Little Caesar
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Year Released: 1930
Rating: 2.5
Early gangster talkie that established Edward G. Robinson's career and helped set in motion an obsession with gangsters and America's criminal underworld. Since it was made with limited resources and is crudely done, it pales beside some later films that take the same theme and further develop it (some of Robinson's later pictures, for example). Robinson is the only reason to watch this (he is unmistakably magnetic as the morally bankrupt Rico) and his intensity overshadows pretty much everything else in here (story, characters, setting).
