EDITOR’S NOTE: The Brotherhood of the Bell was on the CBS Late Movie on August 11 and December 5, 1972 and November 27, 1973.

Director Paul Wendkos (The Mephisto Waltz) was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for “outstanding directorial achievement in television” because of this film. It was written by David Karp, who also wrote the original novel. It had been made once before as an episode of Studio One in 1958.

A world premiere CBS Thursday Night Movie on September 17, 1970, this arrived just as the seventies began, a decade packed with conspiracy. Professor Andrew Patterson (Glenn Ford) is back at the College of St. George in San Francisco to watch a young man be initiated into the secret society that he joined there, the Brotherhood of the Bell.

After the ritual, one of the leaders — Chad Harmon (Dean Jagger) — gives Patterson an assignment. Stop Dr. Konstantin Horvathy (Eduard Franz) from accepting a deanship at a college of linguistics so that a brother can take that position. Harmon is to blackmail Horvathy with the names of the people who helped him defect. Patterson wonders if this is legal. He’s told that he should be happy this is all they’re asking of him.

The professor does what he is supposed to do and it causes Horvathy to kill himself. Patterson then does exactly what no brother should do and reveals the truth to his wife Vivian (Rosemary Forsyth) and his father-in-law Harry Masters (Maurice Evans). This causes the Federal Security Services (as conspiracy-filled as this movie is, it doesn’t name the FBI; the agent is played by Dabney Coleman) to get involved and his father-in-law to turn him into the Brotherhood and Patterson’s father Mike (Will Geer) gets ruined in the process, then has a stroke and dies. Patterson also loses his job, gets humiliated on a talk show by Bart Harris (William Conrad) and is at rock bottom when his former boss Dr. Jerry Fielder (William Smithers) and the man he saw initiated Philip Dunning (Robert Pine) both stand up for him.

Obviously, the makers of The Skulls watched this movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.