Brothers Rico (1957)

Posted on November 12, 2022 by 4 Star Films

I’ll say it again, but Richard Conte is one of the unsung heroes of film noir. He could play ominous villains (Big Combo) or charismatic everymen caught in the pincers of fate (Call Northside 777). But the most important piece is that we buy him in either, whether he’s earnest or simply hard to take our eyes off of.

Digging around in his backstory, it’s telling that he was actually discovered by two fairly auspicious figures in the film and stage community: Elia Kazan and John Garfield. I wouldn’t have immediately drawn the line between them. To my knowledge, they rarely collaborated, and yet Conte does offer something robust and genuine in the majority of his roles. Like a Richard Widmark or a Robert Ryan, he doesn’t get enough acknowledgment, and the dark genre would feel slighter without him.

In The Brothers Rico, he and Dianne Foster are surprisingly frank, and they have a playful rapport between kisses, shaving kits, and showers. It’s all telling character work to set up a more rudimentary story.

It’s difficult to imagine any business more innocuous than running a laundry, but then again, that’s the point because Rico’s somehow connected with a different kind of business: something hot. Although he gave it up long ago with a past that is never fully disclosed, his two brothers are still knee-deep in it.

The film conjures up what can best be described as the fatalistic throes of doom coming back into his life. This growing pull somehow signals the undeniable undercurrents of noir. He gets a clandestine visit from a frightened Gino and learns his other brother Johnny is wanted in the underworld. He’s married a principled woman, and the mobsters are afraid she’ll make him talk. We see the worlds colliding, one engulfing the other, and eating it up.

Eddie’s own marriage is strained as is their dream of adopting a child. Because an old family friend, the kingpin Kublik (Larry Gates), calls on Eddie to search for his missing brother. He needs to straighten the boy out for his own protection. He’s sincere and they have a history. They’re like family. Thusly, Eddie is pulled back into the world.

It deals in terms of family, business, rivals, and all the codes we’ve become familiar with in movies forming the traditions of The Godfather and even an earlier Conte picture like House of Strangers. The family comes first and religion maintains such a crucial moral grip on people and how they make sense of guilt and retribution.

Eddie quickly becomes the seeker hero questioning folks, looking for leads, and going across country to track down Johnny. It’s a bit too convenient how the old world comes out of the woodwork to meet him bearing pretty girls in New York or boasting about gambling in Phoenix, but the point is made.

Finally, he finds his brother (James Daren) in an isolated town, far away from the prying eyes of the urban jungle and salacious gambling parlors. He’s contented himself with a simpler, purer life. Their meeting is inevitable, but it also comes to represent the divergent paths young Johnny wants to take.

It’s curious how Conte who is forever cast as the hero in another’s eyes becomes almost like a specter and executioner himself, representing everything he’s trying to negate. Kathryn Grant has even less to do than in Phenix City Story, but the way she tears across the set beside herself with anguish serves a tangible purpose.

In all his good faith, Eddie has signaled the end for his brother. And even as he finally shows up at his destination, things suddenly seem more tenuous. Although we know what Kubik is capable of, Conte almost makes us believe that some semblance of honor and integrity still exists in the world. And yet it grows more and more suspect.

When he finally reaches Johnny, it’s like the motor of the movie is gone. The story drags until it finds a new focal point. It recognizes the renewed tension in the moment: Eddie is made to talk with Johnny over the phone knowing full well what is going to happen. His little brother is forced to reckon with the welcoming committee that’s waiting for him. And then the picture can only go one place, with Conte on the run like his brothers before him.

The climax is the film at its most mediocre, overblown, and disposable. In a matter of seconds, it brushes off all of the strenuous work of the picture, settling on histrionics over a clearcut actionable ending. It doesn’t even give us the pleasure of one of Phil Karlson’s patented fistfights.

The resulting denouement is one of those overly twee numbers no doubt forced upon the production by the censors. Because as Mr. and Mrs. Rico, that couple we came to appreciate in the opening moments, finally show up at the orphanage to claim their child, there’s something uneasy about the whole scenario. It feels false and disingenuous given what we have experienced already.

Noir sentiments like these can never be so easily smoothed over. It’s almost sickening to think something so saccharine even deserves to be in the same picture. Particularly because it doesn’t seem to be earned. In the end, there are so many shortcuts and liberties taken and while the groundwork is in place, including character dynamics, and the like, Brothers Rico fails to have a viable payoff.

Regardless, there is much to recommend. I’m fond of both Richard Conte and Dianne Baker. They had varying degrees of career success, but have much to offer the movie. For Phil Karlson aficionados, it’s worth consideration.

