Modest, but cleverly structured Early Talkie from Warners opens with a neat fake-out after a mob man from Chicago leaps from a moving train to avoid arrest, probably falling to his death as the train was crossing a river. Cut to NYC, where a police detective uses that unreported death to impersonate the guy and take down the criminal organization from within. The script giving him a full half-reel of exposition before blowing it all up in our face when he’s shot dead by a rival gang before he even gets started. On to Plan B and his sister picking up the gauntlet, presenting herself as the grieving widow and begging for a job. Now, she's the one who'll expose the gang from within. But things get a bit dicey when that ‘probable dead guy’ (her supposed husband; the guy her late brother hoped to impersonate) shows up alive and well. Yikes! Visually kept on the move by Eddie Cline who usually helmed comedy, he’s unable to make much of Alice White’s squawky voice (she’d soon slip back to supporting roles), but Neil Hamilton is fine as the returned husband . . . if he is the returned husband. But the main interest comes in watching the short, squat mob boss who takes on rivals twice his size. It’s Edward G. Robinson in a sort of test run for his very next film, LITTLE CAESAR, and Hollywood immortality.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Naturally, LITTLE CAESAR/'31. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/little-caesar-1931.html
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