, yellow and violet flowers and holds a flare over her head, its orange smoke tearing across a blue sky. The one warm color Tavoularis rationed onto the Corleone tables fills the whole frame here, in a garden where the day is still at its height.
Frequently asked questions
How many oranges are in The Godfather?
Oranges are plain to see in five scenes of The Godfather (1972): Connie’s wedding, Woltz’s dinner, the fruit stand, the meeting of the Five Families and the garden where the Don dies. Counted as single pieces of fruit there are dozens, since the fruit stand alone is stacked with crates of them. The sequels keep them coming, from Fanucci’s orange in Part II to the one Michael drops at the end of Part III.
What do the oranges in The Godfather symbolize?
As far as the man who chose them remembers, nothing: Dean Tavoularis wanted contrast in a film he knew wouldn’t be bright, and he didn’t remember anyone talking about oranges as a symbol. The death reading belongs to the audience. In The Godfather three of the five orange scenes are followed by a death, but only the garden puts the death in the same scene, and nobody dies after Woltz’s dinner or the fruit stand, the most famous orange of all.
Who was the production designer on The Godfather?
Dean Tavoularis designed all three Godfather films and thirteen features with Francis Ford Coppola in all, including Apocalypse Now. He won the Oscar for art direction on The Godfather Part II. He died in Paris in April 2026, aged 93.
Does Michael drop an orange in The Godfather Coda?
No. In the 1990 Part III Michael drops an orange and dies in his chair in Sicily. The 2020 recut, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, runs 158 minutes and ends with Michael alive: he puts on his sunglasses, looks up, and the film fades to black on a card about cent’anni.
Read next
- Chiaroscuro in film, where Gordon Willis’s top light hides Brando’s eyes and the dark gets fixed at the camera.
- Color in film, the hub for this series and how cinema turns light into feeling.
- Scorsese’s red, the other color of that New York, lit in bars and fought for in the lab.
References
- Gilbert Cruz, “What’s with All the Oranges?”, Time, March 14, 2012, quoting Harlan Lebo, The Godfather Legacy (1997): web.archive.org
- “On Location with The Godfather: A Discussion with Gordon Willis,” American Cinematographer, June 1971: theasc.com
- Terry Gross, interview with Gordon Willis (2002), rebroadcast in “Fresh Air Remembers Cinematographer Gordon Willis,” NPR, 2014: npr.org
- Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather, third draft screenplay, March 29, 1971: imsdb.com
- Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather Part Two, second draft screenplay, September 24, 1973: imsdb.com
- Coppola on the garden scene, from CBS Sunday Morning, reported by SlashFilm, 2024: slashfilm.com
- Tim Molloy, “Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone Makes a Surprising Change to the End of Godfather III,” MovieMaker, December 1, 2020: moviemaker.com
- Ian Goldstein, “The Major Moment You Don’t Get to See in The Godfather, Coda,” Looper, January 5, 2021: looper.com
- “Oranges (Motif),” The Godfather Part II study guide, GradeSaver: gradesaver.com
- “Dealing with Don Fanucci,” The Godfather Part II study guide, GradeSaver: gradesaver.com
- Malcolm Jones, “Coppola’s Classic,” Newsweek: newsweek.com
- Ben Sherlock, “The Godfather: Why The Oranges Are So Important,” Screen Rant: screenrant.com
- Mike Barnes, “Dean Tavoularis, Production Designer on the ‘Godfather’ Films and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ Dies at 93,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 23, 2026: hollywoodreporter.com
- Luis Meléndez, Still Life with Oranges and Walnuts, The National Gallery, London: nationalgallery.org.uk
- Francisco de Zurbarán, Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, Norton Simon Museum: nortonsimon.org