3.5/5 Stars.

Gunman’s Walk (1958): A Cain & Able Western

Posted on August 25, 2020 by 4 Star Films

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“I think it’s high time for this state to remember its history!” – Van Heflin

The whistling intro to Gunman’s Walk is one of the most insouciant beginnings to a western you might ever see. Regrettably, the opening lines of dialogue, penned by Frank S. Nugent, don’t stand up on their feet. It’s easy enough to understand Tab Hunter is a sharp-tongued pretty boy with a big chip on his shoulder. His reticent more unassuming brother Davy acts as his complete antithesis. This is the source of immediate tension, even visually, with the casting of such disparate actors as Hunter and James Darren.

Given these elements, the words coming out of their mouths aren’t of much use. It’s not simply in the opening arguments either but in their later verbal skirmishes. Even the brief interludes of candor, they are not always capable of holding a scene. They need a Van Heflin to work with, and he certainly makes them both better and more compelling. Because it is their conflict and confused relationship with him speaking to all other facets of the movie.

Gunman’s Walk finds its footing not only with the introduction of Heflin, but also when it settles into a story with ideas fueling relationships. We come to understand it to be more nuanced than mere bickering. Because with every fight there is an underlying trauma of some form. In the nucleus, you have the archetypal dichotomy between the two male progeny with divergent paths ahead of them. They are like Cain and Abel.

It’s their father who looks to guide them toward the straight-and-narrow or at least the western equivalent, which means molding them to be like he was when he was a boy. In fact, it goes further still. He wants to be one of the lads, even chiding them to call him by his first name.

Quick drawing, carousing, having a good time, and generally cultivating a “boys will be boys” mentality are all part of his regimen as their sole guardian. One boy shies away from this based on his natural tendencies and the other rebels more blatantly still, determined to be his own man, greater than his dad ever was.

Beyond their initial quarreling, we begin to comprehend the spirit of the brothers when they wander into the local mercantile. Tab Hunter notes the pretty “half-breed” working inside, and it’s the immediate barb to suggest this is also a drama about racism.

It cannot help but come front and center when Ed pushes a half-Sioux off the cliffside as he selfishly sprints after a prized white stallion, with no consideration of human life. The man killed, named Paul, happens to be the older brother of Clee (Kathryn Grant). She works in the mercantile and faces the debilitating, inbred bigotry of the town day in and day out.

What must come out of this is a trial. Because two bystanders speak up on behalf of their friend. They think it was murder, and it might as well be. But Lee will have none of it. He’s not about to let his son get railroaded by two natives.

It goes far to suggest a type of privilege not only earned arbitrarily through skin color but also in attributing who is memorialized in the history books and how they get remembered. Lee’s demonstrative cry to remember history is itself a highly ironic evocation, given the circumstances. Just what version of history is he talking about? Undoubtedly his version.

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There’s a trial to follow and of course, Ed gets off. A crooked witness comes to his defense — upon hearing what a generous soul Hackett is — though the conniving passerby is no better than a horse thief. Meanwhile, Davy finds himself in a Romeo and Julietesque romance, at least in considering his father would never agree to a union with a Sioux.

Ever disconsolate, Ed dodges jail once only to end up there again, this time for gunning down his father’s blackmailer. His attempts to frame it as self-defense fool no one in town and Lee is flabbergasted. Why would he do such a thing? Ed feels like his father has gone against his own principles. They’re further apart than they have ever been.

There is no turning back when Ed blasts himself out of jail, murdering another man, with a posse now out to get him. Lee has no choice but try and beat them to his boy — to try and do anything he can to shield him. One wonders if it’s already too late.

The final showdown feels like a foreign dynamic — father pitted versus son — there is no other way to go about it with the law bearing down on them. It ends unceremoniously, though the emotional toil remains heady.

Tab Hunter absolutely blows through his clean-cut, boy-next-door image and tramples on it with the hooves of his horse for good measure. As a result of constantly fighting the demons of his own malice and being cast in his father’s shadow, he remains all but unrepentant to the last frame.

Each subsequent film I see featuring Van Heflin cements my estimation of him as a giant among the unsung heroes of Hollywood’s elite. This is by no means a great western, but in the moments unearthing some semblance of deep emotional truth, it is Heflin who guides them with a craggy vulnerability. The final two scenes are pure class. They tear your heart apart.

It’s quite the statement given that during much of the film we wouldn’t mind tearing him limb from limb. He hobbles off with his boy and the boy’s wife, and we actually have sympathy stored up for him. It’s an extraordinary achievement in a relatively minor western.

3.5/5 Stars