Yellowstone, Family Melodrama, and The Godfather Films
by Kenneth E. Hall
The extremely popular and complexly melodramatic Western television series Yellowstone (2018- ) represents the revival of the familial ranch Western in the line of Broken Lance (Edward Dmytryk, 1954), The Halliday Brand (Joseph H. Lewis, 1957), Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)), and, despite great differences in tone and treatment, television Westerns such as Bonanza, Dallas, and The Big Valley. Yellowstone, soon in its fourth season, displays the hard-edged subtlety of the work of its creator, screenwriter and director Taylor Sheridan. Like his work Wind River (2016) and Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016), both contemporary Westerns, and his screenplays for the two Sicario films (Henri Villeneuve, 2015; Stefano Sollima, 2018), Yellowstone features characters on the edge, threatened by outside forces and by their own demons, and shows us a world in flux, subject also to outside threats and inner conflict. Since several of these works, especially the generic Westerns, feature conflicted families, they bear comparison not only with melodrama but with canonical sources: Shakespeare (especially King Lear), more contemporary drama (All My Sons), and Old Testament sources, particularly the Genesis story of Joseph and its cinematic treatment in the film noir House of Strangers (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946) and in its Western remake or recasting, Broken Lance.
In Yellowstone, Kevin Costner, a veteran of several well-known Westerns, plays a character befitting his mature persona, the patriarchal figure John Dutton, owner of the enormous Montana Dutton Ranch. The dictatorial, ruthless, but complex widower Dutton is the putative master of a family which echoes the progeny of King Lear, composed of his daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly), an equally powerful and complicated person; her brother Jamie (Wes Bentley), a weak man with the stubbornness and prickliness associated with such weakness; Kayce (Luke Grimes), a haunted combat veteran; and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser), the foreman, who often enforces Dutton’s rough discipline and carries out his sometimes unlawful orders. The security of the ranch is threatened principally by the neighboring Native American reservation, led by Thomas Rainwater (played by Comanche actor Gil Birmingham), although other forces, less principled but just as rapacious, such as grasping companies, also place the Dutton holdings in peril.
The ranch is situated in a time of flux, with environmental, political, and economic forces imperiling its continued existence. Thus the series connects rather neatly with the similarly unsettled post-World War II era in the United States, when one set of threats was supplanted by another, as Elizabeth Grace Canino stresses in her article on The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). Discussing Hamlet in connection with the Frankenheimer film, Canino observes that the Elizabethan era, particularly after the attempted invasion by Spain in 1588, was also conflicted and upended: “The England of the 1590s and the America of the 1950s were both characterized by a pride of autonomy and by a corresponding terror that that autonomy would be snatched away” (Canino 136). Thus the linkage between the series and Shakespearean tragedy threads through our own fairly recent history.
Most of the conflict in the series is worked through on the ranch premises, with occasional incursions into outside settings out of necessity, usually for political reasons. Within the insular environment of the ranch, Dutton and his foreman Rip fight a rearguard action against changing political and economic realities. Their methods are often ruthless and sometimes violent and illegal. As in the trilogy of Godfather films, the Duttons are slow to understand that times are changing. In The Godfather, the Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) remonstrates with short-fused Sonny Corleone (James Caan) that “‘This is almost 1946. Nobody wants bloodshed, in my opinion’” (Coppola, The Godfather). Both Vito and Michael as Don are preoccupied with making the Family “legitimate.” Michael’s wife Kay (Diane Keaton) reminds him in The Godfather Part II that the promise he made to her is not yet fulfilled: “In five years the Corleone family will be completely legitimate. That was seven years ago.” Michael can only offer that he is “trying.” In The Godfather Part III, set in 1979, Michael tells his sister Connie (Talia Shire) of his frustrations with making the Family legitimate: “All my life I kept trying to go up in society, where everything higher up was legal, straight. But the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.” In a way oddly comparable to the Corleone family, the legitimacy of the Dutton ranch is a veneer, hiding their frequent legal violations. Of course the parallel is not exact, since the origins of the Corleone “family,” and its ongoing organization, are clearly criminal in the eyes of the law, as the Dutton ranch establishment is not. Both organizations nevertheless perceive themselves as under attack—in fact they are—and take desperate measures to protect themselves. These measures backfire in both cases, contributing to the loss of the very family which presumably needs protecting. This question burdens Michael, who worries to his mother in The Godfather Part II that the very measures he adopts may threaten the Family, and she responds that “you can never lose family.” Michael ends the conversation with the telling remark that “Times are changing.”
