Michael's "Turnbull is a good man" was merely sarcasm, in my opinion.
I think this is correct. According to the second draft of the screenplay, which I think can justifiably be appealed to here, Turnbull fed Tom a string of lies about Geary being squeamish about being bribed in a direct fashion (rather than through a "charitable donation to a cause Geary controls," as Tom puts it in the 2nd draft), so of course he and Michael were quite surprised when Geary came out swinging with his hefty demands.
All of the films in the trilogy went through multiple script treatments, some with radically different outcomes. While those earlier screenplays are often fascinating, what counts is what FFC intended us to see in his final cut. On that basis, I thought Michael looked surprised when Geary said that he'd have a problem taking over Klingman's license. Michael's "Turnbull is a good man" struck me not as sarcasm, but a reminde: "Hey, I thought I already took care of that through Turnbull, your bagman."
It is possible that some or all of the material about Turnbull and his relationship to the Corleones was filmed, then discarded--either in the interest of cutting the film's already prodigious length, or because the plotline was superfluous or didn't really fit. So, "Turnbull is a good man"
could have been a left-over reference in a different context involving an abandonded scene or story line. I thought it flowed well as a statement of surprise.
90 cal, you may recall that, more than a year ago, an alert paisan here spotted Questadt, the Senate lawyer, sitting in a chair behind Roth in the American businessmens' meeting with Batista in Havana. That was a jolt. Questadt had no rational for being in that scene--none whatsoever. He never had a line of dialog or a face-to-face with Michael or Roth, and didn't appear again until he turned up as the inquisitor in the Senate hearing. If his appearance in Havana had been intentional, Michael would have remembered him sitting behind Roth, would have recognized him at the Senate hearing, and would
never have perjured himself. I guessed at the time that Questadt must have gotten a bigger role in an earlier script treatment.
Sure enough, another paisan posted an earlier script in which Michael and Tom had dealings with Questadt before Havana. Obviously it was cut out to shorten the movie and to beef up the perjury trap factor at the Senate hearing. So, why did FFC leave Questadt in that Havana scene? A guess is that he liked the way the scene played out, couldn't film it over because it had been done on location in the Dominican Republic--and figured that nobody'd notice Questadt. He nver counted on the sharpies on this board...
