The Moviegoer

In these days of scientific diets and innoculations against all but sin and the common cold, movie gangsters are bigger than ever. With height, breadth of shoulder, circumference of bicept and cragginess of feature, the toughs are of heroic proportions. But two re-releases now in town make the whole crew, from Charles McBraw to Scott Brady, look like limp souffles.

Public Enemy and Little Caesarare gems of toughness. James Cagney and Edward Robinson attack the problem of being mean and shiftless cancers on the social body with little reserve and less delicacy. Instead, they set patterns of tough-man acting that have haunted their subsequent careers. Cagney is the cocky bantam hoodlum, swaggering and posturing, with words dropping from the side of his mouth in chunks and gushes. His favorite stance is with one hand grasping a terrified speak-easy proprietor by the shirt front while two fingers of the other hand are poised to jab out stricken eyes. Robinson, less slavish to the physical, just points his cigar and says "Nyah," fixing opponents with crepe-swathed stares. Then he sends enormous wreaths to their funerals.

Following the careers of two gangsters from rags to riches, both pictures are in the Horatio Alger tradition. Then the camera watches while the mobsters go back to the gutter, each weighing several pounds more than he had immediately before death. Since both are rather antique, the photography, sound, and much of the acting and direction are adolescent by modern standards. It is mostly the superior villainy of Messers. Cagney and Robinson that makes the films wonderful. Cagney brushes grapefruits into his lovely breakfast partner's face--no, not Jean Harlow, he meets her later. And in addition to his badness he is Loyal, Friendly, Helpful, Kind, Obedient, and in fact possess most of the handbook virtues, making him popular enough to be an interesting hero.

As Rico in Little Caesar, Robinson's character is less fragrant. But he is not devoid of a certain fatuous charm: his sentimental inability to knock off a stool pegeon of long acquaintance proves his undoing, thus leaving us a foul moral lesson that somehow cluded the censors.

Classics, these pictures are, and great fun, too. Swagger and bullets, with men like Cagney and Robinson dispensing both, are unbeatable.