House of Strangers (1949), Joseph L Mankiewicz.

Joe Monetti (R, Luther Adler) asks Max Monetti (Richard Conte) if he can remind their father to follow through on that raise he promised.

House of Strangers is an ambitious and mostly successful family saga of  four first-generation Italian-American brothers and the expectations of their domineering Old World father.  Edward G Robinson plays the patriarch Gino Moretti, a banker who has grown rich providing loans to Mulberry Street immigrants.  Three of the four brothers migrate into the family business but Max Monetti (Richard Conte) has struck out on his own and practices law.  Luther Adler is a very natural performer as Joe Monetti, the eldest brother.  Although Joe is cowed by his father, he follows closely in his footsteps.  His self-perception as a dutiful, pious son leads him to resent his father's preference for Max who stays aloof and remains free from family obligations.  When Gino Moretti finds his business endangered by a legal scandal, the family begins to fracture, the underlying bitterness between the brothers threatening to destroy all relationships.  Another somewhat disconnected subplot involves the romance between Max Monetti and Irene Bennett, played by Susan Hayward.  The two are well-paired: both are sophisticated and charismatic and their brittle dialogue is very noir.  However, Hayward remains irrelevant to the Shakespearean plot.

Unfortunately, Robinson just about torpedoes the whole movie with his cringeworthy "Chef Boyardee" accent.  His performance is believable and even sympathetic in spots (I would argue Luther Adler is the film's true antagonist, not Robinson).  I was surprised that by 1949, it was still fine to play the ethnic role so broadly in a serious drama (Robinson was doing much the same thing as Portuguese fisherman Mike Mascarenhas way back in 1932, almost twenty years earlier).  But the cruder aspects of the characterization of both the mother and father in this Italian family didn't strike contemporary viewers as offbeat.  A New York Times review from 1949 describes the household as "a sizzling and picturesque exposure of a segment of nouveau-riche life within the Italian-American population" (Bosley Crowthers, July 2, 1949).  The vulgarity on display was to Crowthers apt and appropriate to the story - maybe comparable to a Paulie Walnuts type caricature pulled just little more out of shape?  I particularly enjoyed it when Joe Monetti's wife complains she doesn't like spaghetti, and Robinson mocks her. "Oh, it makes-a your stomach seeeeck, does it?" he says disgustedly.  

Now that's a plate of spaghetti!  Joe Monetti (Luther Adler) and his mangia-cake wife Elaine (Diana Douglas) look on.