LITTLE CAESAR

First National Pictures

USA, 1930

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast:

Rico Bandello. . . . . . . . . . . . . Edward G. Robinson

Joe Massara. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Olga Stassoff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Glenda Farrell

Tony Passa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William Collier, Jr.

"Big Boy". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sidney Blackmer

Sergeant Flaherty. . . . . . . . . . Thomas Jackson

Sam Vettori. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stanley Fields

Little Arnie Lorch. . . . . . . . . . Maurice Black

Journal Entry:"

Comment on ONE of the following reflections found in Robert Warshow's essay, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" (1948), as it might apply to Little Caesar and Legs:

1. "The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become."

2. "Certainly our response to the gangster film is most consistently and most universally a response to sadism; we gain the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster's sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster himself."

3. "The gangster's whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual, to draw himself out of the crowd, and he always dies because he is an individual; the final bullet thrusts him back, makes him, after all, a failure."