WARNING: SPOILERS

With these egos, it’s a wonder any Hollywood history is written.

Who’s the guy who promoted James Cagney from supporting to lead in “The Public Enemy”? Among those claiming credit: studio head Jack Warner, producer Darryl Zanuck, director Bill Wellman and screenwriter John Bright. I’m guessing it was some combo of the last two.

Who first read W.R. Burnett’s “Little Caesar” and thought “Hey, we should make this into a movie”? Let me count the ways.

• Jack Warner in “My First 100 Years in Hollywood”: “I encountered a song writer named Butch Davis in the Santa Fe railroad station. He was carrying a new book called Little Caesar by an unknown writer named W.R. Burnett … I had nothing better to do on that slow, all-night train ride and the story had me well hooked by the time I got off at San Diego early in the morning. I walked into the Western Union office there and sent a wire to our story department in New York asking them to buy the Burnett book and keep it quiet.”
• Producer Hal Wallis in “Starmaker”: “I read the book and was fascinated. … I sent the book over to Jack Warner, and without even reading it, he approved my making it into a film.”
• Director Mervyn LeRoy in “Take One”: “Jack Warner called me into his office. He held out the galley proofs of a new book [and said], ‘I’ve got too much to do to read it tonight. You read it and tell me what you think.’ … I read straight through the night, my excitement heightening with every page. … ‘This is what I’ve been looking for, Jack,’ I said. ‘This guy Burnett must have written this for me.’”

As full of shit as Jack Warner always was—and I think he’s full of shit here—LeRoy is equally suspect. On a different page in his memoir, he claims to have discovered and renamed Loretta Young for “Too Young to Marry” in 1931 and directed James Cagney in “Hot Stuff” in 1929. Except by 1931 Young had already starred in a dozen movies as LorettaYoung, while Cagney was not only not in “Hot Stuff,” he wasn’t even in Hollywood in 1929.

I do side with LeRoy on a different squabble. Warner claims LeRoy wanted Clark Gable for the title role, while LeRoy is like: That was for supporting! Gable instead of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.! LeRoy’s version just fits better—particular if you’re going for a Al Capone-type for Rico. It feels like Warner is attempting misdirection, but it’s also a gigantic self-own. His implied criticism of LeRoy—“You think Gable would’ve made a better Little Caesar than Edward G. Robinson, ha ha”—doesn’t change the agreed-upon fact that Warner Bros. screen-tested Clark Gable and rejected him. They turned away the biggest movie star of the 1930s.

The ruthless rise
Question: If Al Capone hadn’t existed, what would Edward G. Robinson’s career have been like? My guess: great character actor and occasional leading man, maybe nominated for a Tony here or an Oscar there, maybe winning a few. Instead he became a legend: one of the great cinematic gangsters, who wound up nominated for… wait for it… zero Oscars. That’s right. Not for “Little Caesar,” “The Whole Town’s Talking,” “Double Indemnity,” “Scarlet Street,” “Key Largo,” or “The Cincinnati Kid.” None, nonce, bupkis. I don’t know the greatest actor never nominated for an Oscar but Robinson is certainly in the conversation.

He was initially reluctant when first offered a Capone-like gangster—Scarsi in the Broadway play “The Racket”—and not because he feared typecasting. “I had little understanding of larceny and murder,” Robinson writes in his 1973 autobiography. “I would be forced to invent the gangster since I had no yardstick by which to create him.” But he did just that, the play was a smash, and it led to gangster roles in nascent talkies: Cobra Collins in “Outside the Law” for Universal; Dominic in “The Widow from Chicago” for Warner Bros. Meaning Warners didn’t have to look far to find their Rico. He was right there.

“Little Caesar” is simpler than “The Public Enemy.” It’s basically the rise and fall of a sociopath.

