u/hangonsufi

Saw the trailer when I saw The Odyssey and had it on my calendar ever since. Avoided seeing, hearing or reading anything about it, blanked my mind on who directed it, wanted to go in a cold read. I agree with u/brownpearl on r/flicks, absolute cinema, and would add elaborate, trenchant storytelling.

My first thoughts were Kubrick, Kubrick, then because my IMAX had such great sound, it added an Eraserhead-ish eerie surrounding and suffusing background of almost recognizable, often rhythmic industrial, natural and organic sounds. It even had the Spielberg War of the Worlds tripod's horrible booming - not lost on Cruise, I'm sure. Oh yeah, Maggie the Cat (on a hot tin roof).

Any Pacific Rim fans out there? You'll see a fan fave. Plus a good role for Michael Stuhlbarg.

I predict major Oscar snubs; it's that good.

I usually eschew films and stories about animals in peril. People have a choice to go down in the dark creepy cellar, out into the dark creepy woods, or into the dark creepy attic. Animals, especially our pets, especially our dogs, have no choice if their human is an idiot. They follow.

In a film, humans act, and are well rewarded when their acting is challenging and stressful, portraying grief, terror, bravery, pain, stuff we humans usually avidly avoid.

Dogs, however, have to show all these terrible emotional processes, for what? A biscuit? A squeaky toy? A pat on the head and a “good boy”?

I like supernatural horror, and Good Boy is the story of a remarkable dog actor facing such horror. Indy, who is the first dog to win an Astra Award for acting, is the director's own dog. Ben Leonberg directed, co-wrote, co-produced with his wife Kari Fischer, co-edited and co-filmed the $70,000 indie film which reaped $8.8 million.

Over tens of millennia, dogs have engineered themselves to make us like them, love them, need them more. The muscles in their face around the eyes and mouth evolved to better express emotion and communication with their human overlords. So I don't like the idea of putting these wise animals through emotional torture to amuse us.

My only “comfort” is that I believe dogs are bodhisattva, advanced beings who delay their transition from this plane of pain to the reward of their enlightenment so they can teach more humans about love and compassion, bringing more of us to enlightenment.

In Good Boy, Indy's human is very ill. He spits up blood, he is weak, but he loves Indy, has had him since a pup. He's told he's too far gone for the medical trials so he and Indy go to – yes, the family's deserted haunted house in the woods with the spooky family cemetery nearby.

Humans.

There is something very malignant here, and Indy is alternately fascinated, frightened, and courageously confronting it. No CGI was used to enhance Indy's performance. You'll see why Indy won the Astra, and understand how he was nominated for Best Actor in his role in Leonberg's Judges' Film Prize winner in a previous short film contest.

Good Boy is itself a short film (73 minutes). I recommend it as a palate cleanser for what I'm sure we'll be subjected to this Horrortober.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, nominated for an Oscar.

The film opens in the cavernous courtyard of walk-up tenements; chatter, noise, clothes hanging outside, dilapidated pushcarts, horse-drawn wagons, an organ grinder, kids, people, trash in the street. And a couple of restless young men with ragged clothes and dirty faces who will grow up to be Rocky (James Cagney, Oscar nom.) and Jerry (Pat O'Brien). A daring police chase through the rail yards interrupts their theft effort and ends in their stint in reform school.

Rocky continues racking up a juvenile record, and a criminal one as an adult. He meets Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart), a lawyer with organized crime connections, but ends up taking the rap in the state pen to shield Frazier and his bosses. But when he gets out, he expects the $100,000 that is his share of a take.

Now a free man, Rocky looks up his childhood chum, Jerry, who took a very different path out of reform school. Why did Jerry decide to become a priest? He got the idea as he passed a cathedral. “I got an idea one time,” Rocky retorts, “and it got me six years.”

A pretty face from his childhood, Laury (Ann Sheridan), rents him a room in a boarding house. Now he's ready to collect from Frazier, and he shows up at the fancy club. He also wants in on more action. Frazier hands him a $500 roll to placate him.

Enter the current crop of dirty faces, Bim (Leo Gorcey), Swing (Bobby Jordan) and leader Soapy (Billy Halop). They lift the wad off Rocky in a street shuffle and head to their hideout where the rest of the Dead End Kids, including Crab (Huntz Hall), are breaking down a stolen cash register. They punch and slap each other until Rocky busts in on them to get his moola back. Oh yeah, it was Rocky's old hideout.

Rocky takes them to the gym where Father is trying to guide the tenements' young men. Rocky's Kids started slapping and punching and bullying the other boys, and Rocky knocks his own crew around pretty good.

