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The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970)
A Hard Look At "The American Dream"
"The Brotherhood of the Bell" is one of the most audacious, subversive, and thought provoking movies ever made for American television.
Glenn Ford, as Prof. Andrew Patterson, goes through hell for spilling the beans about the all seeing, all powerful Brotherhood of the Bell. But director Paul Wendkos and writer David Karp slyly ask us to consider whether it is the Brotherhood that is responsible for Patterson's misery or--more boldly--Patterson himself.
Wendkos does a superb job, through masterful camera-work, of keeping the audience off guard. We are never quite sure whether the events we are witnessing are the results of the Brotherhood, coincidental occurrences, or merely paranoid delusions Patterson is having. The only thing we know for sure is the horrible psychic toll these events are having for Patterson. The film is about loss. And along with losing his his best friend, his job, his father, and his wife, it is clear he is also losing his mind.
But, ironically, the more he loses the more Patterson seems to gain. And what he gains is a clearer grasp of "The American Dream." Like a Buddhist parable on hallucinogenics, the movie asks what real value are a beautiful wife, luxurious home, well paying job, etc. if they can be so easily taken away? Even television, the very device people were watching "Brotherhood" on in 1970, is savaged in the depiction of "The Bart Harris Show." The show, symbolic of an America out of control, is a festering cesspool of hate, paranoia and frustration with William Conrad's Harris as a man-in-charge who has nothing but contempt for his audience. For an American TV movie in the '70s to suggest that there was more to life than a beautiful wife, beautiful home, a well-paying job and that television was essentially a freak show aimed at the lowest common denominator was heretical indeed.
In many ways, it is the precursor to a film that would come 37 years later, David Fincher's "The Game." What "Bell" and "The Game" have in common is that both films use the otherwise hackneyed "conspiracy" film plot as a kind of Trojan Horse to say some rather nasty and pointed things about "The American Dream."
"Brotherhood of the Bell" is an allegory and to only focus on its overt storyline of secret society shenanigans is to miss the bigger picture.