We open at a gas station at night, a man goes inside, a gunshot goes off. Now we’re in a diner, and our title character, Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello, is turning back the clock on the wall as an alibi. As they order spaghetti and coffee, Rico talks up a newspaper article about a shindig for big city gangster Diamond Pete Montana. “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” asks Rico’s partner, Joe Massara (Fairbanks Jr.). Plenty, Rico responds. It’s what Rico wants for himself: to be in the big city doing big things in a big way, see? Joe says he wants to be in the big city, too, but … to dance. Right away you wonder why these two are together.

And then they’re not. They go east, most likely Chicago, and Joe is soon dancing professionally at the Bronze Peacock with girlfriend Olga Stassoff (Glenda Farrell), while Rico is over at the Club Palermo, getting in with Sam Vettori (Stanley Fields) and his gang. Joe is only peripherally with the gang. He’s seen as useful because he’s a civilian.

We quickly learn the underworld hierarchy:

1. Rico, et al., report to…
2. Sam Vettori, who, with rival Arnie Lorch, reports to…
3. Diamond Pete Montana, who reports to…
4. The Big Boy

Big Boy (Sidney Blackmer) is apparently based on Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson (1915-23, 1927-31), whose relationship with Capone was well-known.

There’s a good early scene that speaks to the dawning celebrity age. During a pow-wow at the Bronze Peacock, Pete Montana (Ralph Ince) shows up, and Rico advances toward him as if mesmerized. His advance can be read as threat or fandom—or both—and he’s cautioned back, but he can’t take his eyes off the man or his bling. Eventually he’s exiled to the hallway. That’s when Pete Montana spreads the word: Big Boy is telling everyone to lay low because of the new crime commissioner, McClure (Landers Stevens). Everyone agrees. Everyone except the new guy in town, exiled to the hallway, who’s got an itchy finger.

In fact, in the very next job, a bystander is shot and killed. And that bystander is… Well, I’ll let Sam say it.

Sam [dazed]: McClure! You shot McClure! A million guys in this town and you had to pick the crime commissioner.

You’d think Rico would get in trouble for doing exactly what they told him not to—and against the crime commissioner—but it doesn’t work that way. Maybe because it was McClure? Rico removed the one guy they were worried about. Either way, shortly thereafter, we see Rico feted at an honorarium the way Diamond Pete was in the newspaper account—and unlike Diamond Pete (but exactly like Capone), Rico welcomes the publicity. By this point, he’s already taken over Sam’s gang, and when Arnie comes gunning for him and misses, he takes over Arnie’s territory, too.

Then a meeting with Big Boy at his mansion, where, amid Rico’s comic uncouthness (tapping cigar ash on the carpet, assuming the high price of art is based upon the frame), Big Boy hands him Diamond Pete’s territory—the whole northside.

He’s risen far and fast. His fall is even faster and stems from two interconnected facts: He doesn’t trust Joe and he can’t kill Joe.

The empathetic fall
Now that Rico has what he’s long wanted, he worries over loose ends. That’s Joe. The cops are investigating the McClure murder (about time, boys) and asking about the dancer at the Palermo. Joe knows too much for someone on the outside, so Rico tries to bring him back into the fold. No go. Rico is soon threatening Olga: “That Jane's made a softy out of you,” and, patting his breast pocket, “There’s ways of stopping that dame!” and “She’s outta the way, that’s what she is!”

Then phonus interruptus. It’s Big Boy offering a right-hand man, and Joe uses the moment as an excuse to split—back to Olga, who wants him to rat. He won’t. So she does. She calls Sgt. Flaherty (Thomas E. Jackson), tells him to come down, and answers the door when they knock. Except it’s Rico and his real right-hand man, Otero (George E. Stone, an early Warner Bros. staple I love), who shouts, “Give it to ‘im, Rico!” Rico's about to. He moves forward—toward the camera and toward the couple clutching each other—until he’s right on top of them. That’s when Joe pushes Olga aside and tells Rico to shoot and get it over with.

And he can’t. Same straight-on camera shot, but rather than menacing, Rico appears stricken. The camera even loses focus as if to underline the softening of Rico’s resolve.

