Recycling Job

By Christopher Porterfield

BROTHERS

Directed by ARTHUR BARRON

Screenplay by EDWARD and MILDRED LEWIS

Old newspapers are recycled by first being mashed into pulp. Brothers shows that old newspaper stories can be turned into pulp too. The movie takes one of the notorious headline dramas of the past decade -- the case of Angela Davis.

George Jackson and the Soledad Broth ers -- and recycles it into a racial morality play of staggering and offensive simplemindedness. The real George Jackson was gunned down in the yard of San Quentin Prison in 1971. Was he trying to escape, as prison officials had it, or was he set up?

When he died, Jackson was awaiting trial on a charge that he and two other black prisoners in California's Soledad Prison had killed a guard. Jack son had helped to make his case a rallying cry for the left by writing scores of lacerating, eloquent letters from prison (published in 1970 as Soledad Brother).

His closest ally on the outside was Black Activist Angela Davis, whom he loved.

His brother had died in a wild shootout while trying to kidnap hostages from the Marin County courthouse, presumably in order to bargain for Jackson's free dom. Davis had been circumstantially tied to the episode.

It was a complex, ambiguous situation -- but not to the makers of Brothers.

They offer it as a series of melodramatic cliches, seen strictly in terms of black (noble, long-suffering, righteous) and white (sadistic, loutish, bigoted). Any shred of evidence damaging to Jackson -- and there is a good deal -- is conveniently omitted.

Vivaldi Cycle. That George Jack son may well have been harassed, that ultimately none of the charges against Davis or Jackson's Soledad co-defendants could be made to stick -- these are valid points. Brothers renders them in valid only by exploiting their quasi-factual basis while changing all the names and parading the case as fiction.

As the Jackson figure, ex-Pro Foot baller Bernie Casey goes in for heavy brooding and glowering. Vonetta Mc-Gee drifts in and out with all the serenity of a model in a soap commercial and with none of the biting intellectuality of Angela Davis. (We know the lady is classy, however, because during a scene at her home Vivaldi is ostentatiously being played on the phonograph.) Whether the performers could have done more is hard to tell with a script as one-dimensional as this. Like so many other recycling jobs. Brothers ends up as cardboard.

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