Edward G. Robinson

Edward G. Robinson's first leading part came in Little Caesar, Mervyn LeRoy's film out of W. R. Burnett's novel: Enrico Cesare Bandello, Rico, who robs a petrol station and then leaves his town for the city with his friend Joe Massaro, an eye on the gangsters in the newspaper headlines. By the AFI's account the part won him a wide recognition and for a while shut him into gangster roles. At the close Rico dies beneath a poster advertising his old friend's dance act. Thirteen years later, in Double Indemnity, which Billy Wilder made from the James M. Cain novel on a screenplay he wrote with Raymond Chandler, he played the insurance claims investigator Barton Keyes, meticulous and intuitive, at once the boss and the friend of Walter Neff, who confesses the murder to a dictaphone.