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dweemeister · 5 years

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Little Caesar (1931)

For a brief window in the early 1930s, Hollywood studios churned out a small flurry of gangster films that would define the genre into the present day. Among those influential progenitors was Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, released by Warner Bros. With Little Caesar, Warner Bros. was about to assume an identity of being the “dark” studio – greenlighting socially conscious films replete with human depravity and cynicism towards authority figures or, you know, gangster films where the police are given no nobility. Little Caesar, based on W.R. Burnett’s novel of the same name and adapted by Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert Lord, and future 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, is best remembered today as the film that made Edward G. Robinson a Hollywood superstar. Robinson and Little Caesar, as a film, resembled nothing moviegoers had seen before and demand for these movies – to the horror of state and local censors and special-interest morality groups – skyrocketed.

Audiences, in the opening throes of the Depression, admired these gangsters for their craftiness in assuaging their living conditions in dire economic times while hoping for their demise. Gangster films were an expression of wrath – bottled up within Western audiences due to the obvious costs of such behavior, but fully unleashed within the confines of fiction. That wrath could be consuming for characters in these films, and was often directed at the police, politicians (at any level of government), and other crime bosses with the gall to impose their own rules on a main character. By the end of the decade, this appealing aura would be reversed by the Hays Code – a set of guidelines by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) created in 1930, not fully enforced until 1934, and replaced with the MPAA ratings system in the United States in 1968 – by turning gangsters into unflattering personalities or shifting the narrative to the police attempting to capture the criminals.

Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello (Robinson) starts out as a minor criminal in the lower Midwest, along with friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). Discontent with their fortunes, they travel to Chicago – Rico joins Sam Vettori’s (Stanley Fields) gang while Joe pursues a long-held dream of being a dancer. Rico wants to help Joe rise through the gang’s hierarchy, but Joe declines when he learns the next heist is at the Bronze Peacock – the dinner-and-a-show establishment where he works. The friends go their separate ways, with Joe heeding his dance partner Olga’s (Glenda Farrell) words to leave the gangster lifestyle. At the Bronze Peacock, Rico – against the orders of “Big Boy” (Sidney Blackmer) – hails the Chicago police commissioner with a fatal gunshot. Open gang war has broken out in Chicago’s Northside, Rico believes Joe knows too much about what he has done, and friendships and fates will be determined in the film’s closing acts.

In supporting roles are William Collier, Jr.; Ralph Ince; Thomas E. Jackson as a police sergeant; Maurice Black as a rival boss; and George E. Stone as one of Rico’s henchpersons.

For modern audiences, one of the most glaring impediments to investing oneself into Little Caesar is the clunky acting from everyone who is not Edward G. Robinson (Fairbanks, Jr. feels like he is simply reading lines too often; Farrell is in her first credited feature film and will grow into her reputation as the wisecracking blonde in later comedies and musicals). The dialogue is delivered in stilted fashion, with theatrical voices being used in every scene (this is a legacy of the silent era, as actors and filmmakers were still trying to adapt themselves to synchronized sound – if Little Caesar was a silent film, I would be calling the acting anything but “clunky”). Despite this, the friendship between Rico and Joe feels like it existed even before the first minute of the film begins.

As a pre-Code film, Rico and Joe’s friendship also contains potential homoerotic subtext – Rico is completely dismissive of women as objects of sexual attraction (opens the possibility of other subtexts), he criticizes Joe’s attraction to Olga, almost always keeps his hands on his gun (concealed or otherwise) when rival men are around, the two are complete opposites but want the other to reform their ways, and Joe is the only person in the film that Rico can share his private ideas and life with. This subtext was overwhelming to ‘30s audiences, forcing W.R. Burnett (the author of the novel) to write a lambasting letter to the producers about the “conversion” of his originally and explicitly heterosexual title character. No matter Burnett’s complaints, the fact that the screenwriting team of Faragoh, Lord, and Zanuck packages this convincing friendship (or whatever it is) within a seventy-nine-minute runtime is an impressive achievement. It is also impossible without the performances of Robinson and, to a lesser extent, the junior Douglas Fairbanks.