That’s why the fall. The man who rose to power on ruthlessness falls because of … kindness? Love? Later, on the lam, Rico seems to wake from his stupor. “This is what I get for liking a guy too much!” He picked the right guy anyway: Joe never rats. Rico threatens his life, Otero wings him, but when the cops arrive he sticks by the code. It’s Olga (of course) who spills the tea. Apparently her word is enough for Chicago cops, and the Palermo gang is rounded up. 

On the lam, we get Rico’s downfall in three acts:

• I: A cop gives chase, Otero is plugged, Rico is alone.
• II: Holed up in the back of Ma Magdalena’s fruit store, where apparently he’d stashed money. Now she has the upper hand and uses it. She’ll give him a fraction of his money, “If you be a good boy.”
• III: Months later, an unshaven Rico boozes it up at a flophouse at 4th and Commercial.

That third act is a bit of a lie and underscores an oddity of the film. Gangsters in the 1920s rose to power on the back of Prohibition, which “Public Enemy” details exactly, and which “Little Caesar” mentions not at all. I think the first mention is when Big Boy offers a drink to Rico, who responds, “I never touch the stuff.” But in his fall, per the Warners code, Rico becomes a drunkard with five o’clock shadow. (Cf., Cagney’s Eddie Bartlett.) That’s the lie. They couldn’t just make him clear-eyed in the flophouse? And why is he sticking around the city anyway? Why not hop a train? Start all over again but without Joe/Olga to muck it up.

In the flophouse, three rummies pontificate about the day’s news: how Sam Vettori went to the gallows a coward (Rico smiles), and how Flaherty is saying shit about Rico in the press—trying to flush him out. It works. Rico phones him, barks his bark, and they trace the call. By the time they near the joint, Rico is walking the cold dark streets, hands in pockets, a crumpled fedora on his head, but Flaherty recognizes him immediately and we get our final shootout next to a giant billboard advertising Olga and Joe’s LAUGHING SINGING DANCING SUCCESS. Rico takes refuge behind it, Flaherty demands he give himself up, Rico shouts, “If you want me, you’ll have to come and get me!”

They don’t. They machine-gun him through the billboard. Not exactly cricket.

The Legion of Decency is neither legion nor decent: discuss
A good book could be written on how the morality police almost always sends the wrong message in movies. “Little Caesar” is pre-code, so before Joe Breen and the Legion of Decency took over, but it’s still a good example of this phenomenon.

In his rise, Rico is ruthless and successful, so, yes, he needs to fall. You can’t leave him as wish-fulfillment fantasy. Except, in his fall, Rico becomes tragic and thus sympathetic. He becomes us. Weren’t we supposed to go places, too? And now look at us—stuck at 4th and Commercial with these rummies. It’s a great irony that the very thing the morality police demands—showing us crime doesn’t pay—makes us like the guy they don’t want us to like. Particularlywhen you compare him to the cops here—distant, blasé figures that speak in the slow, sing-songy tone of early talkies. Robinson’s Rico is rat-a-tat. He sounds like the streets. He sounds like us.

More, Rico doesn’t fall because he’s immoral. It’s his one decent moment that makes everything unravel. What kind of lesson is that for the kids? Don’t be decent? Rico is also brave and defiant at the end—Come and get me!—while the cops, gunning him through a billboard, aren't exactly brave.

In a short documentary on the film, film historian Alain Silver brings up a salient point about Rico’s famous final words: Despite a life of crime and murder, and the constant threat of being killed, he’s surprised when it happens: “Mother of mercy,” he rasps, “is this the end of Rico?” I like that it’s in the third person. Even dying, he’s still writing his own press releases. But I think Silver is onto something. This scene has resonated for nearly 100 years because of the surprise, which, again, ties him to the rest of humanity. None of us can truly imagine our own end. We all know it’s out there, we all know it’s coming, and when it arrives we’ll all be as surprised as Rico Bandello.