Little Caesar

Rico comes in from a small town, starts at the bottom of a city gang and climbs. The rise is fast because he trusts nobody and knows nobody. The fall arrives for exactly the same reason. This film set the template for the gangster picture. Edward G. Robinson's Rico is neither romantic nor tragic: small, irritable, vain about his clothes and completely empty. The most quoted line in it is the bewildered sentence he speaks on the ground at the end. The source is W. R. Burnett's novel. The same author's High Sierra would make Bogart a star a decade later, and Raoul Walsh would then remake it as a western. Its difficulties now are obvious. The performances belong to the first years of sound, the pace is slow, and the women barely exist. The moralising title card it opens with is a product of censorship pressure. Who it is for: anyone curious about where the gangster film begins. Who it is not for: viewers expecting modern storytelling.