10 Gangsters Flicks That You Can’t Refuse

I f the coming fusilade of mob movies merely whets your appetite for more treats from that noisy and long-running Hollywood genre, your video store has dozens to choose from. Following are Times reviewer Peter Rainer’s picks as the 10 best American-made urban gangster movies on tape.

Little Caesar (1930). Mervyn LeRoy’s film remains famous chiefly for its climactic rub-out, with Edward G. Robinson intoning “Mother of Mercy--is this the end of Rico?” Viewed today, it’s a pretty stilted and draggy enterprise, but its place in the pantheon is secured by Robinson’s Rico Bandello, with his derby and cigar, his look of bottomless venality. Robinson was perhaps the first actor to take crime-picture shenanigans seriously. He played Rico as a real character, not a moving target for the camera.

Public Enemy (1931). Gangster films until “Public Enemy” were generally rat-a-tat-tat affairs. William Wellman’s movie showed how a gangster rose in the ranks. James Cagney’s Tom Powers doesn’t arrive on the screen as a full-blown hood; we see how he gets that way, as we follow his rise from the Chicago slums through Prohibition and bootlegging. Cagney’s portrayal, like Brando’s Don Corleone in “The Godfather,” has been parodied so often that seeing the real thing again is startling. It’s a ferocious piece of work, sowing the seeds of psychosis Cagney would later reap in “White Heat.”

Scarface (1932). This Howard Hawks film, written mostly by Ben Hecht and produced by Howard Hughes for United Artists, is the most savage and bloody of the early ‘30s gangster classics. As Scarface, based not so loosely on Al Capone, Paul Muni gave a performance of almost simian unruliness. And yet, like so many gangster films, the corruption gleams more brightly than virtue, so the Hays Office (the forerunner of today’s ratings board) felt compelled to retitle the film, “Scarface: The Shame of a Nation.” Look for George Raft as Scarface’s lieutenant, and Boris Karloff, who has one of the great send-offs in film. Gunned down in a bowling alley, his demise is marked by a big X on the score card. Remade unevenly in 1983 by Brian De Palma, with Al Pacino as a Cuban refugee mobster.

The Killers (1946). Ernest Hemingway’s hermetically spare short story was expertly padded out by director Robert Siodmak and a team of screenwriters, including an uncredited John Huston. Burt Lancaster, in his screen debut, plays an ex-boxer rubbed out by a pair of hit men. A young Ava Gardner is the film’s romantic adornment, and she certainly makes glaringly apparent the intimate connection between sexuality and criminality--the subtext of so many gangster films. Remade in 1964 by Don Siegel, with Ronald Reagan as a vicious crime lord. It’s his only “nasty” movie performance. It’s also his best. Best not to dwell for too long on that thought.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950). John Huston’s classic was perhaps the first gangster film to show the ways in which mobsters resembled their “legit” counterparts. The business of plotting a crime, rounding up the right crooks for the job and the dispersal of the booty all bear remarkable similarities to the free enterprise system. The film also is one of the best delineations of how character determines fate--another reigning subtext of most great crime movies. As the thieves’ mastermind, Sam Jaffe’s fate is certainly sealed by his character. His final scene, in which this libidinous, gentle man is mesmerized by a swaying teen cutie in a roadside juke joint, is peerless.

Mean Streets (1973). Martin Scorsese’s view of punk Mafiosi is the most deeply personal gangster film ever made. It has a raw, almost hallucinatory, charge, which no other crime film ever had before. And no other director had ever taken the crime genre and used it for a spiritual autobiography. Along with Coppola’s “Godfather” films, “Mean Streets” is right at the top of the gun-riddled heap. Harvey Keitel, as the tentative, Catholic-guilt-ridden Charlie, and Robert De Niro as the jivey, deranged Johnny Boy, play the director’s alter-egos.

The Godfather I & II (1972, 1974). Taken together, Francis Coppola’s panoramic view of Mafia corruption is not simply the greatest gangster film ever made: It’s one of the greatest films ever made. There’s something limiting in even characterizing this epic as a gangster film; it would be like calling “War and Peace” a war novel. What Coppola did in these films was link gangsterism with a nightmare image of capitalism. The corruption of the American dream, a dream of immigrants, becomes overpoweringly tragic. The performances are incomparably rich; in a genre in which stand-out performances abound, “The Godfather” films are stocked with at least a half-dozen that are definitive, starting with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone and Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone. Note: Since Part III is scheduled for release later this year, it’s a good bet that Parts I and II will soon be revived in movie theaters. If you’ve never seen them, hold off renting the videos until you’ve seen the two films on the big screen, in their full majesty.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Sergio Leone, best known for his gargantuan, ga-ga spaghetti Westerns, turned his attention to Jewish mobsterism on the Lower East Side in this one-of-a-kind epic. Even though it covers a range of time and experience as full as “The Godfather” films, and with the same explosive violence, it’s a stranger and more dream-like work. De Niro, playing a Jewish mobster for a change, has radically slowed down his rages, but James Woods, as his counterpart, is as feral as ever. Warning: The film was cut by more than an hour in its initial theatrical release; if you rent, be sure to get the full 227 minute version.

The Untouchables (1987). Brian De Palma and David Mamet worked up the old Elliot Ness/Robert Stack TV series material into a grand-scale, knockabout, corny extravaganza. It’s shamelessly entertaining, especially when Sean Connery is on screen playing an Irish street cop of maddeningly impeccable integrity. Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness is a bit vapid, but Robert De Niro’s Al Capone matches Rod Steiger’s classic portrayal in the otherwise so-so 1958 “Al Capone.” It’s a gruesomely funny performance: This “Pagliacci”-loving mobster so loves his own swagger that it’s as if he had cast himself as the romantic lead in his very own black-comic opera bouffe.