So much slapping and punching to blow off all that tough testosterone; otherwise it might be a different kind of movie. Just sayin'.

But during a basketball game Bim runs the ball down court, jumps up and grabs a trapeze bar and swings in to make a basket. It's a cool move!

Rocky finds Frazier again, gets his dough – and the incriminating contents, evidence, in his safe.

But the boss sics the crooked police on Rocky, who handed off the the money to Soapy. Frazier tells the boss about all the bank records Rocky scooped out of the safe, which Rocky will use to bargain for himself. Rocky walks.

The priest comes around looking for a rematch, but can't find the Kids.

“What am I?” Rocky snaps “A noycemaid?

Father finds a newspaper editor to support his crusade. Soon the headlines are “Priest Declares War on Underworld Vice!” And Father knows his old friend Rocky will be the face of the enemy, the face taking the rap again for the big guys.

Rocky hears Frazier and the boss plotting to double cross him and plugs them both. There's a shoot out on the fire escapes, across the city rooftops. Sirens scream through the streets, searchlights rake the skyline, machine gun fire rips a staccato beat across the night.

Father gets Rocky to walk out, albeit with a gun to his back. The Kids, who worship Rocky as hero, read about it in the papers – he's gonna fry. Rocky's tough! He won't fold! He'll show those mugs how to die! He'll spit in their eye!

His last talk with Father is hardly a pep talk; he wants him to fall apart, scream for mercy, to let the Kids down, no hero's death, make them ashamed of him.

His last walk, pant legs split. We see his shadow struggling with the handlers getting him into the chair as he breaks down, cries out, No! No!

The Kids read all about their hero's death in the paper. Father comes and leads them out of the dungeon-like hideout as a choir sings the flick to a close. Yeah, a little thick.

10,000 words

The Gangs of New York (1928), written by Herbert Asbury, is a history and compendium mainly of an area known in the mid-1800s as the Five Points. Set in the “dismal tenements that squatted in the miasmal purlieus...of the Bloody Ould Sixth Ward,” the book chronicles the “great brawling and thieving” of the likes of the Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys, Eastmans, Gophers, Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, Roach Guards, Daybreak Boys and Five Pointers.

The book details commonplace violence and cruelty, but does not attempt to diagnose or psychoanalyze the pathology. Much of the gang activity was exploited and protected by the corrupt political machines and bosses of the day to enforce their local control.

Leave it to Scorsese to take this real bleak and brutal hellscape filled with real grotesque and pitiful characters and turn it into another mash note to his beloved New York, complete with a stellar cast.

The action opens with medieval warfare, Bill “the Butcher” (Daniel Day-Lewis) offers a challenge to meet in “the ancient laws of combat,” between his native-borns and the Dead Rabbits immigrants with their “Roman popery” lead by “priest” Vallon (Liam Neeson) for control of Five Points. “Priest” is cut down in front of his little son, Amsterdam.

In sixteen years, Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) is old enough to leave the orphanage and returns to the 'hood on the brink of the Civil War. By now, Bill the Butcher Cutting is providing the muscle in the Tammany political machine for “Boss” William Tweed (Jim Broadbent).

Amsterdam needs to affiliate, so he throws in with Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas), who educates him on the current gang scene. Sirocco is sweet on red-haired Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) and now so is Amsterdam.

A face from the gang past, Happy Jack (John C. Reilly), is now a tough copper on the gang's payroll, taking his lion's share of misbegotten gains.

On the annual celebration of the Dead Rabbits' demise, Amsterdam meets his father's killer, Bill the Butcher, in his den. He is unrecognized as the Priest's son. He accompanies Sirocco on a raiding party for a ship in harbor. But the only booty left are the fresh dead bodies of the crew, which the boys offload for a profit to “medical research.”

Bill is impressed. Soon Amsterdam chooses off Bill's lieutenant, whom he recognizes from that fateful day, and Bill is again impressed.

Jenny has improved her thieving game as a “turtledove,” getting entre to rich people's homes to fleece. Amsterdam and Jenny finally have a proper meet-cute when she holds a knife to his throat and leaves a convincing bloody wound. Ah, such is a cuddle in the Five Points, now show me your scars.

But everyone, even Jenny, and everything, even Tammany Hall, belongs to Bill. “It's a funny thing being taken under the wing of a dragon,” muses Amsterdam. “It's warmer than you think.”

Amsterdam saves Bill's life in an assassination attempt, but that doesn't mean he can help himself to Jenny. In a quiet scene of true menace, with Jenny in his bed, Bill tells Amsterdam he keeps order through fear, enforced with brutality. He see “murderous rage” in Amsterdam, and he likes it.

