In Popular Culture
In the movies The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, the consigliere to Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), and later Don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), is Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall). (In the novel, Tom's predecessor, Genco Abbandando, is briefly featured, dying in a hospital room on the day of Connie's wedding. This scene was filmed for the first movie, and has been included in some television showings.) Hagen is the adopted son of Don Vito Corleone, and doubles as the family's lawyer. At the end of The Godfather, Don Vito's successor and son, Michael, temporarily demotes Hagen within the organization, saying that things could get rough during the family's move to Las Vegas, and he needs a "wartime consigliere." (In an earlier scene, Sonny Corleone, Michael's older brother and acting Don after Vito Corleone's attempted assassination, similarly criticizes Hagen.) Vito Corleone, Michael's father, replaces Hagen at Michael's side as de facto consigliere until his death. Tom is reinstated after Vito's death.
In the television series The Sopranos, Silvio Dante is the consigliere to Tony Soprano.
In The Simpsons episode "Donnie Fatso" Homer explains to an FBI agent that he was at one time Fat Tony's consigliere (see "The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer"), but has trouble pronouncing the word and just says "his Robert Duvall"; a reference to Duvall's character in The Godfather series.
In "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story", White Goodman's employee, Me'Shell, is introduced as his consigliere.
Read more about this topic: Consigliere
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culturelack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most peoples liveshas overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of Gods property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being crucified for an ideaMthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulatedit is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (18851972)