Last & toughest in the Early Talkie Gangster Cycle is no antique, still packing a wallop as a Prohibition Era fast rise/quick fall cautionary tale. Howard Hawks’ violent & pacey direction is a big step up from his last (prison pic THE CRIMINAL CODE/’31), with startling blasts of action from favored second-unit helmer Richard Rosson. Yet the film equally belongs to scripter Ben Hecht who largely invented urban mob story tropes in UNDERWORLD/’27; drew on his Chicago newspaper background for the Al Capone-like Tony Camonte; steered Hawks to male leads Paul Muni (out of Yiddish Theater) & Osgood Perkins (from his own THE FRONT PAGE); brought along John Lee Mahin on dialogue; and came up with the idea of using the infamous Borgia Family as inspiration. (Hawks, great director/appalling fabulist, regularly took credit for much of this.) Though his portrait never became iconic, like Edward G. Robinson’s LITTLE CAESAR or James Cagney’s PUBLIC ENEMY, Muni is seriously thuggish & scary crazy as Camonte, paradoxically becoming more restrained and more out-of-control as events turn for, then against him, launching incestuous jabs of sexual longing at Karen Morley’s amoral moll (he's stealing her from surrogate brother Perkins) and plain old incestuous longings toward vampy sister Ann Dvorak, hot for Muni’s coin-flipping mob enforcer George Raft (another surrogate brother!). Love & murder in the crime world running its course like an infectious disease.
DOUBLE-BILL: Brian de Palma’s self-indulgent 1983 remake (nearly twice the length) has its own big following and is apparently being remade yet again. (A six-hour version?)
CONTEST: When Camonte ‘classes up’ his act by going to the theater to see Somerset Maugham’s RAIN, look sharp at the billboard during an intermission smoke break. You can just make out a few letters of a first (‘NNE’) & last name (‘LS’) on the poster. So who’s the famous actress appearing in the production? Name her to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.
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