Amsterdam's friend, Sirocco, his jealous rival for Jenny, blows Amsterdam's cover and tells Bill he is the Priest's son.

At the next celebration of the Dead Rabbits rout, Bill gives a knife-throwing demonstration, using his “apprentice,” Jenny.

“Whoopsie daisy!”

But Bill isn't through. He pulls out a cleaver, sets a drink on fire, and as Amsterdam comes at him with a knife act of his own, Bill nails him in the gut from across the room.

Then he tortures and brutalizes him, leaving him alive to be marked with the shame of Bill's “mercy.”

Jenny cares for him, shows him a map to get to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn. The last surviving Rabbit, Monk, (Brendan Gleeson) comes to him with a gift – the Priest's straight razor.

“The earth turns, but we don't feel it move,” Amsterdam philosophizes, “Then, one night...” He was always a deep thinker.

It's a showdown again between Bill and a Vallon, and now Tweed wants to be on Vallon's side, with all those Irish votes. Vote early and vote often, Monk for Sheriff.

Tweed's lackey tells him they've run out of ballots, but Tweed is not dismayed. “Remember the first rule of politics: The ballots don't make the results, the counters make the results. Keep counting!”

Yeeeaaahhh.

Bill is a very sore loser. And he still hasn't got rid of Vallon the Younger.

The draft for the Civil War churns through the Five Points. A riot ensues as Irish name after Irish name is called. “Let the sons of the rich go and die!”

New York is burning. P.T. Barnum's animals are running wild.The gangs are united. Soldiers are brought in, firing on the massed rioters. The gangs are fighting the soldiers. Still, Vallon and Bill are facing off in the street, under a fusillade of cannon fire from nearby gun ships.

Bill and Amsterdam are left, wounded, covered in debris, and still facing off in the street. Jenny, beaten but not beaten, walks through the carnage to find Amsterdam, Vallon the Victor.

Four days and nights of mayhem. Bodies in mass graves, bodies lined up for loved ones to claim. “Friend or foe, it didn't make no difference now,” our Deep Thinker observes, “It was like everything we knew was mightily swept away.”

I know our mods like needle drops, so have some U2, “The Hands That Built America.”

addendum: The film was near completion in 2001, but release was delayed a year after the attacks of September 11th. However, the New York skyline that ends the film could have been filmed on September 10^(th).

“The filmmakers had also considered removing the towers, having the towers dissolved out of the shot to acknowledge their disappearance, or remove the entire sequence altogether. It was ultimately decided to keep the towers unaltered.” Rachel K. Bosley, “Mean Streets,” American Cinematographer, January 2003.

Directed by Walter Hill

The film opens at night, set along Coney Island, as a subway train illuminated amid neon colored lights, rounds the subway track and pulls into the station, which seems to be glowing with its own bioluminescence. It's a dreamlike idealized 'scape. The movie is artfully composed throughout.

The plot unfurls with the credits: Cyrus (Roger Hill), “the one and only,” “magic” president of the biggest gang, the Grammercy Riffs, has called a confab of the 100 regional street gangs. Our “heroes,” the Warriors, hop this train, which seen closer is dirty, disrespected and tagged to within an inch of it's beat-up life, out of their home turf in Brooklyn to the Bronx.

“We ain't even been to the Bronx before,” studly war chief Swan (Michael Beck) says to his leader, warlord Cleon (Dorsey Wright).

Soon, colorful and, kindly put, whimsical gangs are headed to the Bronx's Van Cortland Park, told to be unarmed.

Cyrus is a messianic character with a message and mission: “Truce!” If the gangs unite, they outnumber the police. “Can you dig it?” He tells them that this One Gang could run the city, the crime syndicates and the police, because nothing would happen without their permission. “We got the streets, suckers! It's all our turf!”

But someone brought a gun. Luther (David Patrick Kelly), the leader of the Rogues, assassinates Cyrus and tries to pin it on Cleon and the Warriors. A chaotic melee erupts as the cops descend with squad cars and helicopters. Swan tells the Warriors they must get back home to Coney Island, unarmed and unsure if the truce Cyrus called for is holding.

The Riffs want vengeance. They put the word out over the airwaves via a late night radio station record request: “Nowhere to Run,” a version of the 1965 hit by Martha and the Vandellas. Now the gangs are united – against the Warriors. The cops are looking for them, and there is dissension in the Warriors against Swan's leadership by Ajax (James Remar).

