Les Frères Corses

Adapted from an obscure Dumas père novel,"I Fratelli Corsi" is a very good melodrama ,which encompasses everything storybook means :two twin boys estranged from each other from the cradle,blood and passion,duels,abductions,treasons,far-fetched but action-packed screenplay,lots of characters ,a classy villain (Gerard Barray ,later Duvernois/Senor TV in Amenabar's classic "abre los hoyos" remade as "Vanilla sky")..There are even bits of supernatural,which is rather unusual in swashbuckler melodrama :déjà vu feelings,telepathy show up now and then along the movie ,always with skill and taste.Filmed on location in Corse ,where this somber story of vendetta takes place,it's worth a watch,just because they do not do movies like this one today...and when they try,they fail.

In 1844, Alexandre DUMAS published an exciting story about two twin brothers from Corsica, which was made into a film by Anton Giulio MAJANO in 1961.

The brothers Paolo and Leone (later: Geoffrey HORNE) are separated from each other as infants because their father is murdered by the Sagona family because of blood revenge. Without knowing about each other, they meet years later in Corsica: both are in love with the same woman, one brother is now even unknowingly friends with the parricide's son (Gerard BARRAY)...

So there is enough potential for conflict! The special thing about this adventure film is that the twin brothers have a telepathic connection with each other that has something slightly mysterious about it. With Gerard BARRAY (*1931), who acts brilliantly as always, there is a first-class villain who causes a lot of problems for the twins. The female lead roles are played by Emma DANIELI and Valerie LAGRANGE, who was recently seen alongside muscle god Steve REEVES in Morgan il pirata / König der Seeräuber. Geoffrey HORNE, who turned 90 on August 22, 2023 and who is known from THE BRIDGE ON THE KWAI RIVER, does a really good job as the main actor.

The must-see cloak and dagger film sold 481,000 tickets in West German cinemas and even 1,464,409 in French cinemas!

If you saw other Italian "historical" movies from this period then you know what to expect:

-Terrible acting,

-Beautiful girls,

-Awful dialogue, and

-Brain-insulting twists in the story.

I guess all the positive things (apart from the ladies :)) about this movie are what is taken from the book, so I guess it would be better to look for another version.

Just to make one thing clear: I am a fan of classic movies, and this being old is by no means the reason for disliking it. It is simply bad.

The origin of this remarkable story is a novel by Alexander Dumas different from all his other novels, because it's not really a novel but something of a documentary and analysis of the phenomenon of telepathy. As he could not get all the facts of the story, his account is rather fragmentary and more like a sketch than a real novel, but the basics are there, and the main phenomenon is the red thread of the issue. Out of this fragment of a novel, the Italians have created a comprehensive operatic drama with many important characters, each playing some important role, and of course the story of Alexander Dumas fragment is completely replaced by a grand opera with an international cast - Geoffrey Horne, Valérie Lagrange, Gérard Barray, Jean Servais, and Valérie Lagrange is even singing - in English! The script made into a considerable harvest of intrigues out of a bean fragment is a masterpiece in itself, and in Italy this film is considered a classic, while few outside Italy have learned to appreciate its credits - almost like you have to love Italian opera in order to see its values. As always in Italian films, the acting is superb and convincing enough all the way, and to frame the dramatic story, they have found all the most romantic spots of Corsica and turned the film into a great romantic epic of love and death, blood and tears, false identities and established social positions based on lies, and so forth. The case of the twins standing in telepathic contact throughout their lives is the main theme and cannot be explained away, and that's what fascinated Alexander Dumas. He often engaged in occult subjects and tried to penetrate them thoroughly at length, and this was one of them, rather a natural phenomenon than anything occult or supernatural, but the more remarkable for being a fact.