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An allegory of the Depression, naturally, but also The Frog and the Ox cracked wide open as a vision of gangsterism and dandyism as opposite poles touching in the middle. "We don't want no softies spillin' things!" The structure "starts from the gutter and returns there," the first glimpse of Enrico "Little Caesar" Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) finds a scurrying figure shooting up a gas station in the dark (long shot, single take). Moving to the big city is a hoodlum's dream, he takes over the dirty business at the Club Palermo while his mate (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) takes to the ballrooms of the Bronze Peacock. Not the feathers and flair of the Twenties (Sternberg's Underworld) but the grime and abrasion of the new decade, the rise and fall sketched in arthritic setups broken up by the occasional visual coup: An overhead view of a spinning roulette, the camera's semi-circular turn around a poker table as each racketeer is introduced, the robbery of a New Year's Eve soiree as a flurry of rapid dissolves. (Mervyn Leroy's gagwriter touch has cigar ashes flicked on Mr. Big's marble floors and bullets sprayed out of the cow face on a milk truck.) Clocks, diamond stickpins, Robinson's swaggering whine, the implacable Law (Thomas E. Jackson's over-enunciated theatricality attains a hypnotic sardonicism), all the pieces of the gangster genre in nascent form, not the least of which is its homoeroticism. "This game ain't for sissies," snaps the Napoleonic capo when it's time to rub out his pal, he advances with erect pistol and retreats with watery eyes. Faded bronze to The Public Enemy's silver and Scarface's gold, but an enduring bedrock formation all the same. With Glenda Farrell, William Collier Jr., Ralph Ince, Stanley Fields, Sidney Blackmer, and George E. Stone. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |