Mervyn LeRoy (1931)

Edward G Robinson has phenomenal inner force as Caesar Enrico (‘Rico’) Bandello in this famous gangster picture.   With the look of a brutal, ugly baby, he’s mesmerising without being attractive:  the audience is spared the ambivalence which James Cagney’s delinquent charm generates in his portrait of Tom Powers in the nearly contemporary (and superior) The Public Enemy.   Robinson makes Rico, who is supposedly based on Al Capone, too extraordinary for him to function as any kind of representative figure.   He’s no stereotype but he is a Hollywood gangster prototype – although he’s distinctive (and sexually ambiguous) even in that sense.  The ‘swell-head’ Rico, who’s avid for the trappings of success in the form of sharp clothes and jewellery and a swanky home, doesn’t touch drink or girls.  At the point at which he could shoot and kill his former friend Joe Massara, he can’t go through with it and Robinson expresses emotions which suggest more than old acquaintance not being forgot.  (Joe worked with Rico as a small-time crook before they made their way to Chicago – Rico for the criminal big time, Joe for a career as a dancer – and he’s the one with the girl, his dancing partner Olga Stassoff.)  Many of the other characters, although certainly minor, do seem more typical – and they complement Rico’s individuality. Mervyn LeRoy’s direction is arrhythmical in the early stages but the charismatic personality at the film’s centre, the satellite mobsters and the description of social life and ritual (especially a dinner in Rico’s honour and the intersection of organised crime and the world of entertainment) combine to make Little Caesar powerful.

The moralistic structure of the screenplay (by Francis Edwards Faragoh, based on a novel by W R Burnett) is relatively very weak.  The opening titles end with Matthew chapter 26, verse 52 – ‘For all those who take the sword shall perish with the sword’ – but it seems rather to be Rico’s furious determination to be noticed at all costs which draws him into a final, fatal encounter with his nemesis, the Chicago policeman Flaherty.  (Robinson’s dying line, ‘Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?’, is now just about as well known as the verse from St Matthew.)  LeRoy uses legends as short cuts to summarise Rico’s ‘meteoric’ rise and vertiginous descent to the gutter.  When he’s fallen on hard times (and converted from temperance to what looks like alcoholism) and fetches up in a flophouse for the climax of the story, the demonstration that crime doesn’t pay seems utterly hollow – but Robinson’s acting isn’t.   This is a still early talking picture and Pauline Kael says ‘the actors seem to be transfixed by the microphone’.  I didn’t spot this and thought the playing was generally good.  As Joe, Douglas Fairbanks Jr is more believable as a dancer than a lawbreaker but he supplies a very effective contrast with Robinson.  Olga’s exoticism seemed pretty pointless but I liked Glenda Farrell’s performance – she’s physically expressive and natural.   Thomas Jackson is witty as Flaherty.  The collection of mobsters includes Maurice Black, Sidney Blackmer, William Collier Jr, Stanley Ince and George E Stone (who’s particularly good).  Lucille La Verne looks and sounds extraordinary as the haggish Ma Magdalena.

28 July 2009