Word: gangsterisms
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Little Caesar. 1930. An early tragic epic of the gangster world with Edward G. Robinson magnificent as star-crossed hood Rico Bandello...
...Friends of Eddie Coyle. With Robert Mitchum. This is the best movie of the season. It's a story of the low level gangster's underworld of Boston -- of petty crooks beating out colleagues for petty cash, of 'friends' betraying 'friends' for survival in this dog-eat-dog gangster's game. It's an honest movie, true throughout to the crooked tale it tells. Paramount. 9:30-9:30 every 2 hours. --E.A.F...
Died. Jean-Pierre Melville, 55, film director and patron saint of the nouvelle vague of French cinema; of a heart attack; in Paris. Melville changed his name from Grumbach in honor of the American novelist Herman Melville, sported a cowboy hat, and was celebrated for his Gallic exercises in gangster melodramas. His best-known film, Les Enfants Terribles (1948), was made in collaboration with Jean Cocteau, author of the novel...
...gangster movies of the thirties and forties didn't need Technicolor bloodbaths to draw audiences. They were thrilling melodramas, gripping in their own right. In Dillinger, all we see are static moments in time without a sense of cause-and-effect. The bloody episodes are strung together with little continuity, merely reaffirming the adage that crime doesn't pay. Life is continually lost to no avail. The gangsters never even seem to have a chance to spend their money. How can we glorify Dillinger? He seems no more than a crook...
...MIGHT ASSUME that desperately poor people during the Depression, would feed on the myth of a rich gangster. But where is the Depression? Behind the opening credits, we see black-and-white photographs (mostly Walker Evan's) of America in the throes of Depression. But when the film proper begins in vivid '70s color, any sense of the period vanishes. Although Depression comes up once or twice in dialogue, none of the locals really has that lean and hungry look. The scenery is so picturesque and colorful that we get no sense of the drabness of the period. Even boarded...