House of Strangers

Excellent film. Edward G. Robinson plays the patriarch of an Italian family (his accent is a little too obvious, but in 1948 that was okay) who has built a bank by sheer determination and hard work. He runs the bank as his fiefdom, doling out cash to neighborhood people according to his own calculations and whims. His interest rates are usurious (a man who wants to borrow $150 to buy a new horse gets $120 in cash, the other $30 kept as "interest"), his kindness equally large, in some cases. He runs his family with equal ruthlessness. Dinner waits for his favorite son, Max, to arrive. Opera plays loud. Spaghetti is served for dinner. He pays his oldest son $65 a week and treats him brashly. He calls his youngest son dumb and denigrates him, employing him as a gaurd at the bank.

A day arrives when he is audited by the government, and his bank shut for irregularities, including loans being made without collateral. The government then puts him on trial. Max is his lawyer. As the trial nears its end Max is sure the old man will be convicted. The only way to avoid that, Max tells his brother Joe, is to bribe the woman he considers a sympathetic witness. Joe refuses to do it, so Max undertakes the mission. The woman, a widow with young children, refuses the money. As he leaves the building, Max is arrested; he is sentenceds to seven years in prison.

Upon getting out, Max is bent on revenge. He visits his brothers at the bank, and none-too-subtly warns them he wants the seven wasted years back. He leaves. and goes to see his old flame, Irene Bennett. Glad to see him back, she implores him to go to San Francisco with her, and start all over. Max plots revenge, but before he can execute his plan his brothers ambush him. Pietro, the youngest, ana amateur boxer, beats him up. In the film's denouement, as Pietro hesitates in throwing Max over the balcony, Joe calls him dumb. They then realize they are playing out the familial drama.

Richard Conte plays Max; he'd play Barzini in The Godfather. He was also in Ocean's Eleven.
Susan Hayward played Irene Bennett. She did a good job.
Luther Adler played Joe. I do not know him; his biography states that he was the brother of Stella Adler, founded the Stella Adler Conservatory. (She wrote The technique of acting in 1988.)
Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. played Tony.
Edward G. Robinson played Gino Monetti.