As in Yellowstone, the employment of criminal measures by the Corleone family may qualify labeling the entire family a criminal enterprise, an extended RICO structure. This view, certainly a reasonable one, is contradicted by critic John Yates, who argues that
Even the violence and brutality of Don Corleone’s criminal empire fit within this family framework. To call an organization that deals in murder and revenge a “family” is not hypocritical at all. Indeed, it evokes the very origin of the family, that primordial time when anybody or anything that threatened a man’s home was beaten to death with a rock. Don Corleone’s family is a throwback to that violent time when the family existed primarily for mutual protection. (Yates 159)
~~~
So John Dutton, like Ryker in Shane (Stevens) and other such “throwback” characters, defends his actions based on history (the “I got here first” defense) and the need to preserve what he has won, like Lew Wilkison (Edward G. Robinson) in The Violent Men (Rudolph Maté, 1954) or Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) in Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957) or, of course, like the Corleones in the trilogy. Like William S. Pechter’s characterization of “the gang’s chieftain” in The Godfather, Dutton serves as “a patriarch” trying to defend his holdings and his family, even though his view of family may be distorted (Pechter 90).
The Dutton family is certainly a fragmented and truncated group. Dutton’s wife died many years ago, and he never remarried, so that the children, Beth, Jamie, and Kayce were cared for by a single parent. As is the case with all families, though, the circumstances are more complex than this. Beth blames herself for her mother’s death, the result of an accident. Jamie, as he and the viewer will learn in Season 3, is not even the biological relative of Dutton, having been adopted by him under difficult circumstances, and Beth nurses a deep resentment towards him for events in their childhood. Kayce’s situation is challenging for different reasons: as a combat veteran, he seems somewhat traumatized by his experiences; and he married a Native woman, Monica (Kelsey Asbille), a step usually presaging difficulties in the Western genre. Adding to this already fraught mix is the presence of the capable but violent and conflicted Rip Wheeler, who is not a relative of the Duttons but who serves as a surrogate son for John Dutton.
The Rip character can serve as an entry point into the intricate family dynamic of the series as well as into its genealogy in the Western film. Despite its valorization of his character as loyal, courageous, and efficient, Rip’s darker side, which includes unresolved psychic damage from his blood family and doubts about being accepted in the Dutton orbit, recalls another character from an important film in the Western movie canon, The Man from Laramie (Anthomy Mann, 1955). In this memorable Mann-Stewart collaboration, Arthur Kennedy plays Vic Hansbro, foreman for Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp). Waggoman has a spoiled, vindictive son, Dave (Alex Nicol), whom Vic is tasked with protecting from his own worst tendencies, the chief of which is temper-driven violence. Vic wants desperately to be accepted into Waggoman’s family, although this desire is revealed to depend at least partially on Waggoman’s promise to bequeath him a share in the ranch. Alec treats Vic as a second son, although the limits to this treatment surface when Vic objects to Alec’s request that he act as his brother’s keeper. The argument between Alec and his surrogate son comes to a head when Dave’s fight with Will Lockhart (James Stewart), started by Dave, escalates into Dave’s attack on Will during which Dave orders some ranch hands to hold Will down while Dave shoots him in the hand.i Like Tom Hagen in The Godfather although perhaps with more mercenary motives, Vic is anxious to join Alec’s family, or at least to get his share of the ranch. The parallel to Rip in Yellowstone is instructive, because while Rip has little interest in pecuniary gain, he is solidly invested in the family business because of his loyalty to Dutton, and more importantly, he serves as a second son for Dutton, supplanting the weak but rebellious Jamie, who bears some moral and psychological resemblance to Dave. Dutton’s other son Kayce is not weak or vindictive like Dave, but as a combat veteran he does experience psychological difficulty, and his relationship with his father is somewhat estranged. He also has difficulties in his marriage. These are due in part to the differing cultures from which Kayce and Monica come, but additionally Kayce has more than a streak of his father’s stubbornness and imperiousness, while Monica is equally firm in her convictions.