Robinson, along with James Cagney, defined gangster films of the 1930s. Their relatively short stature – Robinson was 5′7″, Cagney 5′5″ – does not suggest a domineering physical presence on paper. But as Rico, Robinson is a fearsome menace constantly compensating for something. Rico cares little – but understands completely – about the ramifications of violence on society, friends, and families. Unlike many gangsters that would follow him, he is not seen under the influence of harder drugs or alcohol – he commits all his schemes and homicides sober. He does not have the athletic or imposing build of later gangsters, nor the cadence to force someone holding up their hands before their lights are turned off to piss their pants. Without any of this, Rico bathes himself in violence, committed to never being cuffed by the cops while still breathing (a promise to himself and the police that he exclaims several times, beaming with pleasure). His intelligence has justified killings in the name of gang loyalty and the familial structure it provides. His instincts allow him to evade capture and death from the hands of the police and rival hoodlums for a time, becoming the most feared – and, in a perverse way, admired – gangster of the Windy City.

Little Caesar does not have the scope of a gangster film directed by Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather trilogy) or a Martin Scorsese (1990′s GoodFellas, 2006′s The Departed). Many of the clichés found in the genre have not been codified yet but appear in this film: the small-time ruffian who shoots his way to the top, the friend of said ruffian attempting to escape a life of crime before meeting an end that involves the gallows or gunfire, the girlfriend who wants their man to stop working with the gang, the intransigent crime boss too set in their ways to prevent their usurpation, the rival crime bosses who instantly recognize the upstart as a destabilizing force in the balance of gang power, the police figures gunned down to kickstart what will lead to the film’s climax. All those aspects appear in Little Caesar – omitting, for the purposes of this review and in respect for those who have not seen the film, clichés in gangster movie finales. The gangster picture, in its concentration on violent masculinity, is one of the least versatile genres innovated by Hollywood. The blame for that dearth of narrative versatility should not be assigned to films that appeared before those tropes became tropes.

With film noir the eventual successor to the early 1930s gangster films, Little Caesar does not have the chiaroscuro lighting that would define film noir. Nevertheless, some of the imagery from cinematographer Tony Gaudio (1936′s Anthony Adverse, 1938′s The Adventures of Robin Hood) breathes grittiness and even a hint of tragedy to this set-bound production when the action is not set indoors. Otherwise, Little Caesar is not imaginatively shot for long stretches. With only one chilling exception, the lack of close-ups almost prevents Robinson, as Rico, from establishing invisible bounds that his subordinates dare not cross.

Though this review, among most all others one could find on Little Caesar, has waxed about Edward G. Robinson’s violent-with-a-smile performance, Robinson himself was squeamish to the sound of gunshots. In the rushes, LeRoy and editor Ray Curtiss noticed, “Every time he squeezed the trigger, he would screw up his eyes. Take after take, he would do the same thing.” To resolve this, Robinson’s eyelids – in any scenes that involved Rico firing his guns – would be taped. Robinson, by all accounts, was anything but Caesar Enrico Bandello or any other of the gangsters he would portray on-screen. The immigrant son of a Romanian Jewish family, Emanuel Goldenberg was a fine arts lover who spoke to and of others with gentleness. He was more of a Christopher Cross from Scarlet Street (1945) or, maybe, a Martinius Jacobson from Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945).

Robinson would take on gangster roles – comedies and dramas – until Never a Dull Moment (1968). Somewhat typecast as the tough gangster in the coming decades, few other Robinson performances were as frightening as this. For almost that performance alone, Little Caesar is one of the most important and accomplished films of the early 1930s. It is not the first gangster film ever made, but the gangster film playbook that it wrote – alongside the other great gangster pictures shortly to follow it – has undergone few sweeping revisions since its release.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#Little Caesar #Mervyn LeRoy #Edward G. Robinson #Douglas Fairbanks Jr.#Glenda Farrell #William Collier Jr.#Sidney Blackmer #Ralph Ince #Thomas E. Jackson #Stanley Fields #Maurice Black #George E. Stone #Francis Edward Faragoh #Robert Lord #Darryl F. Zanuck #Hal B. Wallis #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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