They outrun a busload of skinheads to catch their first train to Union Square, but someone set a fire on the tracks. The Rogues are rolling in their badwagon. “Trouble” shows up in the person of Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) a wanna-be moll slumming it with the Orphans, who tags along on the way to another station.

“You're just part of everything that's happening tonight,” Swan tells her. “It's all bad.”

The goofy baseball bat-wielding Furies with bad Kiss makeup and pin striped uniforms uh, strike out as the Warriors journey hence. The silky voice of the late night DJ continues to mark their progress and taunt their pursuers.

But their path is plagued with, sorry again, booby traps, as girls keep showing up to sidetrack them. They get split up into smaller units, running, fighting in a Hieronymus Boschian land of miscreant mischief.

It's a sullen dawn that awaits the remnant of the Warriors, scavenger gulls screeching over a dismal Coney Island. “This what we fought all night to get back to?” Swan asks, a cry to the gods who couldn't care less. Oh, tales of brave Ulysses.

The Rogues' badwagon has tailed them, and Luther wants to play. But now the Warriors have picked up their stash of weapons for a knife fight on the beach. Luther still has the gun he shot Cyrus with, but Swan throws a knife into his arm to slow him down, and lo and behold, here come the Riffs. They got who they were looking for, and the Warriors get some hard earned cred.

The sun comes up, and the needle drops on Joe Walsh's “In The City.”

The Public Enemy was directed by William A. Wellman

This early sound film starts like a silent movie, introducing the actors/characters via a theater card-like device to the strains of the sentimental, “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.” The story opens in 1909, with archival footage of busy city streets teeming with Model As and Ts competing with horse drayage. Beer was sold by the bucket, and a child could bring it home. Our two main characters, Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, are a couple of boys drinking beer from a bucket, and stealing watches and such to be fenced through some kind “club” run by the Fagin-esque Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell).

Now it's 1915, and Tom (James Cagney) and Matt (Edward Woods) are still in with Putty Nose. This time Putty lays out “something sweet.” “We ain't never done nothin' so big!” Matt objects. Tom hesitates, too, but is told, “You gotta grow up sometime.” Putty then hands each young man a gun and tells them he has their backs.

But the boys blow it, one of their team is killed by a policeman, and they're turned away from the club by one of Putty's flunkies, told to “lay low.”

The World War comes and Tom's older brother, Mike, enlists in the Marines. Tom and Matt are street car conductors, but they still have their side hustles.

Prohibition. Their new “benefactor” Paddy Ryan puts them in as muscle on the bootleg beer business. Fine threads, a cherry roadster, supper clubs, dames Mamie (Joan Blondell) and Kitty (Mae Clarke), and the fey but lethal Nails Nathan (Leslie Fenton).

Enter Jean Harlow. Swell dish, but then they gave her dialog:

“From Chicago?” Tom asks.

“Not exactly. I come from Texas.”

At a fancy supper club with Nails and their frails, Tom and Matt run into their old mentor, Putty Nose. Time to settle the grudge. They tail him to his apartment.

“I've always been your friend,” Putty tries to make nice with Tom.

“Sure, you taught us how to cheat, steal and kill.”

Putty tickles the ivories with a little “Hesitation Blues,” but Tom's not in the mood for music and plugs him.

After shoving a grapefruit in Kitty's face as a kiss off, Tom's been taking up with Gwen (Harlow). Gwen looks wistful and tells Tom he's different in “basic character” from “the men I know, and I've known dozens of them...”

Nails has a fatal riding accident, and now gangland is in violent turmoil. The hideout where Tom and Matt are holed up is being watched by men with military grade machine guns, the kind you can't carry. Under the noisy cover of a coal truck delivery, the machine gunners take Matt down, but Tom escapes.

On a stormy night, Tom challenges Matt's killers in a gun battle. He stumbles out into the night's rainy sidewalks, blood dripping from his forehead, police sirens in the distance.

“I ain't so tough,” he gurgles as he collapses in the flooded gutter.

At the hospital, his mother, brother and Matt's sister visit him. “I'm sorry, just sorry,” he offers.

But Tom is sprung from the hospital by the gang for revenge.

The needle goes down on the sentimental record about bubbles as Mike gets a call that Tom is coming home. And come home he does, bound and tied, beat up and bloody, dead, pushed through the open door to fall on his face at Mike's feet.

“The end of Tom Powers is the end of every hoodlum,” reads the epitaph on the screen. “'The public enemy' is not a man, nor is it a character – it is a problem that sooner or later the public must solve.”

My thanks this holiday weekend to Internet Archive, at archive.org, for making these great old classic films available.

The Public Enemy was directed by William A. Wellman.

