Really? The brick background over the title credits again, Warner Bros.? OK....

“Larceny, Inc.” is based on a 1941 play by Laura and S.J. Perelman, “The Night Before Christmas,” but it’s Edward G. Robinson in a familiar role: not just gangster but comic gangster. I don’t think Warners ever cast James Cagney as a comic version of the role that made him famous, but it kept doing it with Robinson:

• In “The Little Giant” (1933), he quits the gangster racket and joins high society. The gag is high society is full of bigger crooks than he ever was.
• In “A Slight Case of Murder” (1938), he tries to go straight and respectable in post-Prohibition-era America and runs into hurdles. The gag—besides the four dead bodies upstairs—is that his Prohibition-era beer doesn’t sell after repeal because it sucks.
• In  “Brother Orchid” (1941), he quits the biz, is cheated by European swells, can’t get his old gang back, and joins a monastery. Antics ensue.

Here, as J. Chalmers “Pressure” Maxwell, yes, he again tries to go straight, with dreams of a dog-racing track in Florida; but he runs into so many hurdles in NYC that he winds up buying a leather goods store next to a bank in order to drill into it. But I like the main gag: As he and his men (mostly his men) spend days/weeks tunneling, he becomes a community leader, a man of the people, and beloved.

Just wish it were funnier.

Every scene a stateroom scene
Where John Ford’s “Up the River” ended, this one begins: cons playing baseball in prison. It’s the George-Lenny dynamic again: dumb pug manipulated by smooth talker. Robinson, as catcher, is the smooth talker while Broderick Crawford, borrowed from Universal, plays Jug Martin, the pitcher who wants to throw what he wants to throw. The con at the plate hits it out of the park.

It's all light and amusing until Leo (a young Anthony Quinn) slides in with a post-prison plan for a bank robbery on Sixth Avenue. Our guy says nah; he’s got the dog-racing idea. Leo then warns everyone to stay away from the bank. Quinn is so scary here it’s like he entered from another movie.

There’s a lot of talent in the room. Besides the above, Jane Wyman, looking cute and perky, with an intelligent edge that doesn’t suffer fools, plays Denny, the daughter of a deceased gangster whom Pressure looks after; Jack Carson is Jeff Randolph, a glib sales rep for Hotchkiss, a luggage manufacturer, who winds up making a play for Denny; and a very young Jackie Gleason shows up as a nosy soda-jerk at the drugstore across the way. Count ’em off: That’s a future best actor (Crawford), a future best actress (Wyman), a two-time supporting actor winner (Quinn), and a supporting actor nominee (Gleason). Meanwhile, Robinson, the star, who was great in almost everything he did, was never even nominated. So it goes.

Back then, Warner Bros., and head of production Hal Wallis in particular, thought faster and louder meant funnier. It doesn’t. That’s the problem here. Everyone keeps walking in on the boys, and everyone keeps gabbing, and the pace doesn’t relent. It’s like every scene is the Marx Bros. stateroom scene, but you need to take a breath. The movie doesn’t.

I would’ve lost the early stuff about trying to go straight with the dog-racing track, too. Just make it about bank robbers who pretend to run this luggage store and their man suddenly finds himself a community leader and likes it.

At least “Larceny, Inc.” is a better title than Perelman’s.