Little Caesar

Little Caesar is one of the most important films ever made. That’s a large claim for a low-budget Hollywood movie from the beginning of the Depression but it’s hard to think of many other films that so emphatically defined – and in some respects proscribed - a whole genre. In setting, character and acting, it set the ground rules for ten years of gangster movies and, inadvertently, influenced a whole sub-genre of films which reacted against the clichés which Little Caesar helped to create. It wasn’t the first gangster movie by any means – D. W. Griffith’s Musketeers of Pig Alley was made in 1912 – but it’s fair to say that it kicked off the 1930s vogue for the genre and that Edward G. Robinson’s performance was the model for many actors who trod similar turf.

The review contains some spoilers for the film. If you haven't seen the film then you might want to go straight to the review of the disc below.

Beginning with a hold-up at a gas station, the film traces the career of Rico ‘Caesar’ Bandello (Robinson), a small time gangster turned big-time hoodlum who discovers that staying at the top is even harder than getting there. Ruthlessly manipulating his dancer friend Joe (Fairbanks Jr) and using fear to quell any resistance, Rico manages to become number one but soon pays the price for his careless ambition.

The Chicago setting was borrowed by a hundred other gangster movies and the storyline by a hundred more. In essence, Little Caesar, like many of those later films, is a good old fashioned morality tale – the little man who goes from rags to riches to rags, overreaching himself in his quest to become something better than he is. There’s a certain prejudice inbuilt into this plot, a sense that people (and particularly immigrants) should stay in their social place and leave the ambition to those who deserve it or, perhaps, are patient enough to work for every little inch up the social ladder. It’s not quite class snobbery in a British sense, more a consciousness of a natural social order which seems to have consumed America in the first few decades of the 20th Century. To some extent, the Depression shocked the middle classes out of it but it had relatively little effect on either the ‘old money’ class or the attitude of the criminals. It would be surprising if the effect that Little Caesar had on its audience on first release wasn’t a paradoxical one – the same people who were excited by Rico’s brutal rise to power were equally satisfied that he met his fate in the final reel and I have little doubt that sage viewers nodded their heads in a fatalistic understanding that, in the words of the opening epigraph, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword and, by unconscious extension, that hubris will always be punished.

But the moral message of the film – not imposed by censorship surprisingly enough – is shattered into tiny fragments by the force of the central character. The film is generally well made and the acting is of an acceptable, if unexciting, standard, especially for a period when most actors still over-projected and seemed to carry around their own proscenium arch when on the film set. But the character you remember from the movie is Rico. Indeed, for much of the time, Rico is the movie. He’s an extraordinary creation; a helplessly loquacious, completely amoral opportunist who seems to have sprung fully formed out of a celestial collaboration between Machiavelli and Charles Dickens – although the latterly acknowledged inspiration for both book and film was Al Capone. Rico doesn’t give a damn for anyone except two people; himself, naturally, and his friend Joe who he regards as his own property. Normally, this would be off-putting but in this case, the lack of any perceptible moral centre is exciting and stimulating. We don’t care that Rico is a shit-heel – indeed, that’s why we like him. The nastier he gets, the more daring the stunts he pulls, the more perversely loveable he becomes. It’s impossible to take your eyes off Rico when he’s around and when he isn’t around, we shift restlessly in our seat while waiting for him to reappear. Some of this is in the original novel – indeed, Al Capone, the basis for Rico, was a folk hero for not dissimilar reasons – but it’s hard to distinguish the power of the character from the performance of Edward G. Robinson, one of the greatest pieces of screen acting in cinema history.

The irony is that Edward G. Robinson was as mild-mannered and elegant a man as you could have found in Hollywood during the Golden Age of studio filmmaking. He was a highly literate Jewish émigré from Romania and his great passions were acting and art history – indeed, when Vincente Minnelli made his film about Van Gogh, Lust for Life, it was to Robinson he turned as an art consultant. But in a sense, there’s no irony. It would be unusual if such a cultured man didn’t have a dark side to explore and Robinson seems to have explored his through a series of memorable film roles. In the 1940s, he was the morally equivocal centre of Fritz Lang’s greatest film noir Scarlet Street and the legendary gang boss in Key Largo, murmering inconceivable obscenities into the ear of Lauren Bacall. In the 1960s, as an elder statesman of Hollywood, he got one of his best roles as the misogynist film producer in Two Weeks In Another Town, hopelessly lost in self-hatred and nostalgia for a better time. But his performance as Rico is perhaps his most memorable, a collection of carefully observed tics and nuances combined with that unforgettable snarl of a voice which can make even the most innocent line seem horribly sinister and his sarcasm cut like a razor. He understands that it’s the jabbing “I want it now” force of Rico that makes him an exciting character to watch and that the only way that Rico’s fall from grace can affect the audience is if we’re sufficiently sorry to see him neutered. What happens to Rico is hardly a tragedy – he brings it on himself and, let’s be frank, he deserves it – but the morality of the film is made into a nonsense when we feel sorry that Rico has stopped entertaining us by strutting about in fancy clothes, spitting bile at friend and enemy alike and killing anyone who gets in the way of his meteoric climb. Yet, and this is another paradox, Robinson finally gives Rico a certain nobility in his despair as if he can’t quite believe that it’s happening. The way Rico behaves in the first two-thirds of the film suggests that his mouth moves so fast that his brain has to play catch-up; the increasingly baroque threats and gunplay have to back up his impulsiveness. The final line, as has been observed by many critics, is made great by the sense that Rico is genuinely unable to comprehend that his luck has run out for the last time. This is screen acting at its very finest and the character of Rico influenced a whole raft of screen tough guys; watch Goodfellas after seeing this and then tell me where Joe Pesci gets his inspiration from.