This early sound film starts like a silent movie, introducing the actors/characters via a theater card-like device to the strains of the sentimental, “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.” The story opens in 1909, with archival footage of busy city streets teeming with Model As and Ts competing with horse drayage. Beer was sold by the bucket, and a child could bring it home. Our two main characters, Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, are a couple of boys drinking beer from a bucket, and stealing watches and such to be fenced through some kind “club” run by the Fagin-esque Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell).

Now it's 1915, and Tom (James Cagney) and Matt (Edward Woods) are still in with Putty Nose. This time Putty lays out “something sweet”. “We ain't never done nothin' so big!” Matt objects. Tom hesitates, too, but is told, “You gotta grow up sometime.” Putty then hands each young man a gun and tells them he has their backs.

But the boys blow it, one of their team is killed by a policeman, and they're turned away from the club by one of Putty's flunkies, told to “lay low.”

The World War comes and Tom's older brother, Mike, enlists in the Marines. Tom and Matt are street car conductors, but they still have their side hustles.

Prohibition. Their new “benefactor” Paddy Ryan puts them in as muscle on the bootleg beer business. Fine threads, a cherry roadster, supper clubs, dames Mamie (Joan Blondell) and Kitty (Mae Clarke), and the fey but lethal Nails Nathan (Leslie Fenton).

Enter Jean Harlow. Swell dish, but then they gave her dialog.

“From Chicago?” Tom asks.

“Not exactly. I come from Texas.”

Out at a fancy supper club with Nails and their frails, Tom and Matt run into their old mentor, Putty Nose. Time to settle the grudge. They tail him to his apartment.

“I've always been your friend,” Putty tries to make nice with Tom.

“Sure, you taught us how to cheat, steal and kill.”

Putty tickles the ivories with a little “Hesitation Blues,” but Tom's not in the mood for music and plugs him.

After shoving a grapefruit in Kitty's face as a kiss off, Tom's been taking up with Gwen (Harlow). Gwen looks wistful and tells Tom he's different in “basic character” from “the men I know, and I've known dozens of them...”

Nails has a fatal riding accident, and now gangland is in violent turmoil. The hideout where Tom and Matt are holed up is being watched by men with military grade machine guns, the kind you can't carry. Under the noisy cover of a coal truck delivery, the machine gunners take Matt down, but Tom escapes.

On a stormy night, Tom challenges Matt's killers in a gun battle. He stumbles out into the night's rainy sidewalks, blood dripping from his forehead, police sirens in the distance.

“I ain't so tough,” he gurgles as he collapses in the flooded gutter.

At the hospital, his mother, brother and Matt's sister visit him. “I'm sorry, just sorry,” he offers.

But Tom is sprung from the hospital by the gang for revenge.

The sentimental record about bubbles plays as Mike gets a call that Tom is coming home. And come home he does, bound and tied, beat up and bloody, dead, pushed through the open door to fall on his face at Mike's feet.

“The end of Tom Powers is the end of every hoodlum,” reads the epitaph on the screen. “'The public enemy' is not a man, nor is it a character – it is a problem that sooner or later the public must solve.”

My thanks this holiday weekend to Internet Archive, at archive.org, for making these great old classic films available.

Scarface stars Paul Muni and George Raft. It's directed by Howard Hawks and presented by Howard Hughes as “an indictment of gang rule” and the “callous indifference of the government,” claiming the film reproduces actual incidents of gang warfare. The screenplay is by Ben Hecht, with cinematographer Lee Garmes (from City Streets).

Early morning milk delivery, a restaurant cleaning up after a “stag party.” But in the peaceful dawn, the crime boss, “the last of the old fashioned gang leaders,” is gunned down at the restaurant by a lone whistling thug. “It's war!” declares the newspaper editor. “We're fighting organized murder!”

Soon Guino Renaldo (George Raft) and Tony Camonte (Paul Muni, with a cross carved into the side of his face) are rousted at the barber shop to come down to the station, guns stashed in the towel basket. Scarface boldly strikes his match on the copper's badge, but gets clocked for it.

Camonte was the bodyguard for the slain old-timer but Camonte has an alibi: beauty rest at a lady's house. They both get released on habeas corpus, and the new South Side boss, Johnny Lovo, welcomes Camonte to his crib complete with a fancy dame, Poppy (Karen Morley), flashing her gams and her satin-sheathed, uh form.

No surprise, Camonte wants Lovo's spot in gangland, and the dame. He and Renaldo start out as beer baron Lovo's muscle. They punch, shoot, bomb their way to persuasion. It's war for the North Side booze biz.

