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.