1968 Directed by Martin Ritt
The son of a powerful Mafia don comes home from his army service in Vietnam and wants to lead his own life, but family tradition, intrigues and powerplays involving his older brother dictate otherwise, and he finds himself being slowly drawn back into that world.
Los hermanos sicilianos, 暗殺兄弟會, Mafia, La fratellanza, Les Frères siciliens, Auftrag Mord, برادری, Sangue de Irmãos, 마피아 형제들, Mafia-brødrene, Братство, 天伦劫
USAPG-13
USA
More often than you might think, a clue to the quality of what's to come in a movie can be gleaned from the font used on the opening credits. Which doesn't portend well for The Brotherhood, the font for the credits of which screams episode of Streets of San Francisco (well I wanted to keep it in the Douglas family, I coulda used any other TV show of that era).
You could call this Mafia tale a cheaper derivative of The Godfather - except that it came four years earlier. Funny story actually, both were Paramount productions but the earlier, Douglas-produced movie tanked badly enough at the box office that the studio didn't make another gangster movie for four years...…
Two brothers, Frank (Kirk Douglas) and Vince (Alex Cord) Ginetta, find themselves with competing ideas about how to advance the criminal enterprise they are in the upper echelon of. Frank is more conventional, tethered to the ideas of the previous generation. Vince has a fancy pants education and wants to start utilizing new fangled technologies to avoid having their business become obsolete.
This particular type of structure is a tough sell for me. Starting at the end, flashing back and filling everything in to explain how we got there often (though not always) takes a lot of the tension out of everything that happens in between for me. It especially doesn't work when the story is this lacking in momentum…
The mafia saga that bombed so hard at the box office it all but killed off the gangster genre until The Godfather came along a few years later—luckily for us Paramount decided to go ahead with that, though I have a sneaking suspicion that Coppola's film is partly why this obscure little oddity has such an abysmal rating because despite lacking in originality it isn't all that bad, it just has the great misfortune of being irrevocably compared to what is an irrefutable masterpiece of cinema.
A black-haired Kirk Douglas somewhat unconvincingly passes for an ageing mafioso with Sicilian heritage, though he seems to be enjoying himself in the role and performance wise he's his usual charismatic self, plus the…
The Brotherhood is a solid mafia film from 1968 directed by Martin Ritt, anchored by a superb Kirk Douglas performance. Douglas plays an aging Don at odds with the corporatisation of the Mafia. He wants the clean world of killing people and stuffing canaries in their mouths rather than the modern world of accountants and capitalism. The film agrees with him. Not sure I did!
Ritt is always an interesting filmmaker and while he doesn't do anything spectacular here, other than get out of Douglas' way, he does present the film with his usual politically clarity and moral complications. Business overcoming family, tradition being eroded by capitalism. Classic Ritt stuff.
The film suffers from three aspects. One, none of the…
The brotherhood is far from the best gangster film and not some great film in itself either. Douglas seems to try his hardest, playing a character similar to Sonny, only less angry and violent. Trying to paint a different picture of himself as he is in his job compared to a more public façade. But nothing about the way he looks or acts makes him look or feel Italian. And Alex Cord, who plays his brother, even less so. His wife and the old men are the only ones that really look as if they fit in here. Especially with what we expect from a film like this post The Godfather. I do think this might have had the potential…
*Trolley’s Kirk Douglas Pre-102nd Birthday Watchlist #13*
'A blunt, square and sentimental Mafia movie whose heart belongs to the senior soldiers..' (from a contemporary review of The Brotherhood by Vincent Canby)
Kirk Douglas as an aging Mafia Don, anyone?! Well that’s what you get in Martin Ritt’s late '60's gangster movie, released four years before Marlon Brando stuffed some cotton wool into his cheeks and earned himself a Best Actor Oscar in Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly themed The Godfather (though the ungrateful so-and-so refused to accept the award!).
Kirk gets the boot polish out of the cupboard and on to his hair to try and make him look a little more Sicilian - it’s not totally convincing, to be honest!…
You cannot watch this film without comparing it to The Godfather. The similarities are too obvious and not just because both were released by Paramount. The Brotherhood isn't a great film, but I found it surprisingly entertaining if a little slow.
The Brotherhood was directed by Martin Ritt, but his typical injection of liberalism is amiss here. The core of the film centres around the juxtaposition between two brothers. The elder brother Frank (Douglas) is taking an 'extended vacation' in Sicily with his wife (Papas), where he is visited by his younger brother Vincent (Cord).
Although Frank notes that the family business is more about arithmetic and accountancy than outright violence, Frank is rather old school. He speaks Italian and…
uhm so i thought this was going to be gay but i got a very bad rough draft of the godfather instead so- i don't know im scared