Enter Tom Gaffney (Boris Karloff) who comes to take revenge on the South Side. Renaldo just bumped off Gaffney's boss, but Gaffney's sitting on crates of Tommy guns. His boys use them for a drive-by shoot-up of the cafe where Camonte and Poppy are meeting. When one of the drive-by assassins rolls out of the sedan, Camonte grabs his Thompson, “a machine gun you can carry!” Camonte is now “an artist with a Thompson” (let the reader understand).

Camonte and his boys hit up the bowling alley where Gaffney and his boys are relaxing. For good.

Camonte survives a car chase hit; seems his tricked-out ride with a steel body and bullet-proof glass was smart customization.

He tracks down Renaldo and they pay a late night visit to Lovo. The boss is nervous, shakily pours himself a shot, then stops when he hears a tune being whistled – by Tony Camonte. But Tony directs Renaldo to do the deed while he goes for Poppy, at his place. He tells her to blow town.

It isn't long before Renaldo and Camonte's sister, Cesca, (Ann Dvorak) meet cute over an organ grinder. She later runs into Renaldo at a supper club, teases him for a sultry dance, but Renaldo ain't havin' it, she's his boss' eighteen-year-old sister. However, she tells Renaldo, she has “grown up ideas.”

Renaldo, ya shoulda known better.

Tony, ya shoulda known better, too. After he kills Renaldo, Tony takes his sister to his place. The police, in impressive force, surround them to pull Tony in for Renaldo's murder. He has a fortress with steel shutters and an arsenal of rifles and Thompsons. So do the cops, and tear gas for good measure. It's a shoot-out that sets the template.

Oh no, his sister gets plugged. Shoulda seen that comin', too.

Tony is shot down, trying to escape begging and squealing “like a yellow rat.”

Scarface makes pretty good use of pre-code laxity for death, destruction, and suggestive sex appeal. It's snappy and tough, glamorous and grim.

Even the St. Valentine's Day Massacre gets the box checked in this flick.

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, cinematographer Tony Gaudio

Rico (Edward G. Robinson) and his partner, Joe, (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) just knocked over a gas station, then repair to a diner. Rico sees a newspaper with an article about an underworld kingpin, Diamond Pete Montana (Ralph Ince), “somebody, in the big town, doing things in a big way.”

Rico decides to head East to Chicago for the big guys in the big towns. He gets in with the Vettori mob, introducing himself as Caesar Enrico Bandello, for which Vettori quickly dubs him, Little Caesar.

Meanwhile, Joe has gone back to being a hoofer at a fancy supper club, headed by another mobster, with love partner Olga (Farrell). She wants him to completely sever his gangland ties, but he tells her, “I've never seen a guy that could get away with it yet.”

Rico gets to meet Montana, but Montana is not the top of the food chain. His messages from “the big boy” is telling all local bosses to “put the chains on your gorillas” because there's a new zealous gangbuster in town, Commissioner McClure.

But now Vettori wants to pull a job on the club where Joe works, and Rico taps Joe for the inside man on the caper, midnight on New Year's Eve.

Vettori's gang takes over the party, robs the coffers, but Rico shoots and kills Commissioner McClure. Joe's girlfriend, Olga, again wants him to quit the racket.

“You can't go back on a gang,” Joe tells Olga, echoing his earlier words: “I've never seen a guy that could get away with it yet.”

The Big Boy's boys shows up to smoothly confront Vettori over the McClure killing. Now Rico sees his opening, challenges Vettori, takes his lion's share of the money and threatens them all if they squeal. Rico is now boss.

Vettori's driver, Tony, gets yellow, heads to his priest, but Rico guns him down on the church steps. The mob throws a big funeral, street procession, the works. But in the crowd of onlookers is Police Sergeant Flaherty, who gives Rico the high sign.

Later, at a big dinner for Rico, Sergeant Flaherty shows up, equally smooth, asking about a fancy watch gone missing, like the one Rico pulls out of his vest pocket.

Rico gets grazed a drive-by. Emboldened, he threatens Joe's mob boss at the supper club. The club's new boss? Little Caesar.

Rico gets an audience with Big Boy for some “inside dope” – Pete Montana is out and Rico is in as the New Boss of the North Side. Soon, Rico is dreaming of Big Boy's job.

Rico tries to get Joe to come back, even threatening to rub out his girl, Olga. There's a showdown at Olga's with Rico and his henchman and Flaherty and his men. Olga spills the tea on the McClure shooting to the cops, a chase ensues, and now its a gangland round-up.

Rico manages to keep a few steps ahead of the law for a while, laying low as a drunk on the skids in a flophouse. Flaherty mocks him in the papers as a coward.

