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A Tommy-gun for Napoleon, a joke shaved to the nub and played furioso. The little man "wound up like a watch," fresh out of prison and tearing through the Thirties, Mickey Rooney in a bravura display of aging-juvenile wrath. He refuses a job from the capo (Ted de Corsia) and is promptly framed, his revenge comes in the sharp image of the dark at the top of stairs suddenly illuminated by gunblasts. ("It'll take a month to scrape 'em off the cement," a gleeful grin in the getaway car.) In a deserted playground at night he meets Dillinger (Leo Gordon), who gives him his nickname while sitting on a child's swing. Robberies, executions, frenzies over the faithful moll (Carolyn Jones), "a re-creation of an era." Don Siegel on a shoestring, the tight schedule and set-ups just add to the clenched abstraction. Hideout in the country, a thieves' den surrounded by G-Men for the benefit of Bonnie and Clyde. End of Prohibition ("That takes all the fun out of drinking!"), a gas bomb in the bank. Rooney's Cagney spirit, the eye twitch upon discovering a traitor and the smile of recognition for a fellow shrimp. Siegel's jazzy sardonicism puts tough-guy actors through their paces, and allows Cedric Hardwicke to find new juice as a seedy doctor with horny hands. The race into the barricade is a barreling POV with the added screen-within-a-screen of a rear-view mirror, at the end of the line is the cemetery (cf. Corman's Machine-Gun Kelly). "You're getting to be an awfully big man." A masterly sketch recognized by Rivette in the pages of Cahiers: "An utter harmony of subject, material, writing and acting, all sufficient and necessary, from which arises an austerity which is pure poetry." With Jack Elam, Anthony Caruso, John Hoyt, Elisha Cook Jr., George E. Stone, Dabbs Greer, and Emile Meyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |