User Reviews

This made for TV film and the studio TV play that proceeded I assume, have gotten a certain cult status. This productions boasts some fine performances and if you are truly one of the paranoid at heart, The Brotherhood Of The Bell is your kind of movie.

Based on Yale's Skull and Bones society which isn't all that secret, The Brotherhood Of The Bell is a secret society founded by a couple of Massachusetts Bay Puritans. Professor Glenn Ford is a member in good standing of the Brotherhood and when we meet him he's initiating young Philip Pine into the Brotherhood along with Dean Jagger one of the higher ups that initiated Ford back in his salad days.

Like Don Corleone the Brotherhood once you're initiated they may call on you for a favor and Ford gets the call. He's to get his colleague Eduard Franz to decline an appointment offered at another school. And he's to use whatever means necessary and that includes a secret dossier. He uses it and Franz kills himself.

In his remorse Ford decides he'll expose the Brotherhood, but to say his efforts come to naught is an understatement. He's ridiculed for being a crackpot and loses all, wife Rosemary Forsyth, father Will Geer, and his position and home. What will he do?

The Brotherhood Of The Bell is a good made for TV movie with an impressive cast suited for their roles. I liked William Conrad as the Jerry Springer type talk show host and Virginia Gilmore as an anti-Semitic whacko from his audience. Ford's appearance on his show to plead his cause is the highlight of the film.

If you are conspiratorial by nature this film should be one you treasure.

An inexpensive story with stars that were finding it was difficult to get parts, but they do their job, and the story itself is gripping.

Glenn Ford is a highly respected professor at some institute in California and twenty-two years ago was initiated into a select secret society at elite St. George College. It was obviously shot in southern California rather than, say, New England, in order to save money, but it was a mistake to do so. The lunatic sects and fraternities of California are not secret. They're out in the open. They relish their exposure. And none of the colleges, real or fictional, are two hundred years old. Santa Clara University and the University of the Pacific, the two oldest, were both established in 1851.

Where was I? Yes, anyway, Glenn Ford joins these secret elite society, The Brotherhood of the Bell, which is rather like Skull and Bones at Yale. Nobody is supposed to talk about it. Members open doors for other members. In this instance, they order Ford to blackmail an academic friend into refusing a job so that another Brotherhood member will get the job. If Ford's friend, the intended victim, refuses, a list of his collaborators will be sent behind the Iron Curtain and more than forty innocent men, women, and will die.

The Brotherhood is cheerfully serious about the deal but Ford is more than edgy. And it gets worse when he presents his close friend with his demands. The friend commits suicide, and Glenn feels sufficiently distraught that he reveals the secrets of the Brotherhood. Only he finds out that the people to whom he appeals also belong to the Brotherhood, or else they don't really care or they think Ford is irretrievably mad. The Brotherhood puts pressure on Ford, gets him fired, causes his wife to leave him, is responsible for his father's death, and in other ways acts in a manner unbecoming a rich, powerful, elite organization.

Desperate for an audience, Ford agrees to go on a raucous TV talk show hosted by William Conrad, who is given some hard-hitting lines by the writers. But the show turns into a brawl. Conrad calls Ford an "idiot" and calls the entire audience "idiots." This is a variant of a familiar scene in which a man or woman, finally given a chance to tell an eager audience that something is terribly wrong, turns to jelly and becomes hysterical. (See Jack Lemon in "The China Syndrome" or any number of other conspiracy movies.)

At his wit's end, hysterical, Ford pleads with a very young freshman at St. George, newly inducted into the Brotherhood, to join him in his crusade. If the authorities won't believe one witness, they'll certainly believe two, who have nothing to gain by revealing what they know. (This doesn't apply to UFO sightings, where even presidents and secretaries of the Navy have been dismissed.) The recruit must realize that behind the ritual arrogance, both he and the Brotherhood have nothing -- and nothing will come of nothing, as a king once observed.

Ford gives a tense performance. Make up has applied some sort of concoction to his tanned face that makes him look always sweaty, but this is adventitious because in fact all the men's faces looks shiny, while the women look freshly powdered. It's a decent performance, though, and it carries some of the weight of Ford's obsession in "The Big Heat." As his increasingly doubtful wife, Rosemary Forsythe is tall and pretty. A fine performance by Will Geer as Ford's father. He was a splendid character actor and was able to pass as the most gentle, kindly, understanding mass murderer you could imagine in "Seconds." Paul Wendkos directed. There is a moment towards the beginning when Ford becomes aware of just how pernicious The Brotherhood is, and Wendkos tilts the camera delicately to reflect Ford's confusion, but then he goes and ruins it by tilting the camera over and over, sometimes on its side. No kidding. There are monumental close ups of Ford's eyeballs that are positively embarrassing, and Wendkos uses wide-angle lenses to turn some faces into those of cartoons or gargoyles or dolphins. He almost ruins the second half of the film.

Still, it's not a movie to be easily dismissed, particularly in this era of rampant paranoia when all of us are raving about being caught up in a conspiratorial web, some of which, for all we know, may be real.

"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.

Film veteran Glenn Ford made a rare television appearance as a college professor that runs afoul of a fraternal organization with dastardly intentions. Giving him "headaches" are brilliant character actors Will Geer and Dean Jagger. A pre-Walton Geer and veteran Jagger are appropriately "fatherly" as the story unfolds, revealing to college professor Ford that all is not as it appears in the "Ivy Halls" of academia. Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans, better known to American audiences as Samantha's father on "Bewitched," is also on hand as an associate of Ford's that also is not as he appears to be.

Rosemary Forsyth is good as Ford's supportive wife, while William Smithers and William Conrad are effective in their secondary roles.

When this film aired in '71, it was good to see Ford, an actor that had numerous movie successes in the 40's and 50's.

This movie was haunting and highly prophetic for its era: I disagree with (IMDb Geoff Hart) re - the conspiracy theories, however one does sympathise with these remarks: In agreement with (IMDb Joe Sheppard) This is Star Chamber of the 70s!..I was a spotty kid, when I saw this Glenn Ford TV epic, it frightened the crap out of me: I had the opportunity to see it again: It has now mysteriously disappeared from our screens: Some years ago I asked TV companies to re-screen it, I got a very peculiar "Reception".. No pun intended: In the height of Masonic publicity scandals of the 70s, some American, had the "Artistic Licenced" audacity to make this movie: Nevertheless, Brotherhood was a compelling tale of greed,opportunism,fate and conscience rolled into a neat package, giving it cult status amongst phase conspiracy theorists: There is nothing to be afraid of, its a good movie, which activates imaginations. Time for a 2013 remake I feel, with George Clooney as Professor Patterson:CatoTSR2