"MR. RICCO"......MR. DINO LEAVES THE LEADING MAN BIZ.....

Mr. Ricco (1975)   To understand the existence of such a worthless, inert, tired movie, you'd have to know the history of MGM during the early to mid 70's.......

                    As audience demographics skewed younger and younger, big studios fell upon hard times......watching their old school elephantine movies crash and burn at the box office......

                    MGM fell into the hands of corporate reptiles and the slimiest of them all, James T.Aubrey Jr., ended up as the studio's production head.

                     A bottom line shark to his very empty core, Aubrey did save millions by cancelling high profile projects with ballooning budgets.......

                     The remaining filmmakers who were unlucky enough to toil at MGM found their movies sliced,diced and demolished by Aubrey......(including Blake Edwards' "Wild Rovers" and Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid")

                     Aubrey's own slate of films followed his dictates......make 'em fast and cheap.

                     Which brings us to the woeful, insignificant "Mr. Ricco", a static, stillborn mystery drama that served as the last leading role for the aging, exhausted, uninterested Dean Martin.

                     Martin enjoyed a casual good time strolling through his Matt Helm secret agent spoofs, tossing off lame quips and hoary song parodies.........but the mechanical "Mr.Ricco", scripted and directed like a rejected TV pilot, offers no such fun.....for either us or Martin.

                   Infinitely bored out of his mind, Martin barely inhabits this slackly put together mess, playing a slick lawyer in the midst of the still raging war between police and African Americans.

                   For all its exploitation of racial hatred at every opportunity, the movie's such a listless dud, none its supposedly incendiary plots points have the slightest impact.  (And these include......a black activist who's not only a murderer, but an embezzler of his organization's funding.......a white cop who covers up his cold-blooded execution of a black suspect............and the film's most ludicrous, last minute twist character,    (SPOILER - SKIP THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE)  an embittered white guy who masquerades in blackface to frame the activist for more killings)

                   A few minor pleasures pop up in the appearances of future TV stars Philip Thomas ("Miami Vice" and Cindy Williams ("Laverne and Shirley"), but that's not enough to make this movie bearable......

                   Overall, a sad film on multiple fronts......a trivial farewell to major movie stardom for Dean Martin......and just another less-than-mediocre sausage ground out by the diminished MGM.....1/4 of a star (1/4).....they might as well have called it "a film by James T.Aubrey"......