BLOODBROTHERS (1978)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Robert Mulligan

SCREENWRITER: Walter Newman

FILM STARS: Paul Sorvino, Tony Lo Bianco, Richard Gere, Lelia Goldoni, Yvonne Wilder, Marilu Henner, Kenneth McMillan, Floyd Levine, Kim Milford, Michael Hershewe, Kristine DeBell, Robert Englund, Danny Aiello

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Richard Price

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Futura

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1979

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1976

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Drama

WORDS: Bloodbrothers, both the book (1976) and the film (1978), are very much products of the 1970s –  an urban environment, ethnic minorities, alienation, familial dysfunction, a working-class milieu, ordinary events leading to drama were regular ingredients to a story. It was a golden period for egalitarian cinema (and perhaps literature) before post-modernism took hold.

Here two brothers from an Italian working-class New York family deal with their family in a changing America.

Richard Price is a great writer, and he was heir apparent, at least early on, to television playwright Paddy Chayefsky who was writing in the mid-1950s. Chayefsky wrote slice of life kitchen sink dramas for film and television mainly set in New York and laid the groundwork for the gritty little film and TV dramas of the 1970s, also mainly set in New York about families trying to survive in the world.

Price was young when he wrote the novel (it was published when he was 26) and he already had one novel under his belt The Wanderers (1974), about young men and gangs, which he wrote while still in his early twenties.  What he did was convincingly (much, again, like Chayefsky) despite his youth was capture working-class family life, urban culture, and the psychology of young men.

The book centers on one Italian American family, with two sons, Stony DeCoco (age 17) and his younger brother Albert (age 8), their working-class life in New York, their ethnic identity and neighbourhood culture and the limited opportunities available to young people from working families. It’s a coming-of-age story where options are limited.

Stony wants to escape the plan his father has laid out for him as an electrician and the lifestyle that goes with it. Bars, booze, broads and work.

Stony DeCoco’s character has autobiographical elements of Price who drew on his own Bronx experiences. Like Price (who is Jewish though), Stony is an intelligent young man from a working-class New York family who feels torn between loyalty to his family and the desire for a different future. But there are differences ….

The book has a lot of talk and dialogue about what can be misogynist and toxic but how do you write characters that speak like that without being levelled a misogynist. The usual way is to make them unappealing and evil but that doesn’t get to the heart of their humanity, isn’t real, illuminates nothing, and reinforces stereotypes. The better way is to lay it out, warts and all, and let the reader navigate and find where the humanity is, if any. Of course, two people could read the same book and come out with different positions. Though I think that is still better than spoon feeding them.

Stony’s anxieties, ambitions, and growing disillusionment with his family are central. The particular emotional pressures created by the mix of (relative) poverty, family expectations, ethnicity, and masculinity are well detailed.

But his “coming of age” story, though central, isn’t the only story. The parents’ influence, particularly the father’s rough, traditional outlook, is explored, and then there are little detours through other smaller characters who are part of Stony’s life. He doesn’t live in a vacuum and this is particularly appealing about the book.

Price’s book is certainly not as assured as his later work though you can tell, even here, he was going to be a major writer. The landscape is vivid, as is the city which is a character without being intrusive.

The only fault I see is the resorting to stereotypes with the Italians. Is this because Price was from a lower middle class Jewish family from NYC rather than a working-class Italian one or is this because errrr stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason? ie: they are commonplace. No doubt price knew the working-class Italians he depicts but he still would have only been dropping in to their homes rather than living with them meaning, perhaps, he doesn’t see everything happening behind the scenes. There is more unhappiness and violence than there is love in the family and perhaps that’s the way it was with the particular family he is writing about, but they become the “norm”. The family isn’t balanced out against others in the same ethnic and economic boat.

Still, this is a minor complaint for an engrossing book.

The film is a solid though also happy to lean into stereotypes, and (also) not happy Italian ones. The Italians are broad in the book; they are broader here and they all yell. Why? Do all Italians yell? Well, actually, most of all the Italians I know talk loudly, especially those in the trades. I could name at least one painter who you can hear coming from a mile away. To be fair it may be an Eastern Mediterranean thing (Italians, Croats, Albanians, Greeks) even if it is second generation and transported to a foreign country. Is it DNA or socialization or playing into stereotypes? I don’t know.

