The Brothers Rico

I was looking through the offerings on TubiTV and noticed that one of the things that is leaving the platform at the end of October is The Brothers Rico. I had watched the movie not too far back and planned to do a post on it when I got through the rest of the backlog of stuff I've got, but seing that the movie is leaving TubiTV soon, I decided to move up the post so that the rest of you could have a chance to watch it too.

Richard Conte plays Eddie Rico, who at the start of the movie is the owner of an industrial service laundry living in Florida with his wife Alice (Dianne Foster). Eddie is doing well, well enough in fact that he's able to afford to go through all the paperwork necessary to adopt a child. But there's a catch, which is that he's got a past, and that past is about to catch up with him. Indeed, it happens right at the beginning of the movie when he gets a phone call in the middle of the night, from a guy named Phil. Phil works for one of the syndicate bosses, and Eddie did too in the past. Eddie thought that past was behind him, but they're pulling him back in. And Alice is none too pleased with it.

Eddie's got a mother who loves him, and two brothers, Gino (Paul Picerni) and Johnny (James Darren). Gino shows up unannounced one day at Eddie's laundry, in a state of panic. It seems that the three brothers were low-level operatives in the syndicate. Eddie wanted to get out, which is why he moved to Florida and opened up the laundry. Gino wanted to move up, which is why he got involved as the hired gun in a murder-for-hire as part of the gang wars. Worse, Gino had the bright idea to have Johnny be the driver of the getaway car. Even worse than that, Johnny has disappeared in the couple of weeks since the killing. Much as with Claude Rains at the end of Notorious, the gang seems to want information from Geno that he thinks will lead to him getting killed.

Eddie's getting pulled back in further. The phone call at the beginning of the movie was to get Eddie to give a job to a different hired killer. And then the head of the syndicate insists that Eddie fly down to Miami right now to meet with him. The syndicate is pissed that Johnny disappeared. Johnny had recently gotten married, and the wife has a brother who hates the syndicate, enough that he's willing to testify to whatever grand jury the prosecutors are willing to empanel. So the syndicate wants Eddie to find Johnny and "persaude" him to come back, before the brother-in-law can get Johnny to testify too.

Of course, "persuade" means "kill if necessary". Eddie's smart enough to realize that, and of course Johnny is eventually smart enough to figure that out too. And Johnny also understands that if Eddie shows up, other hired killers aren't going to be far behind, hoping to pull off the job in case Eddie can't. That's part of why Johnny has left New York City....

The Brothers Rico is another of those competently-made 1950s crime programmers that feel like they might have been influenced by the noir genre, but aren't really in the noir box. (Unless, of course, you're someone like Eddie Muller who would find a way to put Can't Stop the Music into the noir box.) It's not the sort of stuff that will ever make anybody's Top 10 list, but it's certainly successful in entertaining, and fills a niche. Nowadays, it's the sort of thing that would probably be made cheaply by Netflix or another of the similar content providers. It's definitely worth a watch before it disappears from the streaming services.

Ladies of the Chorus

Tonight's lineup on TCM includes a movie that only gets seen because of the presence of a very young Marilyn Monroe: Ladies of the Chorus, at 11:00 PM.

Monroe plays Peggy Martin, one of the chorus girls who is the daughter of Mae Martin (Adele Jergens, nominally the star here). Mae was at one point the star of the show, but she aged out of stardom and is back in the chorus, not having married well. An argument ensues that sees the star of the show leave in a huff, and Peggy getting named to be the new star.

Coming into the club one night is Randy Carroll (Rand Brooks), one of those playboys who dotted movies of the 1930s but seems like time has passed him by now that it's 1948 -- times were changing fast after World War II. But Randy sees Peggy in the show, and immediately falls in love. Of course, there's a problem in that Peggy is just a showgirl, and Mom tells her that the likelihood of it working out is low.

However, Randy still loves Peggy and plans to introduce her to his mother, oddly enough named Adele (Nana Bryant). Eventually the time comes for Peggy to be introduced to all of high society, and that's where you'd expect the problem once all the other "good" rich people find out Peggy was a show girl. But Mrs. Carroll has something to say about that.

There's not much in this 61-minute B movie from Columbia. In fact, as I watched it, I found myself thinking that this is the sort of movie that a decade earlier would have made a nice two-reeler for one of the studios. There's the bare bones of a story; Peggy can do one production number at the club; and then there would be the big production number wrapping things up as Peggy and Randy get to live happily ever after. But with shorts becoming less of a thing after World War II, Columbia stretched it out to that hour.

It's not exactly a bad movie; it's more that Ladies of the Chorus is a movie that came at the wrong time. And if Marilyn Monroe hadn't gone on to bigger things, nobody would remember this movie, much like all the other B movies that aren't part of the Turner library.