LITTLE CAESAR (1931)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Crime

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Edward G. Robinson / Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. / Stanley Fields

Plot

Charismatic tough guy Rico Bandello rises from stickup gunman to crime lord of Chicago’s North Side on ambition and intimidation, as the police and his rivals work to bring him down.

What I Liked

Perfect casting doesn’t get any more perfect than Edward G. Robinson’s getting picked from near obscurity to play the quintessential gangster movie anti-hero, Rico “Little Caesar” Bandello.  From his facial resemblance to the reigning Chicago crime kingpin Al Capone, to his trademark sneer, to the machine-gun-fire pace of his streetwise banter and gestures, Robinson created the blueprint for virtually every gangster lead to appear in American films for multiple generations to come.  Sure, eventually the persona became an oft-parodied cliché, but that was years down the road and had less to do with Robinson’s performance than it did with later actors imitating it and failing.  In 1931, Robinson’s Bandello was regarded as fresh, captivating, and frighteningly authentic.  Even all these years later, the ferocity he gives Rico lends the movie a dazzling excitement that is lacking in even the best films of the same period.  Robinson is one of my favorite actors of the 1930s to the 1950s and this is his most iconic performance.

The character of Little Caesar wasn’t the only element of the movie that was so definitive.  “Little Caesar” is far from the first gangster picture to be made, but it was the first to put all of the elements we now recognize as defining the genre into a single package.  Aside from the charismatic-if-demented anti-hero lead, “Little Caesar” explores the hierarchical nature of organized crime, it’s perversion of liassez-faire capitalism, and also presents the police (typically hero figures in other films) as being almost as unscrupulous as the so-called bad guys.  Perhaps more important than all of that, it marked the debut of the Thompson Sub-Machine gun in motion pictures.  Not really used as often in urban gangsterism as Hollywood would have us believe (they were too damned expensive), the gun was nonetheless a wonderfully loud and destructive weapon that electrified audiences at the dawn of the sound era.  Kicking off a spate of gangster pictures that would thrill Depression-era moviegoers (“Public Enemy,” “Scarface,” “Angels with Dirty Faces,” “The Roaring Twenties”), “Little Caesar” remained the undisputed benchmark against all gangster films would be measured until the release of “The Godfather” more than forty years later, and for good reason.

What I Didn’t Like

As compelling as Robinson’s performance was, he was bogged down by some less than dynamic co-stars.  Particularly hard to endure is Thomas Jackson as police Sgt. Flaherty, Rico’s ultimate nemesis.  The character of Flaherty is clearly designed to be a foil for Rico, as obsessive and maniacal as the crime boss, but without his charisma.  Apparently Jackson took this to mean he should play the role as the cop were a robot.  His lifeless performance and his awkwardly phrased dialogue might have been intended to give Flaherty some kind of Depression-era grittiness, but just falls horribly flat.  Several other characters are dismally cliché (handsome and dashing Joe Massera and Igor-like Otero, for example) but one gets the sense this had less to do with the performances of the actors, who do the best they can with the material, than it does with the lack of imagination in scriptwriters.  Not so with Thomas Jackson.

Most Memorable Scene

*spoiler alert!*

“Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?!?”  It’s a bullet-riddled and somewhat puzzling final scene that remains the most quoted and referenced moment of the movie.  But I think there’s another that probably has more to do with the film’s impact and continued resonance.  As the film reaches its climax, a now wealthy and successful Rico confronts his old friend Joe, who rebuffs his offer to join his gang and flees the scene.  The camera then zooms in from a low vantage point on sneering gangster chewing his cigar and standing resplendent in a dapper suit at the top of the steps in his extravagant penthouse, alone but clearly wrapped in the trappings of power.  He is silent but murderous thoughts are aflame in his eyes.  It’s the perfect image of the Hollywood gangster, the image to which every filmmaker and actor who has ever made a gangster movie since has aspired.  One can’t help but think that even a few real life gangsters have used that very image as a blueprint, or at least, a goal.

My Rating: 5 out of 5