Brothers Rico
Directed by Phil KarlsonEddie Rico has put the syndicate behind him – or so he believes. Settled in Florida with his wife Alice, running a prosperous laundry business built on money he prefers not to examine too closely, Eddie is the picture of legitimate success. When his younger brothers Johnny and Gino disappear, Eddie assumes the organization will protect them as it once protected him. He contacts Sid Kubik, the calm, courteous syndicate boss who set Eddie up in business years ago, and accepts Kubik's reassurances at face value because accepting them is easier than the alternative.
The search for his brothers pulls Eddie across the American South and West, through motel rooms and suburban living rooms that look ordinary and conceal nothing good. What he uncovers, slowly and then all at once, is that Kubik has already decided the brothers are liabilities. Johnny, who married outside the organization's approval, and Gino are marked men. Eddie's loyalty to the syndicate and his loyalty to his family cannot both survive, and the film watches him work through this arithmetic with a patience that borders on the methodical.
Brothers Rico belongs to the cycle of late-1950s noir that moved away from expressionist shadow-play toward a flat, sun-bleached dread – films preoccupied not with the criminal as romantic outlaw but with the criminal as organization man. Adapted from Georges Simenon's novel, it frames organized crime as a corporation indistinguishable in manner and structure from any other postwar American business, and asks what it costs a man to have ever believed otherwise.