The interracial marriage element is reversed in a film which is also important insofar as it connects with Lear treatments in Hollywood. Broken Lance (Edward Dmytryk, 1954) is a creative remake of House of Strangers (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946). Both films recycle the Lear plot as well as, at least partially, the Genesis story of Joseph and his brothers. Yvonne Griggs comments on the “antecedents” to the Mankiewicz film: “Hirsh [sic] notes that the film has two antecedents—biblical references to Joseph and his brothers and King Lear . . . but there are also intriguing intertextual connections to the western Broken Lance, Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, the novels of Weidman and Mario Puzo, as well as Shakespeare’s play and a range of genres across an extended period of cinematic history” (Griggs, “Humanity” 127) (Hirsch).ii
In Broken Lance, Joe Devereaux (Robert Wagner) is the odd man out in the Devereaux ranch family (the equivalent of the Monetti banking family of House of Strangers). Joe is half-Comanche, the product of the second marriage of Matt Devereaux (Spencer Tracy) to a Comanche woman (Katy Jurado). The other three sons are from Matt’s first marriage and are not mixed-race. The interracial dimension of the family adds a complexity to the film which is lacking, or at least not emphasized, in the Mankiewicz film. Although one of the sons, Joe Monetti (Luther Adler), is married to non-Italian snob Elaine,“Joe’s Philadelphia Main Line wife” (Schwartz 82) (Diana Douglas), and Max Monetti (Richard Conte)iii has an affair with Irene Bennett (Susan Hayward), also not Italian-American, the fact of the inter-ethnic mixes is not stressed. In an additional plot complication in Broken Lance, Joe Devereaux begins a romance with Barbara (Jean Peters), the Eastern-educated, Anglo-American daughter of the bigoted governor (E. G. Marshall). This situation contributes to the rift between Matt and the governor, a man who could have used his authority to influence the outcome of Matt’s legal difficulties. In both films, the loyal son becomes the scapegoat for the troubles of the father.iv Lawyer Max tries to tamper with the jury, while Joe confesses falsely to having started the fight at the mining camp, whose destruction leads to the downfall of Matt Devereaux.
The lawyer character in House of Strangers (but not in Broken Lance, in which the lawyer is not a Devereaux family member) parallels the family lawyers in Yellowstone and in The Godfather. In all three films, the lawyer either works directly for the family, like Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), or he becomes entangled in the problems of the family business to his own detriment, true most sadly in the case of Max Monetti. Although Max has his small law office in the Monetti bank building, he does not represent the family. Only after Gino is threatened with prison because of his illegal money-lending practices does Max step in and defend him at trial. When he sees that Gino will likely be convicted, he tries to influence one of the jurors and is arrested as he leaves her apartment. His conviction for jury-tampering sends him to prison for seven years, a symbolic number connecting his travails to those of Joseph in Egypt in the Book of Genesis.
Tom Hagen is the lawyer-counsellor (consigliere) for the Corleone family. Adopted as a boy, apparently informally, by Vito, Tom Hagen wants desperately to be accepted as a brother by Michael, as he tells Michael tearfully in The Godfather Part II. A smooth-talking, low-key, and apparently genial man, Tom is quite ruthless in carrying out his work, scarcely batting an eye at killings and blackmail setups, as several incidents from the first two films demonstrate.v One of the most chilling of these is his visit near the end of The Godfather Part II to turncoat Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) to convince him to commit suicide as a means of guaranteeing safety and protection for his family—actually a form of blackmail, with the implied threat that the family may be harmed intentionally if he does not comply. Robert Duvall plays the scene with extreme skill, as Hagen conveys a half-genuine friendliness and spirit of bonhomie towards the likable Frankie while maintaining a cool and insinuating aloofness from the doomed man. In The Godfather Part I, Hagen stands on nearly equal footing with the volatile Sonny Corleone (James Caan), his adoptive brother, who acts as Don during Vito’s convalescence, addressing Sonny in a direct and even forceful manner to convince him not to escalate the conflict with the other Families.vi
The lawyer situation in Yellowstone is quite different. Jamie acts as lawyer for the Dutton Ranch in the earlier seasons of the series, eventually becoming attorney general of the state during season 3. Until late in the third season, Jamie knows little of his real past. He is all too aware of his outspoken sister Beth’s animosity towards him, although the reason for her aversion is only revealed as well in the third season. In this eventful set of episodes, Jamie learns that he was adopted by Dutton, who keeps the identity of his real father concealed from him, until Jamie uses his legal expertise to find out for himself. Jamie is routinely manipulated and dismissed as weak by Dutton and is hated by Beth for his role in her abortion as a teenager. His rage because of his life experiences surfaces in devastating manner when he kills an investigative reporter and in season 3, he becomes rebelliously vindictive. Like Tom Hagen, Jamie is the outsider brother, adopted into the family and its business, but unlike Tom, Jamie fiercely resents his treatment at the hands of some of the family members.
