Black Handiwork

The old men have eyes like dirty ice and mouths as inviting as tombs. The young men have subdued ties, three-button suits and Ivy-covered vocabularies. Together they make up the modern Mafia that inspired "Lucky" Luciano, Murder Inc. and The Brotherhood.

No single film can tell the whole story of an organization as stark as Sicily and as Byzantine as the stock market. Instead, The Brotherhood concentrates on the microcosmic death struggles of a single Mafioso family. Frank Ginetta (Kirk Douglas) is the son of a deceased "soldier" of Murder Inc. days. Like his father, Frank still kills in the same old way, ordering a stool pigeon shot in a New Jersey dump, then stuffing his mouth with a symbolic canary. But Frank's college-educated brother Vince (Alex Cord) has acquired new credit cards of identity. Not for him the violent memories, the long jags on vino, the crude labor racketeering. His work is the more up-to-date business of "washing" dirty money: making ill-gotten gains look legitimate by putting them through business firms that the mob has taken over. The new rulers have also learned to watch their Black Handiwork; to them, the older brother is an embarrassing antique, to be brought up to date or kept out of sight.

When Frank avenges his father by garroting an old killer (Luther Adler), the mob decides that he must die. Their choice of triggerman: Brother Vince. But for a soldier's son there are no surprises. Lying low in Sicily, Frank realizes that his life really ended years before, when he refused to get out of the gutter and on to the sidewalk. All he can do is cloak himself in the traditional peasant armor: resignation.

$75 Hit. Working with Lewis John Carlino's spare script, Director Martin Ritt has fashioned a film like grappa, with a raw kick and a bitter aftertaste. Seldom has a movie so resembled its characters. Like them, it has a primitive volatility, churning from glee to fury in the space of a second. Like them, it has aspects of a legend that has outlived its time. Like them, it strains for respectability--and never makes it. For all its sober posture, the film is hooked on its participants. It stays too long at the graphic garroting; it details too lovingly the good old days when a "hit" (a decreed death) cost a fast 75 bucks. It forgives the criminal because, though he is endemically corrupt, he is thoroughly dramatic.

The Brotherhood's pervasive nostalgia grants the senior members the best scenes. As Frank's wife, Irene Papas has a rare, abiding femininity that has taken on middle age and won. Luther Adler invests his role with the kind of craft and authority that make for supporting-actor awards. Douglas, fitted out in a push-broom mustache and dyed hair, is the most convincing, perhaps because the role of a prideful, aging bullock who clings to an old persona hits astonishingly close to home.

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