WARNING: SPOILERS

Is this Edward G. Robinson’s last gangster role? He played a couple of Big Jims in the 1960s: Big Jim Riva in an episode of “The Detectives” and Big Jim Stevens in a cameo in “Robin and the 7 Hoods.” And of course there was Dathan, governor of Goshen, in “The Ten Commandments,” who, as Billy Crystal reminds us, was a little too gangsterish. But in terms of the classical gangster, the genre he helped create with “Little Caesar” in 1931, I think this was the real end of Rico.

What a way to go out. Robinson plays Vincent Canelli, a brutal gang boss in prison, and a day from going to the chair for his sins. Except he’s got a plan, see?

Actually, as B-movie plans go, it’s not bad:

• His gang, including one-time moll Hatti (Jean Parker), kidnaps Ellen (Sylvia Findley), the grown-up daughter of a benevolent prison guard, whom they then blackmail into planting a gun under a chair in the death-row visitors gallery
• Then they kidnap a journalist, Carson (Jack Kelly), assigned to the execution and replace him with one of their own: Joey (Warren Stevens)
• Joey grabs the gun, and he and Canelli make a break

They also take the death-row inmates, including his partner Peter Manning (Peter Graves)—who knows less where the bodies are buried than where the money is hidden—along with hostages: the prison priest (Milburn Stone), prison doctor (Vic Perrin), and a nasty guard who will get his. Plus they still have the reporter and the daughter. Quite a picnic.

Except the other death-row inmates are dropped off off on a street corner without a plan. They’re pawns in Canelli’s game, since they give the cops something to do besides chase him. Smart. But in the getaway Manning gets shot, he’s the one guy Canelli needs alive, so they hole up in a warehouse where tensions mount. Can Manning pull through? (Yes) Will the guard survive Canelli’s brutality? (No) Will romance develop between Ellen and the reporter? (I think?)

Canelli winds up pushing Manning too quickly. Against the doc’s advice, Manning goes to a bank to retrieve the dough, which is in a safe-deposit box, but he winds up bleeding over a newspaper account of the prison break—altering the cops. The trail of blood leads to the warehouse, which is surrounded. But Canelli, in classic fashion, won’t be taken alive, see? One wonders which less-sadistic gangmember—Joey or Manning—will take matters into their own hands. 

I saw “Black Tuesday” as part of the SIFF Noir fest this year, and then bad shit happened afterwards and I lost the thread of the review. Apologies. Main thoughts: the movie is never dull, and it’s over too soon. If Hitchcock ripped the Band-Aid off, this one took some skin with it.

It’s also another of those ’50s movies (see: “Illegal”) that marries a 1930s star with actors who will become very familiar on 1960s television. We get not only “Mission: Impossible”’s Jim Phelps and “Gunsmoke”’s Doc, but The Professor (Russell Johnson) and Chief O’Hara (Stafford Repp). And Warren Stevens was in everything: “Twilight Zone,” “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “Rat Patrol” and “Star Trek”—Rojan in “By Any Other Name.”

Final thought: Peter Graves was a looker when he was young. Burroughs Elementary, represent.