As a fan, I'm more or less willing to sit through anything starring Richard Conte. You can count me among those who don't think it would have been a tragedy if Francis Ford Coppola had given Conte the title role in The Godfather, as he supposedly considered doing before relegating him to the role of Barzini. Conte still came away with one of the film's best lines: "After all....we are not communists!" That said, he made a lot of forgettable films during his long career, film noir and otherwise. The Brothers Rico, screened at the recently concluded Film Forum B-noir festival, is unfortunately one of those films. It clocks in at around 90 minutes but feels twice as long, thanks to unfocused direction, lazy editing and a strange aversion to action. Whenever the story builds up to a moment where blood is about to be spilled, director Phil Karlson (Scandal Sheet, Kansas City Confidential) curiously leapfrogs over that moment and lands us in another long scene of tedious conversation. The movie leaves almost everything to the imagination, which movies should never do unless they're on very firm ground. I guess we should just assume there's a director's cut out there somewhere that contains all the movie's most promising scenes, such as the hotel room torture session, the driveway execution, and the presumed murder of a mobster's wife and child.

The film begins by introducing us to Eddie Rico (Richard Conte), a mob functionary who has been (improbably) allowed to retire from the business all-together, and now lives the quiet life in Miami, running a legit laundry service. One morning before breakfast he is confronted with a problem: his brothers Johnny (James Darren) and Gino (Paul Picerni) have botched a stick-up job. They want Eddie to call in some favors with his old bosses before they are chopped into fish bait and thrown into the harbor. Eddie pays a call to "Uncle Sid" Kubik (Larry Gates) a high-ranking capo who agrees to protect Johnny and Gino if they lam it to South America until the heat is off. Uncle Sid doesn't exactly have a face you can trust, but Eddie has to trust him for the plot to work, so he does. Eddie immediately hops a plane to California, with only a vague idea of where to find his youngest brother. Even in these early scenes, there's a sense that  director Karlson is marking time. I understand the "semi-documentary" style is a legitimate one, and was used successfully in other film noir movies, but did they really need to include Eddie's entire phone call to the airline to book his flight, or scenes of him killing time in airport lounges? By the time Eddie arrives in California to find his brother, it's the audience that feels the jetlag.

Eddie's primary character arc -- that he's gone straight and is on the road to good citizenship -- is embodied in a bizarre subplot involving his plan to adopt a child from the local orphanage. Even though he seems to know from the start of the film that he and his family are still in danger from the mob, he doesn't seem concerned about bringing some poor kid into the line of fire. Nice. Also, unless I missed it the film never reveals why adoption is a necessity for Eddie and his wife in the first place; the fact that we see them sleeping in separate beds may be a clue. Throughout the course of the film they go through great travails to make meet-and-greet appointments with the adoption agent. One scene of Eddie being interrogated by his mob handlers is interrupted so that he can take a call from his wife, reminding him to be at the orphanage for a meeting. Since this is supposed to be film noir, I half-expected the orphanage angle to be weaved into the meat of the story in an unexpected way. Maybe there would be a final shootout with the gangsters on one side and some Dead End Kids on the other. Or maybe we'd find out the orphanage is really a racket, and they are selling the kids into indentured servitude or something. But sadly, none of this happens.

Another problem that afflicts The Brothers Rico -- and I'll stop the punishment after this point -- is that it's terribly aged. Aside from the subplot about an orphanage (do they even have orphanages anymore? I guess they must) the film routinely clues us in on the fact that Eddie Rico is an Italian-American by having him say things like "Arrivederci, baby!" There's also a big deal made out of a new-fangled "refrigerator" machine that Eddie buys for his mother. I think it's supposed to keep food cold or something. We also see someone conspicuously zombied out in front of a television, rotting their brain. Since this film was made in the mid-50s, I can't help but think that some studio suit thought they were being clever by inserting that in as a jab to the new mode of competition. Director Karlson must have felt from the beginning that he had a turkey on his hands with this film, and so he never bothered to put any real heavy lifting into its making. If you're a Conte fan like me, you can sit through it once, but once will be plenty.


Footnote: Argentina Brunetti, who plays Richard Conte's mother in this 1957 film, lived to be around 100 years old and, in her final years, hosted her own Internet movie blog.