He calls Flaherty, “I'll show him!” The call is traced, Rico is tracked, the copper guns him down with a Thompson. Dying in a dirty alley at Flaherty's feet, his last words:

“Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

Prohibition was a legal injunction against the evil effects of alcoholic intoxication on the health and morals of Americans. It spawned the infamous violent era of bootleg liquor and the gangs that fought and killed for the turf to purvey it.

Gangsters. Racketeers. Tommy guns. Cement overcoats. Dames. These enterprising criminals were the new outlaws, glamorous and dangerous, folk heroes whose legendary exploits permeated the glittering Jazz Age and the gloom and desperation of the Great Depression until the relief of Repeal.

City Streets is the story of a man, er, The Kid, (Gary Cooper) a carnival sharp shooter and the woman, Nan, he wants (Sylvia Sydney), he just doesn't want to be mixed up with her stepfather Pop Cooley's (Guy Kibbee) connection to a bootleg booze racket.

The film begins with a scene that indicates she knows, is complicit in, the dirty work. Later, her old man peels of a bill from a thick roll to reward her silence.

Frails get pushed around, knocked around, slapped around. Frails take the fall, like our little lady, after her stepfather passes her the rod he bumped off another gangster with and she's caught holding it and, keeps silent. Accessory. A stint in stir.

Pop Cooley and a goon go to the carnival and hit up The Kid ostensibly to free Nan, who Pop says was framed by the cops. Soon, The Kid is digging the thrill kills, the swell rides and the fine threads. He visits Nan in the slam and they kiss through the wire mesh during visiting hours. Pretty hot, even today.

But now Nan fears The Kid is a babe in gangland; The Kid is working for the Big Fella. The Big Fella, Maskal (Paul Lukas), throws a hot jazz party for Nan and keeps her company all to himself. Big Fella is the Big Dog, and don't no one forget it.

Well, Maskal's jilted moll, Aggie, ain't too happy with Nan taking her place, and no kidding, it's another frame-up for Nan when Aggie plugs Maskal and the gun is tossed at Nan's feet.

There's a showdown for control of the mob, with The Kid calling the gang's bluff. The Kid gets Nan and they out-run the mob in a classic gangstamobile while racing a locomotive, crossing the tracks just a whisker ahead of the speeding train, leaving the mob to eat their dust.

Rising music as a flock of seagulls, well, maybe white pigeons, fill the sky. I bet that's one of those metaphor thingies.

A post in r/criterion led me to this beautiful, moving film by F.W. Murnau. Acclaimed by cinephiles as a masterpiece, alas, I had never seen it.

The arts are the modes of creation allotted to man; be thankful each day you wake up, that you are given anew the opportunity to experience some measure of the greatness that our human race can aspire to.

Sunrise is the famed German filmmaker's first U.S. film. It stars Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, two popular and busy American actors, as a simple but happy, young (did I mention very attractive?) country couple living with their infant son lakeside in an Old World village.

Ah, but a serpent has slithered into this bucolic Eden. Margaret Livingston plays the alluring high-fashion hottie from the city taking the country air in an elderly peasant couple's humble vacation home rental. The temptress has been seducing the handsome young husband and convincing him to sell the farm, lure his wife into a drowning (dark!), and come wallow in the city's fleshpots with her.

It almost works. The husband convinces his wife, who knows he's been unfaithful, to take their dinghy for a day away from the farm. She gaily accepts the outing, but it is soon anything but pleasant. Her glowering husband is rowing like Charon on the River Styx, then he comes toward her to throw her in the water. He stops himself, but once they reach the shore his wife jumps out of the boat and runs up into the mountain village, and he chases her to the trolley and boards with her, desperate to make amends and mend his broken vows.

Aside: When they are running through the mountain hillsides, I'm thinking, this looks like the mountains I grew up with in So Cal; yep, much of the exteriors were shot in Lake Arrowhead.

For the sake of setting the story's narrative, I have neglected the stunning cinematography that opens the film from the scaffolding of a bustling train station, then powers that narrative throughout. Camera “tricks” abound, and the skill and patience to work the analog (pre-analog?) process is a feat of magical proportions.

Sets were built and lighting engineered to place the actors in the congestion of a 1927 cosmopolitan street with horse-drawn lorries, trolleys, automobiles, pedestrians and pushcarts. Their last day in the city has our dear couple dodging the traffic against a pretty convincing backdrop of the hectic street. They embrace and appear to stop traffic, including a big black horse that pulls a “Frau Blucher” nearly on top of them, then immediately the scene is live, the horse is balking, horns are honking, angry motorists are shaking their fists, and they are pushed out of the middle of a modern maelstrom as they dash off, laughing.

