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"We're all brothers, aren't we? Did that ever stop anything?" An after-hours call launches the nightmare, back into the past goes the laundry merchant (Richard Conte), formerly a mob accountant. One brother (Paul Picerni) has "graduated into the bigger money" as an assassin and the other (James Darren) is his wheel man, both are on the lam from the honcho (Larry Gates) who cheerfully declares "I believe in families." (Nicknamed "Uncle," the criminal boss hands out pleasantries before heading down to the mansion's dungeon to contemplate an informer's obliterated mug.) Warnings from wife (Dianne Foster) and mother (Argentina Brunetti) go unheeded, the protagonist insists on the integrity of his mission until it's too late for his siblings and possibly himself. "When do you think the executioners will come?" Simenon in America, all over America, Florida to New York to Arizona to California and back to give the full span of the land gripped by "the organization." Phil Karlson's clean, hard lines suit the compression, Hathaway's Kiss of Death is a compositional model shaved to the image of a couple of sedans waiting outside the cabin of the marked man who's just become a father. Legitimate business and its underworld shadow, "men with eyes like marbles" and ominous chumminess in every corner. Mediterranean codes don't mean much in the New World grid, the realization sinks in a featureless hotel room while the youngest Rico sweats before the abyss. All-pervasive corrosion, "nothing personal," nevertheless a hopeful glimmer for the next generation. "He showed me a plush lined rat-hole and I crawled in and made it my home." A crucial midpoint between Polonsky's Force of Evil and Lattuada's Mafioso, for the benefit of The Godfather. With Kathryn Grant, Lamont Johnson, Harry Bellaver, Paul Dubov, Rudy Bond, Richard Bakalyan, and William Phipps. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |