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THE
BROTHERS RICO
4/10
USA 1957
: Phil KARLSON : 92 mins
According to
Dave Pirie of Time Out magazine, Karlson’s previous crime-problem
picture The Phenix City Story (1955) features a “militaristic ending
[which] may be the closest any American film ever got to advocating a
domestic coup.” The solution presented in The Brothers Rico may
not be anything like so drastic or violent, but it’s almost as reactionary
and just as unrealistic: the climax sees ‘The Organisation’ (i.e. local
Mafia) quickly destroyed thanks to the testimony of a mob-accountant-turned-informant,
Eddie Rico (Richard Conte).
According to
Karlson and his scriptwriters Lewis Meltzer and Ben Perry (working from
the novelette Les freres rico by Georges Simenon, no less), however,
Rico isn’t any kind of low-down stool-pigeon: his decision to turn against
his former employers is an admirable stance, and the result of extreme
circumstances of the most melodramatic kind.
The mob – represented
by the deceptively genial Kubik (Larry Gates) – takes fright when Eddie’s
youngest brother Johnny (James Darren) seems likely to spill the beans
on their whole operation, apparently spurred to decency by his marriage
to respectable Norah (Kathryn Grant). When Johnny goes into hiding, Eddie
is given the task of tracking him down – to the horror of his wife Alice
(Dianne Foster), who thought her husband had settled into the straight
life as a respectable businessman.
Eddie takes
deep offence when Kubik suggests Johnny may be turning ‘stoolie’ – but
when both Johnny and middle-brother Gino (a barely-seen Paul Picerni)
end up dead at the mob’s hands, it’s Eddie who ends up contacting the
District Attorney. His success in this manoeuvre is represented via the
classic ‘spinning newspaper’ image, which flashes up with absurd speed
following a clunky climactic shoot-out involving Eddie, Kubik and Eddie’s
aged mother (Mimi Aguglia) – the latter a walking caricature of the Italian
mamma, who, we’re repeatedly reminded, took a bullet for Kubik years before.
Blood is much,
much thicker than water in this world, where mob ties prove worthless
against the rock-solid bonds of proper family. And Eddie Rico is the quintessential
Eisenhower-era hero: the informant a hard-working businessman, a family-man.
Tracking down Johnny explicitly gets in the way of Eddie’s domestic life,
as he gets the job on the same day that he and Alice are supposed to visit
the local orphanage to arrange the adoption of a child. It’s all manipulative,
comic-book, goodies-vs-baddies stuff, offering an unfeasibly sunny depiction
of what happens when an ex-mobster switches sides.
The Brothers
Rico doesn’t even cut it as a crime drama – Eddie jets from Florida
to California and New York, but his continent-hopping seems designed to
persuade us that we’re watching a fast-paced, exciting thriller, rather
than the torpid, relatively uneventful affair which it really is. The
black-and-white film has a flat, TV-play type look, and the main interest
lies in pondering whether Simenon’s basic plot – gangster, offended by
death of brother(s), exacts revenge, brings down local mob – could possibly
have inspired Ted Lewis when he wrote Jack’s Return Home, later
filmed as Get Carter.
23rd
December, 2003
(seen 17th December : Cinemateket,
Danish Film Institutute, Copenhagen, Denmark)
by Neil
Young
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