Word: calleia
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...pinned responsibility for the murder to the least likely character involved, After the Thin Man has introduced to cinema audiences as amusing a group of suspects as Author Hammett, its No. 1 purveyor of this specialty, has yet contributed to the screen. Included are: a monosyllabic cabaret keeper (Joseph Calleia) who shoots at Detective Charles in an apartment house basement; Mrs. Charles's Aunt Katherine (Jessie Ralph), who breaks photographers' cameras with an umbrella as big as a pole-vault pole; mild young David Graham (James Stewart), in love with Mrs. Charles's cousin; a Chinese restaurateur...
Sworn Enemy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A first-rate screen play by Wells Root and a first-rate performance by Joseph Calleia make this otherwise ordinary Gangster v. Government film agreeably nerve-racking. Calleia is Joe Emerald, neurotic head of a protection racket who, because his own legs are so weak he cannot walk without two canes, has set his heart on becoming proprietor of a heavyweight champion prizefighter. The Root screen play shows how a G-man (Robert Young), who has inherited a promising young plug-ugly from a brother the racketeer has killed, uses this obsession to bait...
...story also concerns itself with the efforts of a star reporter (Stuart Erwin) to track down the racketeers; the professional vagaries of a tippling public prosecutor (Franchot Tone), and his shilly-shallying with two young ladies (Madge Evans, Louise Henry); the vocational difficulties of the neurotic triggerman (Joseph Calleia) for the numbers racketeers. Best scene in the picture and most gruesome* in the month's crop of such exhibits shows the public prosecutor torturing the triggerman into a wholesale confession of his crimes by beating him, strapping him into a chair, leaving him alone with a sinister package supposed...
...sister of a crook rather than of a Federal detective, and by letting the audience mistake the G-Man hero for a criminal until his visit to his superior reveals that the jail break he engineered was really a trick to gain the confidence of the leader (Joseph Calleia) of the Purple Gang, who escaped at the same time. From that point on, the story follows the accepted G-Man course: a hunt, punctuated by machine-gun fire and climaxed by the villain's death, this time in a theatre. It even includes two other familiar episodes culled from...
Best acting and direction are reserved for the central story, concerning Tony Mako (Joseph Spurin-Calleia), a deadeyed, neurotic murderer who attends the show handcuffed to a detective because their train leaves late. Tony wants two things: to see the little man who betrayed him dying at his feet; then to drop dead himself. He gets both wishes. One or two of Small Miracle's side excursions are gratuitous and one or two are trite, but the tangled threads never slip out of the capable hands of Director George Abbott. The net effect is as pungent and authentic...