Watch Little Caesar For Free

the audience applauded

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Blistering performances.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

One of the earliest of the gangster films which launched a cottage industry: people pretending to be Cagney or Robinson. Edward G. Robinson made many great movies, but this is the genre he is most remembered for. Here he plays a guy who is bad from the beginning, who immediately got into the hierarchy of the criminal world. His friend Joe wants to be good but Robinson won't leave him alone and eventually drags him down. But he goes to his knees eventually. Unfortunately, he forgets that there is good in the world. He does have one moment of realization, but it's too late. He dies in the gutter which produced him in the first place. Robinson did a fine job and established great career.

. . . Enrico Bandello laments before deciding to flatten LITTLE CAESAR's love triangle by gunning down his long-time companion Joe and Olga (the dame for whom Joe has forsaken Enrico in his hour of greatest need). But Enrico doesn't know how to "quit" Joe, either, sealing his own doom. Decades before the supposedly "ground-breaking" flick BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, the same plot pervades LITTLE CAESAR for all to see, if they care to really look. If you subtract this meaty gray subtext from LITTLE CAESAR's scant 78-minute running time, is there even anything worth noting left? One might argue that the remaining coherent thread tying parts of this tawdry tale together is its vehement pro-Prohibition message. Crime czar Alvin McClure seems hell-bent upon a night of illegal drinking himself at the Bronze Peacock when he's gunned down (perhaps because his ale-addled reaction time is no match for then Tea-Totaller Enrico's). So what's the first thing "call-me-Rico; R-I-C-O" does when he finally lets himself fall under the influence of Demon Rum? He rings up his chief persecutor, Flaherty, of course, and "LITTLE CAESAR" is soon history.

Mervyn Leroy directed this early gangster picture that stars Edward G. Robinson as Rico, a tough-minded man who is determined to make something of himself, and so he, along with his friend Joe Massara(played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) goes to the big city, where they join a gang, and Rico quickly rises to the top, taking it over, and calling himself Little Caesar. He then sets his sights on a bigger gang, but after a high-profile assassination, Rico finds that despite his power and wealth, his violent lifestyle will catch up with him in the end... Robinson is the whole show here, so memorable is his performance that it makes up for the stilted nature of the picture.

Just less than a year before Cagney's "Public Enemy" and a decade before Cagney made his own version of a similar story with "The Roaring Twenties", Edward G. Robinson played the bootleg King of Chicago, a fictional version of Al Capone. Slithering up the ladder of the mob and quickly taking over, his decline was just as rapid with enemies made not only of the cops but other mobsters as well. This Chicago version of Napoleon is a little guy who bullies everybody along the way, so it is obvious as to why his own mob soldiers will grow to hate him.Slow-moving and even a little creaky, it explodes every time that Robinson is on screen, but slows down to a snail's pace when Douglas Fairbanks Jr. comes on as his protégé. It is also memorable for a cameo by veteran actress Lucille La Verne who made ugliness an art form with her hag like characterization in two epics concerning the French Revolution: the silent "Orphans of the Storm" and the original (and best) "A Tale of Two Cities". She is best known for the face of the crone in Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" which she also provided the voice for. A close-up of her profile is totally unforgettable.Robinson went on to many similar roles (even spoofing this character many years later in "Robin and the Seven Hoods"), and the saga of his rise to fame and fortune shows the ego-building so fast that you know it will be so much fun to watch his downfall.