It's a silent film, so the story is told visually; the actors emote to the balconies, the gags are sight gags, from pie-eyed piglets to the peek-a-boo of a lady's slippery gown strap.

My favorite, and a wish-I-thought-of-that, is our reunited couple in a photography studio waiting for their prints. They are country clumsy and knock over things. They are horrified when they appear to have broken the head off a classical statue. The search everywhere, under furniture, for the missing head. The husband see a doll's head with some toys and sticks it on the statue – of Winged Victory.

While rowing home, a fearful storm whips up and the boat founders at sea. The husband ties bundles of rushes, stashed for his own escape, to his wife as floatation devices as he endeavors to get to shore, but she goes overboard. The village is roused, rescuers take to the lake.

The city woman thinks this is her plan at work when the wife is missing. She goes to the devastated husband but he chases her out and starts to strangle her. Then the wife is recovered from the lake! She lives!

The city woman leaves the village in the back of a horse-drawn wagon down the path in another breathtaking interior. Finis

The cinematographers, Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, won the first Oscar for their craft when the Academy Awards were inaugurated in 1929.

A post in r/criterion led me to this beautiful, moving film by F.W. Murnau. Acclaimed by cinephiles as a masterpiece, alas, I had never seen it.

The arts are the modes of creation allotted to man; be thankful each day you wake up, that you are given anew the opportunity to experience some measure of the greatness that our human race can aspire to.

Sunrise is the famed German filmmaker's first U.S. film. It stars Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, two popular and busy American actors, as a simple but happy, young (did I mention very attractive?) country couple living with their infant son lakeside in an Old World village.

Ah, but a serpent has slithered into this bucolic Eden. Margaret Livingston plays the alluring high-fashion hottie from the city taking the country air in an elderly peasant couple's humble vacation home rental. The temptress has been seducing the handsome young husband and convincing him to sell the farm, lure his wife into a drowning (dark!), and come wallow in the city's fleshpots with her.

It almost works. The husband convinces his wife, who knows he's been unfaithful, to take their dinghy for a day away from the farm. She gaily accepts the outing, but it is soon anything but pleasant. Her glowering husband is rowing like Charon on the River Styx, then he comes toward her to throw her in the water. He stops himself, but once they reach the shore his wife jumps out of the boat and runs up into the mountain village, and he chases her to the trolley and boards with her, desperate to make amends and mend his broken vows.

Aside: When they are running through the mountain hillsides, I'm thinking, this looks like the mountains I grew up with in So Cal; yep, much of the exteriors were shot in Lake Arrowhead.

For the sake of setting the story's narrative, I have neglected the stunning cinematography that opens the film from the scaffolding of a bustling train station, then powers that narrative throughout. Camera “tricks” abound, and the skill and patience to work the analog (pre-analog?) process is a feat of magical proportions.

Sets were built and lighting engineered to place the actors in the congestion of a 1927 cosmopolitan street with horse-drawn lorries, trolleys, automobiles, pedestrians and pushcarts. Their last day in the city has our dear couple dodging the traffic against a pretty convincing backdrop of the hectic street. They embrace and appear to stop traffic, including a big black horse that pulls a “Frau Blucher” nearly on top of them, then immediately the scene is live, the horse is balking, horns are honking, angry motorists are shaking their fists, and they are pushed out of the middle of a modern maelstrom as they dash off, laughing.

It's a silent film, so the story is told visually; the actors emote to the balconies, the gags are sight gags, from pie-eyed piglets to the peek-a-boo of a lady's slippery gown strap.

My favorite, and a wish-I-thought-of-that, is our reunited couple in a photography studio waiting for their prints. They are country clumsy and are horrified when they appear to have broken the head off a classical statue. The search everywhere, under furniture, for the missing head. The husband see a doll's head with some toys and sticks it on the statue – of Winged Victory.

While rowing home, a fearful storm whips up and the boat founders at sea. The husband ties bundles of rushes, stashed for his own escape, to his wife as flotation devices as he endeavors to get to shore, but she goes overboard. The village is roused, rescuers take to the lake.

The city woman thinks this is her plan at work when the wife is missing. She goes to the devastated husband but he chases her out and starts to strangle her. Then the wife is recovered from the lake! She lives!

The city woman leaves the village in the back of a horse-drawn wagon down the path in another breathtaking interior. Finis

Cinematographers Karl Struss and Charles Rosher won the first Oscar for their craft when the Academy Awards were inaugurated in 1929.