If Eddie Robinson is the reason to watch the movie, that’s partly because what’s surrounding him is so ramshackle. As an obvious example, I refuse to believe that scenes like the poor but honset mother begging her son to go straight seemed any more credible in 1930 than they do now. It certainly doesn’t play as anything except camp now – although that didn’t stop Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma including it in their 1983 remake of Scarface. Interestingly, the Pacino film often seems more like a remake of Little Caesar in some respects – swap cocaine for alcohol and Miami for Chicago and it’s remarkably similar, give or take a few hundred ‘fucks’. But there’s something quaint and naively appealing about melodrama presented with this kind of enthusiasm and every time you find yourself looking at your watch, Rico reappears and brings the film back to life. Surprisingly, it’s not as visually distinguished a film as I recalled. It certainly doesn’t have the visual elegance of William Wellmann’s The Public Enemy or Hawks’ Scarface. But it’s paced like a rocket and the verbal exchanges sometimes have the kind of slangy comic momentum that you find in screwball comedy. Mervyn LeRoy also indulges in some brilliant tracking shots and memorable framing – he particularly seems to relish the violence, which is considerably more graphic than would be allowed once the Production Code got its teeth into Hollywood three years later. The supporting cast sometimes seem a little wooden but there are very nice bits from a stylish Douglas Fairbanks and Sidney Blackmer and the film is certainly never remotely boring. Warners would better Little Caesar as they refined the genre into an art-form of its own, but it’s a moot point whether they ever had a better gangster than Eddie G. If they did, and I’m prepared to debate the point, he was to make his appearance three months later in The Public Enemy. But, er, that’s another story...

The Disc

The Warner Gangsters Collection is one of the finest DVD sets I have ever encountered and a completely essential purchase for anyone who loves movies. If you don’t buy it then I’m gonna tell Rico that you called him a sissy.

Little Caesar isn’t the best looking disc in the set but that’s not entirely surprising. There is some print damage in evidence and some crackling and white popping in places. The level of detail is not consistent either – although I am comparing this to the incredibly high standards of Warners best restorations, such as White Heat in this collection. Considering the age of the film and the condition of the available prints, Little Caesar looks very good indeed and is a revelation compared to the murky VHS that I own. The image is suitably grainy but not excessively so and there are no problems with compression artifacts. All in all, this is a very pleasing full-frame monochrome transfer.

The soundtrack is also very good. The limitations of sound recording in 1930 mean that you won’t hear a pristine track but then you really wouldn’t want to. The hiss and crackle of a Vitaphone soundtrack is one of the things I love about early sound films. This mono track for Little Caesar renders the dialogue clearly and has plenty of atmosphere.

As with the other discs in the set, the extra features are exemplary. Best among them is a 17 minute featurette on the film containing a multitude of interesting observations from a distinguished cast of commentators including Drew Casper, the legendary film noir expert Alain Silver and Mr Scorsese himself. There’s some wonderful anecdotes here and facts I didn’t know – the mooted casting of Clark Gable for example. Although it’s fairly brief, it packs a hell of a lot into a quarter of an hour. To be honest, I found it more useful than the commentary track from film scholar Richard Jewell. He’s got a fair amount to say and he’s interesting enough but he doesn’t really expand much on the featurette and I kept getting annoyed that he was drowning out the far preferable sound of ranting Rico. Still, Jewell knows his stuff and his enthusiasm can’t be faulted. We also get the 1954 re-release forward to the film which adds a completely unnecessary moral contextualising in case viewers don’t get the message that crime is a bad thing. You can add to this the original theatrical trailer which is a lovely period piece with some wonderful animation.

As if this wasn’t enough, the disc also features one of Warners’ delectable “Night at the Movies” packages which enables you to simulate a trip to the movies in 1930 in the comfort of your ultra-modern home cinema set-up. Leonard Maltin eloquently sets the scene and introduces each item. We get a trailer for the superb Five Star Final, in which Edward G. Robinson plays a scuzzy tabloid journalist. There is a newsreel extract in which the girlfriend of murdered gangster ‘Legs’ Diamond is interviewed, and then a six minute short featuring a disarmingly young Spencer Tracy. Finally, a delightful short cartoon is included in which the popular song “Lady, Play Your Mandolin” is performed by the somewhat primitive animated character ‘Foxy’. All of these features are beautifully presented in 1.37:1 monochrome and they are in surprisingly good condition.

The film has subtitles available in English, French and Spanish but, sadly, none of the extras are not subtitled.

Apart from the lapse of not subtitling the bonus materials, I can’t imagine how this disc could be better, considering the quality of the elements which exist for the film. Warners have done a stunning job and this is a fine opener for one of the best box sets that I ever expect to own. You can buy Little Caesar on its own but you’d be mad to miss the whole set, one of the bargains of the century.