Despite their differing circumstances, Jamie is best compared, in the Godfather films, to Michael Corleone’s older brother, Fredo (John Cazale). Fredo is “weak,” according to his brother Michael, and thus unsuited to be Don (Coppola, The Godfather Part II). The same weakness and indecisiveness are central features of the Jamie character. As weak, easily frightened, insecure men, both Jamie and Fredo can, and do, react impulsively and even violently. Neither appears to possess the coldly measured calculation of a Michael Corleone or a John Dutton, or even the bullish ruthlessness of a Rip Wheeler. So Fredo attempts to disrupt Michael’s control of the Family by betraying him to Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), leading to an assassination attempt at the Corleone compound in Lake Tahoe. Although the attempt fails and Fredo later states that he did not know that Roth would try to assassinate Michael, the betrayal will lead to Fredo’s own death on Michael’s orders (Coppola, The Godfather Part II). Fredo protests to Michael after the facts of his betrayal become clear that he resented being passed over for the Don position and that his status as elder brother was not respected. As family lawyer and later as Attorney General, Jamie tries very hard to live up to Dutton’s expectations, but circumstances as well as his own shrinking from the kind of ruthless measures easily pursued by his sister Beth or by Tom Hagen prevent him from succeeding. Veering in and out of control, he murders an investigative journalist and, near the end of season 3, meets his real father (played by Will Patton) and nurses an explosive hatred towards John Dutton.
As the neglected or forgotten son and sibling in the Dutton family, Jamie is a spiritual cousin to Max Monetti, Joe Devereaux, and the anti-heroic protagonist of the powerful Otto Preminger film Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). The haunted anti-hero Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews), a cop with a record of violent abuse of suspects, vengefully pursues a gangster, Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill).vii As Hart Wegner observes, the two are spiritually connected although not in “genetic” terms: Scalise is “the true son” of Dixon’s wayward cop father because Scalise has found “success” in his outlaw pursuits while Dixon (genetically the real son) has failed as a cop. Thus, “Mark Dixon hates Tommy Scalise with the deep resentment of a faithful son against his preferred sinful brother, who, unjustly, seems blessed with all the worldly graces and goods” (Wegner 60). Of course, the complex of emotions attributed here to Dixon could apply to Joe’s half-brother Ben and to Max’s brother Joe, both of whom resent the “preferred sinful brother” who receives his father’s attention and affection. Still, the parallel across genres, and directors, is valid and significant, as it points to a conflict within families probed in film narratives of the postwar 1940s and 1950s.
Another such conflict is presented in All My Sons (Irving Reis, 1948), a film based on the play by Arthur Miller. As in the other “family under stress” examples cited, a son, Chris (Burt Lancaster) returns to the Keller family household after a prolonged absence. In this case, no embittered siblings await him, and the viewer learns that the stresses in the family—both father and mother still living—stem from multiple sources in the recent and more distant past. The more recent instance concerns World War II and a missing son, Larry, whose death the mother, Kate (Mady Christians) will not accept. The other serious problem in the family stems from a business decision made decades ago by the father, Joe (Edward G. Robinson) and his business partner Herbert Deever (Frank Conroy) which resulted in the imprisonment of the partner despite Joe’s greater guilt. Finally, an unresolved disagreement within the family about a romance between Chris and Ann Deever (Louisa Horton) heightens the tensions under the surface. The subtext of the film is, as in other cases discussed here, the prodigal son story. Less important to this film is the Joseph story or, for that matter, the Lear plot.
