This is perhaps the least guilty contender on the entire list (so here it is a number 10), purely because it's more of a technical inclusion than a narrative one. Cast your mind back, then, to the scene where Sonny Corleone (James Caan) takes to the street to get revenge on one of the movie's antagonists, Carlo Rizzi, for beating up on his sister. The scene should have been brutal and kind of disturbing - instead, it's the only scene in the movie that provokes accidental laughter. And I don't mean "fake" in the usual way, where you kind of suspend your disbelief because you know that the actors in question aren't really hitting one another. It's really, really fake, to the point where director Francis Ford Coppola was - for some reason - happy to include shots of James Caan a) missing his target by about three inches on several occassions, and b) punching his own hand to create a sound effect. So whereas the rest of The Godfather is real and gritty, this scene feels oddly out of place and badly done... almost to the point of a Saturday Night Live parody.
