1,001 Films: "Little Caesar" (1930)

And the movie gods said let there be sound; and lo, there was Al Jolson singing jazz, a selection of helium-voiced bottle-blondes, and the singular, lisping rasp of Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, the template for all subsequent gangster narratives. Robinson's Cesar Enrico Bandello (aliases: "Little Caesar", "Rico" - the latter ironically becoming an acronym for a real-world government act intended to combat racketeering) displays his high-vaulting ambition by shooting a crime commissioner during his very first job; his fate is contrasted with that of his light-on-his-feet best friend (an insipid Douglas Fairbanks Jr., comprehensively outshone by his co-star), who just wants to dance.

In our post-Sopranos age, it's hard to take Rico's crew of well-spoken gangsters - who say "so long" when they exit a scene; presumably authentic mobster dialect was out-of-bounds in the early sound cinema - entirely seriously; same goes for Thomas Jackson, strangely effete as the lieutenant on Rico's case. And the film's portrayal of Italian-American homelife, all strings on the soundtrack and spaghetti on the stove, could scarcely be less convincing. Mervyn Le Roy's film proves better on the organisation of organised crime: the different strata Rico must pass through on his rise to prominence, which offer no safety net whatsoever upon his inevitable downfall. (An intertitle - one further legacy of the silent era - insists Rico is "starting from the gutter and returning back there".)

Dating from a time before audiences grew accustomed to - not to mention spoilt by - cinematic norms of glamour and beauty, when the movies (and the American cinema, in particular) could have developed in any direction, the film - an interesting relic - conferred a deserved, if unlikely, star status upon its leading man. Robinson - the 1930s equivalent of a contemporary character actor: all odd angles, with a face only a mother could truly love - remains fascinating to watch: puffing himself up to fill more of the screen the bigger Rico gets, like a creature hooked out of a swamp, and ending up bloated and grunting in a hostel, a nobody on the wrong side of the billboards.

Little Caesar is available on DVD from Warner Home Video.