The setting of the film and the play on which it is based, the immediate post-World War II era, displays the fissures in American society wrought by the war: “All My Sons [the play], written and set in 1947, with its tale of a family torn apart by its members’ secrets and lies, clearly exhibits the many discordances which arose within the American family at this time” (Abbotson 29). The comment of Wheeler Winston Dixon on House of Strangers is apropos here: “As an example of old-world values clashing with postwar American society, House of Strangers demonstrates that families serve primarily as the repositories of secrets, lies, ambitions and long-held grievances” (Dixon 15). As in Broken Lance and The Godfather, in All My Sons a son returns to his former home in a postwar era, when society has been changed forever due to that war. Unlike those two films, and also unlike House of Strangers, All My Sons shows a family immersed in a particular kind of unreality, a falsehood about the events which landed Deever in prison and allowed Joe to become a wealthy and well-respected member of society: “The problem is that Joe not only manufactured airplane parts, he manufactured a memory to hide the fact that he built faulty airplane parts, shipped them out, and consequentially killed almost two dozen American fighter pilots” (Werden 77). While the patriarchs in the other films, and in Yellowstone, sometimes dwell on their family history, regretting losses or even, as does Vito Corleone, recounting but not apologizing for past misdeeds, they do not invent or embellish, much less romanticize or repress, that history.
Kenneth
E. Hall
Professor Emeritus
East Tennessee State University
Works Cited
Abbotson, Susan C. W. “A Contextual Study of the Causes of Paternal Conflict in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 11.2 (Fall 2005): 29–44.
Canino, Catherine Grace. “‘Ben, It’s a Terrible Thing to Hate Your Mother’: Mind Control in Hamlet and The Manchurian Candidate.” Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 134–46.
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. The Godfather. 1972. Digital Videodisc. With Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Joe Cazale, Richard Castellano, Abe Vigoda, Talia Shire, Diane Keaton, and Richard Conte. Paramount, 2008.
---, dir. The Godfather Part II. 1974. Digital Videodisc. With Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Joe Cazale, Michael V. Gazzo, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, and Lee Strasberg. Paramount, 2008.
---, dir. The Godfather Part III. 1990. Digital Videodisc. With Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Alicia Coppola, Andy Garcia, Eli Wallach, George Hamilton, and John Savage. Zoetrope-Paramount, 2008.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “House of Strangers: The Family in Film Noir.” A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home. Ed. Murray Pomerance. London: Wallflower, 2004. 13–27.
Dmytryk, Edward, dir. Broken Lance. 1954. Digital Videodisc. With Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Richard Widmark, Katy Jurado, Jean Peters, Earl Holliman, E. G. Marshall, and Eduard Franz. 20th Century-Fox, 2005.
Frankenheimer, John, dir. The Manchurian Candidate. 1962. Digital Blu-ray Videodisc. With Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, James Gregory, Janet Leigh, and Khigh Dhiegh. MGM-M. C.-Criterion, 2016.
Fuller, Samuel, dir. Forty Guns. 1957. Digital Videodisc. With Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Gene Barry, and Dennis Hopper. Twentieth Century-Fox, 2005.
Gambino, Richard. Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1974.
Golden, Daniel Sembroff. “The Fate of La Famiglia: Italian Images in American Film.” The Kaleidoscopic Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups. Ed. Randall M. Miller. N. p.: Jerome S. Ozer, Publisher, 1980. 73–97.
Griggs, Yvonne. “‘Humanity Must Perforce Prey Upon Itself Like Monsters of the Deep’: King Lear and the Urban Gangster Movie.” Adaptation 1.2 (2008): 121–39.
---. “King Lear as Western Elegy.” Literature/Film Quarterly 35.2 (2007): 92–100.
Hirsch, Foster. “Commentary.” House of Strangers. Digital Videodisc. 2006. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. 20th Century-Fox, 1946.
Krug, Christian. “On Jimmy Stewart’s Hand: Violent Acts in Western Movies, 1946–73.” Studies in the Western 12 (2004): 47–90.
