Mr. Ricco

I recorded a couple of movies from when Dean Martin was Star of the Month on TCM, and I finally got around to watching the last of the movies that I recorded, Mr. Ricco.

Martin plays Joe Ricco, a defense attorney who at the start of the movie is getting his client, Frankie Steele (Thalmus Rasulala) off a murder rap. It seems as though the police tampered with the evidence, and although Ricco can't prove Steele's innocence, he doesn't have to: he just has to show that the prosecution hasn't proved its case, and evidence tampering will do that in spades. Ricco goes back to his San Francisco apartment, as well as playing poker with his friends at an Italian restaurant owned by his aunt and uncle.

And then somebody lures two cops into an ambush-style murder. The murderer is running down a fire escape, and a young boy sees the murderer, who is pretty clearly Frankie. The poor boy. If he's got one thing going for him, it's that the boy's mother knows Joe Ricco, so she's able to go to him for advice. The kid goes to the police, at which point there's going to be problems for everybody. First is that two cops are dead, and the cops care about murdered cops more than they care about murdered non-cops. Second is that people are going to make the obvious assumption that Ricco got a cop-killer off on a technicality. And then there are the racial issues of a black guy having been framed by the cops only to turn around and kill them.

Further mucking things up is that Frankie was a self-styled community activist, who blew through the grant money he got from Washington with nothing to show for it. He's still got some sort of organizational headquarters and when the cops find it, Frankie is able to make a quick escape, while the racist cop Tanner (Michael Gregory), who tampered with the evidence that put Steele in the first place, happily shoots an unarmed man. A third man there is arrested to try to divulge Steele's new hiding place. So that man's sister Irene (Denise Nicholas), approaches Rico for help. Ricco takes the defense of Irene's brother Purvis (Philip Michael Thomas).

And then things get even more complicated when somebody tries to bump off Rico on multiple occasions, and once again all the evidence leads to Frankie. But why on earth would Frankie be trying to kill the lawyer who got him off a murder rap? It would make sense that Frankie would want to kill those cops, not only for racial reasons, but even if they had been black for trying to frame him. Trying to kill Rico, however, defies logic. Ricco also begins to change his attitude toward Frankie when he meets Frankie in his new hiding place of a condemned church and Frankie admits that he killed the woman in the case where Ricco got him off, although Frankie claims it was an accident. So maybe Frankie has some weird reason for wanting to kill Ricco after all.

Is this the end of Ricco? Well, not quite. There's a climax at an art exhibit in one of those awful brutalist 1970s buildings where Ricco becomes a hero by killing the murderer, whose identity you should be able to figure out if you watch the movie a good ways before the movie ends.

Mr. Ricco isn't a great movie by any means, but it's reasonably good entertainment, and the 1970s location shooting in San Francisco is more than worth a watch. Martin was playing straight drama, which is something he didn't do all that often in his career, and does reasonably well. Rasulala is probably the brightest spot as a character who's screwed up badly in his life, but since this is Dean Martin's movie, Rasulala doesn't get enough scenes. The big problem is with the story, which in some ways is unfair to the viewer because the ending is one you can't guess until a specific piece of evidence is introduced, way late into the proceedings.

Mr. Ricco is availalbe on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, and is as I write this available via Amazon's streaming service for people who can do that.