But, in the film they aren’t just talking loudly, they yell and every sentence sounds like a threat. I get it the film is trying to depict a specific working-class culture, and it does, it beats you over the head with it.

Stereotype or not the characters are also nuanced (if that is not a contradiction) so you cut them some slack because they are a product of their environments unlike Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999) which is hateful and portrays almost every major Italian-American male character is a hateful way.

Bloodbrothers the film does capture, the “urban jungle” better than the book. When it comes to depicting the density of the landscape, the topography, the myriad of ordinary people, pictures speak a thousand words. From the flyover shot at the start like the intro to West Side Story (1961) … apartments on apartments, construction sites, skyscrapers, surrounding small pockets of space. The indoors are mainly claustrophobic, the tiny apartments, the small bars. There are no lengthy outdoors scenes in the film save for the dangerous working on skyscrapers and a cemetery visit.

The film, like all films based on detailed books like this, has had to truncate the story, remove or marginalize characters, remove subplots, or mash together different scenes into one to save time. They also have toned down some of the darkness and made the film more friendly to all. Some humour has been thrown in and the characters more sympathetic and less racist and misogynist than in the book.

The central character, Stony, still wants something better but he doesn’t know how to get there and can’t leave the family to trust any of the non-familial characters  – not Annette, not Butler, not the doctor …. all characters better delineated in the book. His father and Uncle with their violence and their sexual infidelities, as well as the desires of his mother and Aunt are also more delineated in the book, and more graphic. The film is somewhat more sentimental and emotional, particularly in its portrayal of family bonds. Not that the film pulls punches (sic). Both the film and book escalate to a climax full of violent acts but there is no happy ending in writing as there often is in film. In the film Stony escapes his family with his younger brother Albert, things are more uncertain in the book, there are no resolutions.

The film is well directed by Robert Mulligan, a much-underrated director (The Rat Race (1960), The Great Impostor (1961), Come September (1961), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The Stalking Moon (1968), Same Time, Next Year (1978))

Mulligan is suited to Price. He has dwelled on the working class milieu (The Rat Race (1960), (1961), Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The Nickel Ride (1974)) and also focused on adolescence, family relationships, and emotional coming-of-age stories (To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to Summer of ’42 (1971), The Other (1972), The Man in the Moon (1991)). How does a family shape a person and how does a person escape becoming what everyone expects are central questions to his work or seem to interest him.

Not sure how screenwriter Walter Newman got the gig …he had been relatively quiet in film since Cat Ballou (1965) though he did follow Bloodbrothers up with the old fashioned The Champ (1979) but anyone who co-wrote Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) I will cut some slack for.

The acting is uninformely good though LOUD. Which is a problem … any louder and characters become stereotypes and some of the performances here are stepping on the edge.

Gere was about 27 when he made the film and he is too old for the role though he has charisma for the role, and is otherwise great. Paul Sorvino and Tony Lo Bianco are suitably boorish in the if Stanley Kowalski was Italian kind of way, and Marilu Henner is good. If you look you will see Robert Englund and Danny Aiello in small roles.

The cinematography by Robert Surtees is excellent, though he could film anything and make it look good. He won three Academy Awards, out of 16 total nominations, for the films King Solomon’s Mines (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Ben-Hur (1959). He could do big action, adventure and outdoors (Quo Vadis (1951), Mogambo (1953), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), The Cowboys (1972)) but he could also do indoors (The Graduate (1967), The Arrangement (1969), The Last Picture Show (1971), The Sting (1973), The Turning Point (1977), Same Time, Next Year (1978)) which he increasingly turned to in his later career. He was born in 1906 and Bloodbrothers was his next to last film released. He passed in 1985.

Elmer Bernstein provides the music score. I love Bernstein and the music score is very catchy, but it belongs in another movie. It’s not gritty, kitchen sink or ethnic enough. The intro sounds almost like the intro to a 70s police drama and the central motif is fully something from The Love Boat.

Audiences largely ignored the film, which was produced on an estimated budget of $4 million. In its domestic theatrical release, the film was a major box-office flop, grossing only about $1.4 million in the United States. It made less internationally where it received very limited release.

Both worth reading wand watching.

LINKS

MAINT TILE AND INTRO MUSIC