Lewis, Jon. If History Has Taught Us Anything... Francis Coppola, Paramount Studios, and The Godfather Parts I, II, and III. Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy. Ed. Nick Browne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 23–56.
Lewis, Joseph H., dir. The Halliday Brand. 1957. Digital Videodisc. With Joseph Cotten, Viveca Lindfors, and Ward Bond. MGM-20th Century-Fox, 2011.
Mackenzie, David, dir. Hell or High Water. Digital Blu-ray Videodisc. With Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham, Chris Pine, and Ben Foster. CBS Films, 2016.
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., dir. House of Strangers. 1946. Digital Videodisc. With Edward G. Robinson, Richard Conte, Luther Adler, Susan Hayward, Paul Valentine, Debra Paget, Hope Emerson, and Efrem Zimbalist. 20th Century-Fox, 2006.
Mann, Anthony, dir. The Man from Laramie. 1955. Digital Videodisc. With James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, and Alex Nicol. Columbia, 1999.
Maté, Rudolph, dir. The Violent Men. 1954. Digital Videodisc. With Glenn Ford, Edward G. Robinson, and Barbara Stanwyck. Columbia, 2005.
Pechter, William S. “Keeping up with the Corleones.” Commentary 54 (July 1972): 88–91.
Preminger, Otto, dir. Where the Sidewalk Ends. 1950. Digital Videodisc. With Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, and Tom Tully. Twentieth-Century Fox, 2005.
Reis, Irving, dir. All My Sons. 1948. Digital Videodisc. With Edward G. Robinson, Burt Lancaster, Mady Christians, Louisa Horton, and Frank Conroy. Universal, 2014.
Schwartz, Ronald. Noir, Now and Then: Film Noir Originals and Remakes (1944–1999). Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Sheridan, Taylor, dir. Wind River. Digital Blu-ray Videodisc. With Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen. Lionsgate, 2016.
Smith, Sara Imogen. “Dana Andrews: The Forties Hero and His Shadow.” Bright Lights Film Journal 1 Nov. 2008.
Sollima, Stefano, dir. Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Digital Blu-ray Videodisc. With Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabella Moner, and Catherine Keener. Columbia, 2018.
Stevens, George, dir. Shane. 1952. Digital Videodisc. With Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Emile Meyer, Jean Arthur, and Jack Palance. Paramount, 2000.
Vidor, King, dir. Duel in the Sun. 1946. Digital Videodisc. With Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones.. MGM, 2004.
Villeneuve, Henri, dir. Sicario. Digital Blu-ray Videodisc. With Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, and Josh Brolin. Lionsgate, 2015.
Wegner, Hart. “From Expressionism to Film Noir: Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 11.2 (Summer 1983): 56–65.
Werden, Leslie A. “Memories of Yesterday and Tomorrow: Familial Legacies in Titus and All My Sons.” War, Literature and the Arts 19.1–2 (2007): 68–84.
Yates, John. “Godfather Saga: The Death of the Family.” Journal of Popular Film 4.2 (1975): 157–63.
Yellowstone. Television series. Taylor Sheridan and John Linson, creators. Paramount Network, 2018.
Endnotes
i For a discussion of this incident within the general context of postwar Western films, see Krug.
ii See also the article by Griggs, “King Lear as Western Elegy” (Griggs, “King Lear as Western Elegy”).
iii Near the end of his career, Conte played the sinister Don Barzini in The Godfather.
iv Hirsch comments on the link between the two films, including the sons and their relationship with their father (Hirsch).
v The Tom Hagen character did not appear in the third film. The producers did not meet Duvall’s asking price for the role (see Lewis, J. 48).
vi Sonny does not last very long as Don: “Brother Santino [Sonny] is marked for death by his own brash and uncontrollable emotionalism—he lacks the crucial element of pazienza, the Mezzogiorno [southern Italian] ideal of a measured withholding of energies and commitment, an almost impassive reserve that is channeled into an explosion of sudden, decisive action” (Golden 87). See also, cited by Golden (96n22), Gambino 117–45.
vii Dana Andrews’s work on this film has been called “his best performance, a tour-de-force of slow-burning pain and agonized intelligence” (Smith 6).
